Hello, everyone.  Brad [Roberts] asked me to say a few words to you today about “America as a Strategic Competitor,” and I’m pleased to have the chance.  I can only offer you my personal opinion, of course – and nothing I say here should be taken to represent the views of anyone else – but perhaps you’ll find these thoughts interesting. 

Rather than starting off by talking about what we need to be doing in order to compete effectively, I thought I’d start by addressing what might be thought of as a provocative threshold question: “Is the United States really up to this in the first place?” 

In that regard, I’ll make two points today.  The first is about how the nature of our engagement in the world, which has essentially always been a matter of uncomfortable debate and contestation in the United States.  I hope I’ll be able to convince you that although it’s often an ugly and complicated process of getting there, historically we do end up being – even if belatedly – good enough at engaging, enough of the time, to get by.

My second point will be to push back against some of the doomsaying one occasionally hears, both in the international community and here in the United States itself, suggesting that America’s geopolitical sun is setting: that we, internally divided and dysfunctional, are now in terminal decline.  I won’t be able to prove to you that this isn’t the. case, but I do intend to remind you that our demise has been predicted before, and that we’ve repeatedly come quite handily through periods of domestic and geopolitical challenge that were even worse than what we face so anxiously today.

So let’s start with that first point.

Kennan’s Americanosaurus

Perhaps the simplest thing I can say on this topic is that our great Republic, in historical terms, has consistently been a pretty bad strategic competitor – at least until it wasn’t.  And that oscillation is perhaps the story.

Let me unpack that a bit.  Historically, America has, by reflex, not often tended to care overmuch about the rest of the world.  It isn’t that we do not engage with it, but rather that this engagement comes and goes, sometimes capriciously. 

Nor, I must confess, are we Americans generally very good at nuance.  You can bet money that if the “right” place on the continuum between isolationism and hyperactivity.  The mid-20^th Century U.S. diplomat George Kennan – famous for his “Long Telegram” from Moscow and his “Mr. X” article in Foreign Affairs that did so much to set the intellectual tone for U.S. “containment” of the Soviet Union during the Cold War – once speculated that American democracy might be a bit like a prehistoric monster that just sort of lies around ignoring its environment until repeated affronts finally piss it off enough that it flails around with terrifying vigor in response, sometimes quite destructively.

Now, this clearly wasn’t precisely a flattering description of U.S. engagement in the world, of course, but while it probably wasn’t entirely fair, it also probably wasn’t entirely wrong.  But Kennan’s metaphor – and indeed the story of his own success in helping catalyze and shape a robust U.S. response to Communist geopolitical threats in the late 1940s – also illustrates that we Americans are quite capable of rousing ourselves out of an insular and solipsistic funk and acting resolutely in the world from time to time, when the threats and challenges are great enough.

That said, it certainly seems to be true that the history of U.S. engagement with the rest of the world is one of periods of disengagement punctuated by what you might call “Oh Crap!” moments – that is, points at which we realize that we’re not entirely the remote island we sometimes imagine ourselves to be, and in which we recognize that we actually do have compelling reasons, both self-interested and high-minded, to pull our head out of the isolationist sand.

This audience won’t need much reminder of a lot of this history, but it started early.   

The young United States, for instance, quickly dismantled what little navy it had built during our revolution against Great Britain, not thinking we needed any such thing because we’d never really had much of a problem with attacks upon our merchant shipping and maritime commerce before.  That, however, turned out to have been because of the protection afforded by the Royal Navy, which of course went away when we sent His Majesty George III packing! 

Accordingly, the United States soon found itself literally making tribute payments to Morocco – one of the infamous “Barbary Pirate” kingdoms of North Africa – under a treaty of 1787.   When the ruler of Algiers also wanted to get in on the tribute-payment game, seizing a number of U.S. vessels and their complement of sailors for ransom or slavery, we figured that we might actually need a little internationally-deployable muscle after all.  Accordingly, Congress authorized the construction of six naval frigates in 1794.   (Voila!  The U.S. Navy was born in a fit of grumpy anti-isolationist awakening.)

Even then, we still made tribute payments to the Muslim rulers of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli for a few more years.  Nevertheless, we eventually decided that paying tribute to an Islamic autocrat wasn’t such a good idea after all, and finally used that young fleet to put that challenge to rest. 

I’m an ex-Navy officer, so perhaps I make too much of the episode.  Nevertheless, you might not go too far wrong if you see that vignette – basically the origin story of the U.S. Navy, as it were – as providing something of a leitmotif for all the on-again-off-again history of American global engagement that was to follow.  And these debates became even more acute as we became a majr world power over the course of the 19^th Century, for with that power came security and economic interests that were not intelligibly “de-linkable” from the rest of the international community, even though that sometimes still remained our first instinct. 

Most observers will know, of course, that after the First World War, the American political community rebelled against President Woodrow Wilson’s internationalism by refusing to participate in the League of Nations.  It’s not as well remembered today, however, that even after World War Two had begun in Europe, U.S. aviation celebrity Charles Lindbergh and his political allies wanted to keep us from any kind of involvement, forming the “America First Committee” in 1940 in an effort to block U.S. aid to Great Britain after the Nazis attacked it.

The isolationist and fascist-sympathetic leanings of the “America First” agenda of the 1930s should not have been too surprising, I suppose, from someone who thought highly enough of Hitler’s gang to declare that Europe was “fortunate” the Nazis had come to power – as Lindbergh did – and who was even awarded the “Service Cross of the German Eagle” by Hermann Göring in 1938.  Nevertheless, the idea of “neutrality” was a powerful temptation for many Americans, even in the face of revisionist aggression by genocidal Nazis and brutal Japanese militarists.

Thankfully, I’d say, Lindbergh’s “America First” campaign failed, but nothing probably illustrates the push-pull dynamics of isolationism and engagement at play within the American political psyche so well as those fraught years leading up to the Second World War.

In a sense, it is remarkable that the United States was willing to remain engaged in the world after 1945, perceiving – quite correctly, I think – that the growth of Soviet Communist power did not permit us the luxury of putting our heads back in the sand pursuant to some new Lindberghian willingness to let foreign tyrants dominate the world beyond our shores.  And this is where George Kennan played such an important role in 1947, by articulating the conceptual framework for engagement in the name of “containing” Soviet expansionism.  That basic approach succeeded in keeping peace between the major powers, preventing most of the world from falling under Kremlin control until the USSR itself finally collapsed in 1991, and creating an environment in which the United States could be powerful and prosperous as never before.

But as I noted – and as Kennan himself articulated in his “dinosaur” critique – we weren’t particularly good at nuance.  Presumably, the best approach to containing the Soviet Union would have been a steely-eyed and consistent resolution, applied carefully and prudently, over a very long period of time, in order to convince leaders in Moscow that aggression was very much not in its best interests, yet applied carefully and thoughtfully – without hyperbole, chest-beating bellicosity, or other overreaction that might inadvertently lead to escalation, or which might bollix up our own efforts to rally third-parties to stand with us against Communist expansion.

And perhaps – on average, as it were – that’s where the United States was during the Cold War.  But of course, an “average” just expresses the mean of a wide range of data points, and by no means did we get that sober and consistent steely-eyed resolution consistently right during the Cold War. 

Maybe George Kennan was right that we’re not too good at nuance – that we’re dinosaurs that ignore everything dangerously long until they finally erupting in rage.   Yet as the broader narrative of Kennan-influenced U.S. “containment” itself demonstrates right up to the fragmentation of the USSR in 1991, we’re also quite capable of getting things enough right, enough of the time, that we end up being a pretty decent strategic competitor despite ourselves. 

So that’s my first point.

We’ve Been Through Worse

As for the second point, I’m all too painfully aware that there’s a narrative afoot in the contemporary U.S. policy community that even though all prior predictions of our demise have turned out to be greatly exaggerated, this time it’s real.  This time, it is sometimes suggested – even from some who in the past made their name fighting such declinist narratives – that our goose really is cooked, and we just need to accustom ourselves to geopolitical senescence and a neo-isolationist future of lessened influence, dismissive inattention to the outside world, and preoccupation with our own internecine squabbles. 

Through this lens, the United States is not only past our global peak and browning around the edges like an old head of lettuce, but also politically spent – too polarized, too divided, too fractious, and too dysfunctional to thrive in a competitive world.  In this telling, in fact, we basically deserve our decline.

So is this true?  Well, maybe, I guess.  But maybe not. 

I have no crystal ball that can foretell the future.   But, by the way, neither do the neo-declinists.  Perhaps our American day has in fact now passed, but perhaps it hasn’t. 

So here’s my second point: it is very much worth remembering that in so many ways we have indeed heard this all before– and then some. 

It may be that some of our problem today is that we have lost perspective upon our own history, in the sense that if you think that today’s political and economic problems are bad, you might want to meditate a bit on what we have already come through with flying colors. 

For reasons of brevity, I’ll largely pass over the turbulent U.S. domestic politics of the 19^th Century, but I probably shouldn’t.  After all, that era included a period of vicious polarization and tension over slavery that culminated in a literal civil war over slavery.  Beyond just traumas of the “slavery question,” moreover, the late 19^th Century included years of violent riots, strikes, brutal industrialist strike-breaking, and anarchist violence leading up to the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901.  And did I mention financial crises in 1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, and 1893?

Those tempted to despair over our American present should keep this messy history in mind: we’ve come through some pretty messy stuff in the past.

And what about the 20^th Century? 

Well, even within my own lifetime – well, more or less, anyway – we’ve also faced challenges that eclipse those with which we struggle today.

Domestically, U.S. politics in those years of the late 1960s and the 1970s were tumultuous and sharply divided over issues such as the Vietnam War, which all but paralyzed national politics, helped produce televised riots at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968, and led President Lyndon Johnson to drop out of politics.  Left-wing students rioted and took over campuses across the country, and activists such as Jane Fonda actually rather disgracefully traveled abroad to do propaganda events for military adversaries whose forces were killing American troops.  Some of America’s young men burned draft cards and fled to Canada, while some others were shot dead by National Guardsmen at Kent State in Ohio, and still others by police at Jackson State in Mississippi.

Johnson’s successor, Richard Nixon, also dropped out of politics, resigning from office amidst criminal investigations and ignominy, but not before the scandals of Watergate, the invasion of Cambodia, and a series of Congressional hearings on Cold War intelligence abuses – specifically, assassination and coup attempts abroad and spying on American citizens at home – had devastatingly tarnished our leadership and undermined public trust in government.   It was an amazing era of televised Congressional hearings that aired dirty laundry about scandal after scandal after scandal.

And there was lots of domestic political violence, too.  Even leaving aside President John F. Kennedy’s assassination a few years earlier, 1968 saw presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy’s murder, as well as that of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.  Race riots convulsed many American inner cities, including in 1964, 1965, 1967, and 1968.  A spinoff of the left-wing group Students for a Democratic Society turned violent, forming the “Weather Underground” and undertaking a campaign of domestic terrorist bombings, killings, and robberies from 1969 until the early 1980s, even as violence escalated between American Indian activists and federal agents. 

Nor were the so-called “Weathermen” alone in such violence, for attacks were mounted in those years by a range of other radical leftist groups, including the Black Liberation Army, the Armed Forces of National Liberation, the Symbionese Liberation Army, and the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee (an early incarnation of today’s “Antifa” movement).  In 1977, moreover, a Muslim group even got in on the action by seizing 149 hostages for the better part of two days in taking over the building housing Washington, D.C.’s mayor and city council; two persons were killed and three injured before the gunmen surrendered. 

Though they occurred both a bit earlier and a bit later – in 1954 and 1983, respectively – it’s also worth remembering that there were even violent attacks on the U.S. Capitol building.  In 1954, a group of Puerto Rican separatists opened fire with semi-automatic pistols onto the legislative floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, firing 30 rounds and injuring five people.  In 1983, a group calling itself the May 19^th Communist Organization – an organization one of the then-leaders of which was a woman who nowadays does funding and administrative work for the Black Lives Matter Global Network Project – also set off a bomb in the Senate wing of the Capitol, fortunately not managing to hurt anyone.  (January 2021, therefore, was not the first time unhinged radicals have attacked our national legislature!)

So that was the state of our domestic politics when I was young. 

In terms of geopolitics, the late 1960s and the 1970s were also grim years for the United States.  As I mentioned earlier, these were years in which all sorts of people believed the world had reached – and had passed – “Peak America,” and that the United States was entering a period of terminal decline.  We had been bloodied and humiliated in Vietnam, and the Soviets were on the march in the developing world. 

Marxist governments came to power and ruled, at various points, in a number of African countries – including Angola, Ethiopia, Guinea, Mali, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Somalia, and Yemen, not to mention fully taking over in Vietnam and Cambodia. 

The Soviet Navy became a global power-projection force, with a presence in the Mediterranean (and a base at Tartus in Syria), in the Indian Ocean (with facilities at Aden and Socotra Island in Yemen, and for a time Berbera in Somalia), and even in the Atlantic (with base access in Luanda and to Angolan airfields).  Fidel Castro’s Cuban expeditionary forces, with Soviet help, had deployed overseas to prop up Communist client states, with thousands of Cuban troops fighting in Angola and Ethiopia.  And Soviet arms exports to Africa in the late 1970s came to more than ten times those provided by the United States. In 1979, moreover, our longtime ally the Shah of Iran was overthrown, succeeded by a vicious Shi’ite fundamentalist theocracy that humiliatingly held U.S. diplomats hostage for well over a year. 

The Soviets and their Eastern European allies also actively trained and supported terrorist groups in Europe and the Middle East striking at Israel, American interests, and allied NATO governments.  On top of all this, the USSR was engaged in a huge military buildup, not merely of conventional forces but also building a vast nuclear arsenal that would reach a peak of some 39,000 nuclear weapons, including both the largest intercontinental ballistic missile ever fielded (the SS-18), the largest submarines ever built (the Typhoon-class ballistic missile boats), and a whole class of new theater-range missiles pointed at NATO (the SS-20, for instance) for which we had for years no answer.  And then, in 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, too.

It seemed obvious to strategists on both sides of the Cold War that the Soviets were on the march, and that the United States was losing ground quickly.

Making matters worse in this litany of seeming geopolitical defeat, he industrialized West also faced a dramatic new challenge in the form of the oil-producing states of OPEC.  After the Arab-Israeli conflict of 1973, this oil cartel began to wield its monopoly power as a political weapon, helping to produce an “energy crisis” and years of economic stagnation in industrialized economies, combined with inflation – the so-called “stagflation” menace of mid-decade.   And this was at the same time as the emergence of the environmental movement called public attention to what were described as crippling problems of chemical pollution and overpopulation that seemed all but sure to presage the end of modern industrial growth and prosperity, creating a future of catastrophic pollution and starvation.

The short version of this long story was simply this: America had, it seemed, obviously lost, and we were screwed.  That was the domestic politics and the geopolitics of my childhood in the 1970s.

So let’s not forget all this history.  We have our challenges today, to be sure, but we have had worse problems before, both at home and abroad.  Those problems were perhaps unsurprisingly accompanied by what seemed to be obvious narratives of American decay and decline. 

Yet those narratives turned out to be false ones.  The declinists and doomsayers of that period underestimated the resilience of our democracy, and things turned out differently than they expected.

Conclusion

To be sure, as they say in investing, past performance is no guarantee of future performance.  Perhaps we are now today, finally, in our American twilight.  And perhaps the narratives of decline and decay that tempt us in the contemporary world will indeed turn out to be accurate in ways that previous such predictions were not. 

Perhaps, then, it is indeed time to put “America First” in the Charles Lindbergh sense, and to return our heads to the isolationist sand rather than engage with a world that we’ve convinced ourselves we’ve pretty much lost anyway – and that, in effect, we almost feel we deserve to have lost. 

But, maybe, such conclusions are just the result of our losing perspective – of our forgetting what we have come through before, and how extraordinarily resilient and adaptive the American people have repeatedly shown that they are capable of being. 

So that’s my message to you as we think, at this conference, about “America as a strategic competitor.”

Let’s try keeping that historical perspective.  Let’s try remembering that even though we Kennanian “dinosaurs” may not be particularly sophisticated or consistent strategic competitors, we nonetheless do have strong interests in the world, especially when confronted by powerful revisionist autocrats who hate us, wish us nothing but failure and collapse, and are actively working to bring that out.  And let’s try remembering that we are indeed capable of rallying in hard times in order to be at least enough of a competitor to get the job done.

Thanks.

-- Christopher Ford