Michael Kimmage - The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy

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Look at me, going everywhere! Why, I am a sort of Columbus of those near-at-hand and believe you can come to them in this immediate terra incognita that spreads out in every gaze. I may well be a flop at this line of endeavor. Columbus too thought he was a flop, probably, when they sent him back in chains. Which didnt prove there was no America.

A UGIE M ARCH IN S AUL B ELLOWS T HE A DVENTURES OF A UGIE M ARCH , 1953

Westward the course of empire takes its way;

The first four acts already past,

A fifth shall close the dawn with the day

Times noblest offspring is the last.

G EORGE B ERKELEY , V ERSES ON THE P ROSPECT OF P LANTING A RTS AND L EARNING IN A MERICA , 1728

S EPTEMBER 14, A Friday, had been declared the National Day of Prayer and Remembrance. One day later, a council of war met in Camp Davids main building, Laurel Lodge. Everyone present knew that Afghanistan would soon be invaded. That evening, George W. Bushs national security advisor Condoleezza Rice sang His Eye Is on the Sparrow and For You, O Lord, Are Faithful to Us to the piano accompaniment of Attorney General John Ashcroft. Before dinner Rice had voiced the words of a prayer: We have seen the face of evil but we are not afraid, she promised. That Saturday night, with New Yorks World Trade Center a hole in the ground, its remains still smoking, the future took on an apocalyptic hue. The face of evil had shown itself just four days earlier when the nation was struck in a phased terrorist attack. Thousands of Americans had been killed at work, on the way to work, at leisure, in uniform, not in uniform, indoors and on the street.

Landing on the White House lawn on Sunday, September 16, President Bush walked over impromptu to the waiting reporters. This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while, he cautioned them. War on terrorism would stick as a description of American grand strategy after September 11. The word crusade had another effect. Within the White House, the discontent registered immediately. After advisors explained it to him, journalist Peter Baker wrote about this vivid turn of phrase, Bush never again used the word [crusade] to describe the war on terror, but the onetime unscripted utterance proved a defining moment to many Muslims for years. On September 17, in the apologetic mode, the president visited the Islamic Center of Washington. He assured his audience that the United States was not about to embark on a crusade. Casually and spontaneously spoken, the presidents wording had evoked all the wrong historical analogies.

Prior to September 11, however, the United States had amassed a rich history of foreign-policy crusades. Quite possibly, President Bush had been alluding to them in his comments to the press. The motif of crusading predates the American republic, recalling the European image of a New World. Christopher Columbus had the zeal of the Crusaders behind him, although he did not point his ships eastward toward Jerusalem or set forth to retake the Holy Land. Columbus went off in the opposite directionto the West. When he encountered land and people there, he comprehended them through the prism of conversion and conquest. Later, countless paintings, murals and sculptures depicted him with a sword in one hand and a cross in the other. Conquistadors and other explorers followed in his wake, faithful knights making the worlds known geography amenable to European dominion. The European settlement of the Americas had many of the hallmarks of a crusade, of a holy war.

Europes crusades shaded into American ones. If Englands Puritans could not physically retake Jerusalem, they could at least plant a new Jerusalem on the Atlantic seaboard. The Puritan experiment in New

The twentieth century appealed most directly to Americans crusading instinct. The enemies were legion, and at the beginning of the century the United States had a world-class economy, a world-class navy and much unrealized world-class potential. In a standard trope, the historian Anthony Hopkins denotes the crusading foreign policy shared by Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Looking back on the event that lifted him from Midwestern obscurity to the front lines of international affairs, Harry Truman called World War I that first crusade. The president who sent him into war, Woodrow Wilson, would surely have agreed. Righteousness was as much Wilsons cause in entering the war as was a cessation of hostilities or the protection of American commercial interests. The Paris Wilson visited in 1919 might have become a new Jerusalem had it not been so stubborn about remaining Paris. London was similarly stubborn about remaining London. Neither imperial capital was eager to make the world safe for democracythat was not their preferred crusade. But across the Atlantic, Americans were so fond of crusading that they could even do so in the name of peace. Recalling the horrors of World War I, pacifists launched the wonderfully named No Foreign War Crusade in 1937.