“The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.”
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
One hundred years hence, when historians study the factors that led to the economic decline of the United States, it is likely that they will mark the first week of August, 2011 as a crisp break in the line that depicted our 235 year upward trajectory towards sustained superpower status. They will study a dark week when Americans witnessed their country’s credit rating downgraded and the tragic deaths of over 30 of its most elite service members in a single incident in a foreign military campaign. Both events serve as exclamation points written into a dark narrative that covered the period beginning September 11, 2001 and ending at some yet to be determined date.
As our hypothetical historians review millions of megabytes of multi-media content chronicling the challenges of our day, will they sense the deepening angst of an American populace awakened to a reality in which they no longer fully control their collective destiny? Even cursory research for the causal factors of America’s decline will quickly reveal more than a few smoking guns. They will surely judge us harshly for our penchant for exceedingly expensive unilateral cross-generational foreign interventions underwritten by a defense department with a budget that exceeded $700 billion per year — a sum fourteen times greater than our expenditures on diplomacy and foreign aid. As other intellectually curious students mine for additional clues, they will likely find statements that indicate growing cracks in the national defense consensus. Red flag utterances that show deep concerns, such as former Secretary of Defense Gates’s warning that, “The creeping militarization of US foreign policy at the expense of diplomacy and development is ill-advised and will not produce the enduring effect we desire for ourselves and future generations.”
As young American students prepare their term papers on the ‘Great Recession’, they might even find guidance from one of our most controversial Secretary of Defenses, Mr. Robert McNamara. McNamara, shortly before his death, embarked on a personal conscience cleansing campaign sharing his “what we did wrong” reflections with the American public. Best known for his role in escalating the Vietnam War, the former war hawk in his mea culpa conveys to viewers how flawed assumptions in D.C. led to one of the greatest foreign policy blunders in American history — the Vietnam War.
I have embedded above a short video interview of McNamara, taped just before his death in 2009. In it he shares with us how a misunderstanding of the socio-political dynamics, coupled with flawed operational decision-making, cost over 57,000 American and countless Vietnamese lives. After viewing this piece, I think you will agree with Hagel that, “The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.”
It is my sincere hope that the people of this great nation will heed the warnings from our statesmen, both living and dead, so we can safely navigate the treacherous waters that lie ahead domestically and abroad. Should we fail to do so, we will certainly be bequeathing to our descendants an entirely different America.
