In the immediate aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks , President George W. Bush explained to New York Times reporters that he âwanted justiceâ for Osama bin Laden. He recalled, âWhen I was a kid, I remember thatâthey used to put out there in the Old West a poster. It said, âWanted, Dead or Alive.â All I want and America wants him brought to justice. Thatâs what we wantâ (The New York Times, September 18, 2001, B4). While many foreign policy analysts would point to a variety of reasons for Bushâs argument for vengeful justice (to establish credibility, or to create and sustain public support), the terrorist attacks activated the longstanding connection between âtough guyâ masculinity and successful foreign policy, a relationship many presidents have historically used to outflank their domestic opponents and pursue victory at all costs. Much of the media and a significant portion of the public wholeheartedly accepted Bushâs invitation to perceive him as a decisive leader who would fight rather than run away. Three months after the attacks a New York Times journalist described the presidentâs routine on his ranch in Crawford Texas, running, fishing, clearing brush, watching a University of Texas football game, reading a biography of Teddy Roosevelt and âgetting in a little chainsaw workâ (Bumiller 2001, B2). In June 2002 The Nation editorialized that intelligence agency mistakes regarding the attacks had diminished Bushâs reputation as âthe straight talking cowboyâ (2002, 3). In March 2003, reporters continued dutifully to recount subsequent memorable âcowboyâ moments in the war with Iraq. In July 2003, with the occupation of Iraq in its fourth month, Bush invited a fight with Sunni insurgents by issuing an invitation to âbring âem on.â He was elated when the soldiers who captured Saddam Hussein brought him the dictatorâs gun. (âItâs the phallic equivalent of a scalp,â a scholar told Bumiller 2004.) On a visit to Australia in 2007, he crowed that the US was âkicking assâ in Iraq.
The swirling media commentary on Bushâs âmanning upâ constituted an important component of post-9/11 foreign policy analysis. The historical scholarly literature made connections between imperial and territorial expansion, while feminist-inspired analysis linked this history to contemporary expressions of masculine dominance. Ivie, for example, tells us that the war on terror is a âvariation on an old theme of defending civilization against savagery,â with the fight against terrorism the âlegitimating sign of U.S. empireâ (2005, 55; 61). DeGenova globalizes the earlier project of manifest destiny to one of âsubjugating and putting in order the wild new frontiers of an unruly planetâ (2010, 614). Silliman (2008) found empirical support for the salience of âIndian country,â in the war in Iraq by the termâs ubiquitous use by soldiers and the media, thereby demonstrating that a national heritage rooted in colonialism and aggression found sure footing in Fallujah and Ramadi. Monten argued that the Bush Doctrine announced in 2002 âprovides an essential point of continuity with preceding generations of grand strategyâ (2005, 141). Peaseâs analogy exemplifies and summarizes the connection often drawn between old and new imperialism: âBy way of Operation Infinite Justice [Afghanistan] and Operation Iraqi Freedom [Iraq], the Homeland Security State restaged the colonial settlersâ conquest of Indians and the acquisition of their homelandâ (2009, 172). A significant amount of feminist scholarship gleaned insights from this historical literature to shed light on masculinist, Orientalist, and imperial operations to âsaveâ Afghan women, emasculate opponents through torture, and (re)establish old-style male heroism in film and television (Zine 2006; Richter-Montpetit 2007; Young 2003).
The arguments presented in this and subsequent chapters seek to complicate, challenge, and reformulate the paradigmatic view that US foreign policy in the twenty-first century is a reenactment and replication of frontier stories. While the argument here is not that we have entered a âpost-nationalâ era, my thesis is that accounts that find only continuities in expressions of nationalism fail to note how a bundle of older articulations of US nationalism have been refashioned by changes in political economy, war, and gender and racial politics. This exploration of reframed and reworked nationalism destabilizes efforts to read contemporary US foreign policy through the lens of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and prompts my efforts to suggest an alternative way to consider foreign policy developments in the wake of Vietnam .
In her influential 2003 piece on neoliberalismâs displacement of liberal democracy, Wendy Brown argued that the logic of neoliberalism entails âextending and disseminating market values to all institutions and social actionsâ (p. 3; emphasis in the original). While Brown mainly analyzed the way neoliberalism has eviscerated institutions of liberal democracyâthe legislature, political parties, and the executiveâin a few passages she applied neoliberal logic to foreign policy, particularly in the turn to private security and the rationales for the military invasion of Iraq. The former relied upon because commodifying security has been deemed cost-effective and the latter because liberal democratic justifications for invading Afghanistan and Iraq (liberating people from dictatorial rule, installing democracies) were a fig leaf for efforts to remake alleged former terrorist havens into neoliberal spin-offs and projects of American imperium (2003, 9). This book aims to demonstrate how neoliberalism has transformed institutional and societal features of US foreign policy and rendered at least some aspects of historical continuity suspect. The domestic dimensions of neoliberalism have their counterpart in foreign policy and map onto the struggles that emerged in the twilight of the Carter years about the appropriate US response to the failures of Vietnam and the proper response to what many policy-makers and analysts considered a resurgent Soviet threat. The policies embraced in the late 1970s and early 1980s, while often contradictory and seemingly adopted from the nineteenth-century playbook, laid the groundwork for accelerating the emergence of neoliberal foreign policy-making.
President Jimmy Carter and Michel Foucault, 1979
During the last year of Jimmy Carterâs presidency Michel Foucault was lecturing on neoliberalism at the College de France, with a special focus on post-war Germany and the US. In Germany, Ordo-liberals (the Freiberg school) devised post-war market-focused economic policy as a government effort to repudiate the national planning represented by Nazism and Soviet systems. In the US, on the other hand, a more thorough going entrenchment of neoliberalism was the predicted outcome of a society where Keynesianism had long been thought to be âextraneous and threateningâ (Foucault 2004, 218). Lemke reads Foucault as differentiating the US from Germany in that the U.S. had more deeply rooted neoliberal affinities for inventing âmarket-shaped systems of action for individuals, groups, and institutionsâ (Lemke 2001, 197).
At the same time, the Carter administration faced its own set of domestic and foreign policy crises that demanded the implementation of more cost-effective policies to tamp down domestic demands for social welfare and employment. Even though haphazard and partial, the Carter administration increasingly embraced deregulation and a monetarist economic policy, officially declared with the 1979 appointment of Paul Volcker to the Federal Reserve. The Carter administrationâs inclination, when faced with the crisis of capitalism in the late 1970s, identified so presciently by Foucault, was to usher in new policies and governing strategies that accelerated the domestic weakening of organized labor and sought greater global financial integration that would eventually constrain the stateâs ability to fulfill the post-World War II Keynesian social contract.
The late Carter domestic crisis had its counterpart in foreign policy, with the Vietnam War a significant signpost of developments that would unfold in the 1980s. The usual framing of the post-Vietnam War foreign policy elite portrays fracture, with âliberal managerialistsâ favoring US leadership in reconstructing the international monetary order, thereby strengthening and stabilizing global capitalism, opposed to the eventually triumphant conservatives who lamented Americaâs âloss of willâ in the face of the Soviet threat. The argument that Reaganâs rebooted Cold War policies triumphed over Carterâs human rights foreign policy, however, misses a number of important policy emphases during the Carter era that would shape Reagan-era policy and help lay the groundwork for a different foundation for post-Cold War era US hegemony. To label Carterâs human rights initiative a failure misses the way it began to undermine East-West Cold War competition with a (neo) liberal plank that resonates with US political culture on a par with anti-communism: individual human rights. Carterâs foreign policy was not simply a naĂŻve experiment eventually forced to confront the ârealitiesâ of the Cold War. However tentative and incipient, Carterâs foreign policy wedded the value of human rights with visions of the market as the most significant site of human flourishing. As Carter put it in his 1978 State of the Union address:
Government cannot solve our problems, it canât set our goals, it cannot define our vision. Government cannot eliminate poverty or provide a bountiful economy or reduce inflation or save our cities or cure illiteracy or provide energy. And government cannot mandate goodness. Only a true partnership between government and the people can ever hope to reach these goals.
Carterâs embrace of human rights worked in tandem with post-Vietnam Congressional assertions of authority on the topic of human rights violations in other countries. The Harkin Amendment (1975) banned continued economic assistance to nations that consistently violated human rights, and the International Security Assistance and Arms Export Control Act (1976) withheld military assistance from governments that consistently violated human rights. With Congressional prompting, Carter also created the Bureau of Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs (1977). Annual reports on the state of human rights facilitated the use of them by members of Congress and NGOs to link human rights with foreign aid. Scholars of international relations who study regimes point to human rights under Carter becoming an issue-area where norms and policy priorities are established and gain traction over time. As Schmitz and Walker put it, after Carterâs term, âHuman rights was now a fixture on the policy agenda and part of both American and world discussions and international relationsâ (2004, 143).
It is significant that human rights became the nodal point in the unraveling of the post- World War II containment paradigm during the Carter and Reagan years. Republicans had already tried to undermine the Kissinger-led détente strategy, one that hinged on balance of power considerations, with the Jackson-Vanik Amendment of 1975, which, as Romano notes, brought together pro-human rights and anti-détente groups (2009, 719). Perhaps one of the most famous disputes with the Carter administration came from Jeane Kirkpatrick, in a well-known 1979 article in Commentary. While lambasting th...