American Thinking About Peace and War

Ken Booth

For the first 199 years of their 200 year history, Americans could claim that they had never lost a war: it is ironic therefore that they have almost always managed to be on the losing side of arguments about the character and competence of their strategy. For the United States, Corneille’s aphorism has a tormenting pertinence: ‘To win without risk is to triumph without glory.’

In the course of this essay use will be made of a convenient fiction, American Strategic Man, in order to focus the bundle of inter-related ideas which make up the popular image of the American way of war. It will be the contention of this essay that these ideas are largely myths, mistakes, or misconceptions, arising out of a general lack of awareness of American military history, an absence of sophisticated appreciations of the nature of strategy, and the recurrence and self-interest of various groups of myth-makers. These myth-makers cannot be isolated as single individuals or groups: they have included intellectuals and anti-intellectuals, Republicans and Democrats, military practitioners and civilians, the political left and right, and governmental insiders and outsiders. They have been ably abetted by numerous foreign commentators. The resulting myths widely pervade the literature on American strategy and foreign policy, and are consequently the staple diet of students.1 This essay seeks to identify and re-examine some of the more important aspects of contemporary conventional wisdom. The discussion leads to the conclusion that the well-established image of American Strategic Man—everybody’s favourite bad guy—is very misleading. It will be seen that to the extent a peculiar American way of strategy exists, it has been both very different and very much more complex than its reputation suggests.