Vol. XXII No. 2 Fall 2002
Divine, Robert A. Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace. College Station, TX: Texas A & M University Press, 2000.
The issues of war and peace are touching ones for Americans. As believers in democracy, Americans like to think of themselves as peaceful people who engage in war only when provoked. It is therefore ironic that virtually every generation of Americans has fought in a war. The purpose of Robert Divine's book is to explain why twentieth-century Americans always sought idealistic goals in order to justify their military conflicts. Divine's thesis is that twentieth-century Americans, by continually demanding that wars serve overly ambitious purposes, were continually disillusioned when peace was inevitably less grandiose and more fragile than their inflated expectations had led them to anticipate.
According to Divine, American exceptionalism is the reason why the United States has sought the high moral ground in conflicts. In other words, America's idealism should make the nation a glowing example to all other nations. These other nations supposedly fight wars "for narrow, selfish reasons - for revenge, for territory, for economic gain, sometimes just out of lust for world power." (p. 36) In contrast to such base motives, Divine asserts that "throughout the twentieth century the American people believed that they were fighting for principles rather than national self-interest." (p. 37) This process started with President Woodrow Wilson during World War I when he insisted on making it "the war to end all wars" by advocating "peace without victors," national self-determination, and collective security. These high ideals then collapsed with the punitive Treaty of Versailles and the ineffective League of Nations. In World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt demanded the unconditional surrender of Germany and Japan, with an ensuing power vacuum in Central Europe that emboldened the Soviet Union and contributed to Cold War tensions. The Cold War and the Truman Doctrine led to the Korean War in which Americans fought to a stalemate after the conflict widened to include communist China. The Cold War ideal of containing communism worldwide led to the disastrous Vietnam War, a national civil war where foreigners, especially Westerners, were not particularly welcomed. Finally, in the Persian Gulf War President George Bush demonized Saddam Hussein to the point where victory became marred when Hussein remained in power.
One of Divine's best insights is that Americans need to take a more realistic view of war. Instead of the high-minded idealism associated with American exceptionalism, Divine advocates following Carl von Clausewitz's dictum that war is the continuation of politics by other means. This approach should produce a more sober minded understanding of war than the wide-eyed enthusiasm Americans typically bring to military conflicts presented as crusades. In addition, a more open and honest acknowledgment of national self-interest would probably lead to less disillusionment when peace comes. For example, during the Persian Gulf War national leaders could have put greater emphasis on the economic necessity of ensuring future oil supplies. Instead, Bush compared Hussein to Hitler and took a principled stand against Iraq's human rights abuses, thus creating inflated expectations among Americans about what the war could actually accomplish. In a similar vein, President Bill Clinton sent peacekeeping troops to Kosovo for the idealistic principle of ending genocide. While stopping genocide seemed a worthy goal, there was hardly any legitimate explanation of how this military action would fulfill American self-interest. This humanitarian mission, still ongoing despite Clinton's promise of a short-term engagement, perpetuates America's role as a global policeman. Such a humanitarian engagement can set a dangerous precedent since it stretches US forces too thin when they are needed elsewhere, like in the current war on terrorism.
While the book has definite shortcomings, I would recommend it for its wisdom about American foreign policy and military affairs. One of the book's serious flaws is that it originated as a series of public lectures and thus lacks a detailed, scholarly analysis. In addition, the speech format makes for some needless repetition as Divine covers each of the major twentieth-century American wars in each chapter. On the other hand, Divine, a diplomatic historian, makes up for a lack of depth with a sweeping breath of knowledge. In a concise manner, he gives the basic contextual background to a war and then theorizes about it. This historical approach offers needed perspective as Americans tend to myopically focus on most recent conflict. Although the book was published before the events of 11 September, Divine offers a relevant warning about making unrealistic war goals. When President George W. Bush assured the American public that the war on terrorism will cripple militant Islamic terrorist networks around the world, he is following his twentieth-century predecessors in creating a mission impossible to fulfill.
Robert McTague
Fairleigh Dickinson University