CODA: Volume XVI, No 1, SPRING 1999

The Age of Anxiety
James Chace

W. H. Auden called the low, dishonest decade of the 1930s, with its global depressions and rise of the dictators, the "age of anxiety." But, in retrospect, that decade seems to have been more an age of disillusionment, or worse, a prelude to destruction. As the twentieth century closes, the great European civil war, followed by the Cold War, merits French sociologist Raymond Aron's appellation, "the century of total war."

What about fin-de-siècle America? A world without certainties is surely an anxious world; certainties come when you have something to rebel against, some belief that there is a world elsewhere that can be seized and inhabited if you can find it and then storm and occupy its ramparts.

The new globalized economy that has been sweeping the world in the wake of the Cold War was supposed to bring to the world's citizenry peace, or at least prosperity. But the past decade has been riven by inequality and subject to fits of violence (witness Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, Sudan, Chechnya, Indonesia, Afghanistan). Both at home and abroad the rich grow richer and the poor poorer.

What, if anything, is to be done? If you contemplate America's place in an anarchic universe, then surely things are as good as they get. The Clinton administration says we are on the threshold of an era of budget surpluses, which will amount to nearly $4.5 trillion over the next 15 years. Inflation, already low, slipped to .7 percent in the fourth quarter of last year. America's gross domestic product--the total in goods and services produced--sped ahead at a 6.1 percent annual rate of increase in the final quarter of 1998. That made last year the third consecutive year in which the economy had expanded at a nearly 4 percent pace.

At the same time, Americans worry about the education of their children, who are dangerously behind children in many other nations in their command of science and math, and a health care system that is determined by insurance companies rather than by doctors. But it is possible, as anxiety worsens, that a future administration, working with a congressional majority, will actually tackle these problems with the vigor of a Roosevelt--be it Theodore or Franklin.

Internationally, a far more confusing picture emerges. What is America's responsibility abroad? There is at the moment no longer a direct threat to American interests, as was the case during the Cold War when we found ourselves having to contain the Soviet Union. Instead, the United States, as is evident from the bombing last August of targets in Afghanistan and Sudan in retaliation for the terrorist attacks against American embassies in East Africa, seems to be engaged in an effort to put much of the world to rights.

This past December, President Clinton said that the purpose of our raids against Iraq's Saddam Hussein was to "protect the national interests of the United States and indeed the interests of people throughout the Middle East and around the world." (Vaste programme, as General de Gaulle might have said.) Clinton's words echo George Bush's on the eve of the Gulf War against Saddam Hussein. "Our role as a world leader will once again be reaffirmed," wrote President Bush in his diary, "but if we compromise and if we fail, we would be reduced to total impotence, and that is not going to happen."

In struggling to redefine NATO's role now that the Western alliance is no longer needed to contain a Soviet thrust into Central Europe through the famed Fulda Gap, the administration is urging its European allies to embark on a new initiative to combat weapons of mass destruction. Yet for this new task of fighting terrorism, we presumably need the same number of carrier battle fleets we deployed during the Second World War. 

In Paris, unofficial French sources who are well versed in the Quai d'Orsay's thinking are skeptical of American protestations that NATO is not to become an arm of American interests. When I asked one of them what was the reason for NATO's existence in the post-Cold War world, he replied, "To keep the United States in Europe. America wants to be in Europe and wants to control NATO." Moreover, he says, the United States "deliberately manipulates NATO by splitting the allies and threatening to withdraw its troops" if the allies don't fall in line with Washington's thinking.

European anxiety about American purpose reflects the paradox of American power. Congress proposes to spend vast sums on the military, including substantial pay raises and benefits for its personnel, but is reluctant to put troops "in harm's way." And the big-ticket items the service chiefs demand are ill-suited for the wars against terrorism and small-bore conflicts that seem most likely to require great-power intervention in the near future.

Until the United States makes clear to its constituents at home what role it expects to play in the new century--and what this implies for military strategy--it is unlikely that any administration will receive the wholehearted backing it needs to accomplish its task. What are the costs we are prepared to bear? How do the monies we spend on the military affect the monies available to spend on education and health care at home?

American hegemony is a reality. Rarely do all-powerful nations surrender their predominance without a struggle. And so we go on, willing to bear the trappings of military prowess, but unable to define what and who it is we are protecting. If indeed we are undertaking the role of protector of the rights of the oppressed and determined to act, whenever feasible, to right wrongs, we had better say so. And then let the debate over ends and means begin. 

James Chace

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