Global Policy Forum

Preface to the fully updated 2007 edition of
Tom Engelhardt's The End of Victory Culture

By Tom Engelhardt

November 9, 1989; September 11, 2001. The first moment, the fall of the Berlin Wall, took place six years before The End of Victory Culture was published; the second, involving 19 men, hijacked civilian jets, and the collapse of two monumental towers in New York City, happened six years after this book appeared. 11/9. 9/11. Between those two dates, ideas about American victory and defeat have had their distinct ups and downs.

In 1991, the Soviet Union, that Reaganesque Evil Empire and our enemy of almost half a century, disappeared without a whimper. Until almost the last moment, top officials in Washington assumed it would go on forever, and when it was gone most of them couldn't, at first, believe it. But soon enough the event was hailed as the greatest of American triumphs. We had "won" the Cold War and were truly victorious in a way never before seen in history. Four-decades-plus of titanic struggle had ended with the super-enemy giving up the ghost.

This book was written in the wake of that "victory." It was surely one of the first histories to look back on that almost half-century from the moment the atomic bomb went off over Hiroshima to the collapse of the Soviet Union as a distinct past epoch, as history as well as (my own) lived experience. I was also exploring the world I had grown up in. (The book you'll soon read has much about what a 1950s and '60s childhood felt like.) I did so with a certain wonder, even bemusement, because, in those years of the early 1990s, much that had animated my world and my life did seem so over to me - and I was wondering just what had happened, and when, and why.

Now, we find ourselves in another puzzling moment, on the other side of a far briefer period of American triumphalism, though not so obviously (yet) at the end of our present era. This book, first published in the lull between Cold War's end and George W. Bush's unnerving rise, has been updated accordingly.

Back in the year The End of Victory Culture was published, the United States was viewed as standing miraculously alone as a Great Power, towering over a globe of puny powers. It was the "global sheriff," the "last" superpower on planet Earth - or the first "hyperpower" - with the mightiest, most high-tech, most futuristic military anyone had ever imagined. When it came to military bases abroad, our global "footprint" - a term Pentagon officials would soon be using - was so enormous that you couldn't speak of it in the plural. The United States was such a colossus that only one foot at a time, it seemed, could even fit on the planet. Little wonder, then, that American strategic brains would in those years begin dreaming in overtime of that last "high frontier," of the utter military domination of space, and so of the earthlings below. (American frontier dreams, as you'll soon find out, play no small part in this book.)

But here was the strange thing, the United States also stood alone, enemy-less and seemingly confused in a world of midget bad guys (quickly dubbed "rogue states"). And for all the victory rhetoric, the initial American response was the kind of befuddlement and paralysis one would usually have associated with loss. Chatter about reining in the Pentagonization of the country, of the economy, and of the federal budget appeared briefly in the media. A "peace dividend" was bandied about, but nothing happened. Meanwhile, a vast nuclear force sat mission-less in place. After all those mad years of "Mutual Assured Destruction," the missile silos remained full and no one mentioned it.

In those nether years, from Gulf War I to the attacks of September 11, 2001, bursts of triumphalism yoyo-ed with unease and self-doubt, with the angry, divisive politics of resentment as well as with roiling identity and culture wars. Then in 2000, George W. Bush, a "compassionate conservative" not given to "nation-building," took the presidency. With him arrived a group of men (and a few women), whose thinking had been formed in the Cold War, and who were thoroughly dazzled by the idea of American military power. They had spent the previous decade dreaming of a kind of global omnipresence and, one might almost say, omniscience that would befit the great, conquering nation of the Cold War.

Then came the attacks of 9/11 and those same officials, emerging with startling speed from the shock of what looked like the mother of all disasters, spooked a frightened, traumatized nation into a series of wars that were to make the United States the planet's New Rome (as some of George W. Bush's neoconservative supporters liked to think of it) or a global "Empire Lite," as the liberal Michael Ignatieff would write back in January 2003, only months before the invasion of Iraq. In the process, they invoked an old tradition of American triumphalism - the focus of this book - which I called "victory culture" and which had by the end of the Vietnam War essentially collapsed. They brought back much of its language and many of its images, while promising "victory" in a new, generations-long, Manichean struggle against "evil" enemies. It was to be the next Cold War, or alternately "World War III," or even "World War IV," or, as the president would dub it, "The Global War on Terror." It was to give us back our "frontier" (which just happened to coincide with the oil heartlands of the planet) and the necessary enemies to go with it.

The president and his top officials in these years promised victory no less often or relentlessly (sometimes using the word ten or more times in a single speech) than his predecessors had during the Cold War. Perhaps they all betrayed a certain anxiety by insisting on it quite so adamantly and so often. After all, in the post-Cold War world (as in the Korean and Vietnam War eras of the previous century), victory soon turned out to be a remarkably quicksilver concept, even for the leaders of the New Rome. As historian Andrew Bacevich, who fought in Vietnam, put it, thinking about Bush's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, "the East has solved the riddle of the Western Way of War... [T]he Arabs now possess - and know that they possess - the capacity to deny us victory, especially in any altercation that occurs on their own turf and among their own people."

Perhaps when the history of this era is written, among the more striking developments will have been the inability of a mighty empire to force its will or its way on others in the normal fashion almost anywhere on the planet. Since the USSR evaporated, the fact is that most previously accepted indices of power - military power in particular - have been challenged and, in the process, victory has been denied. Triumphantly here today (as your generals sit grinning behind a marble table in one of Saddam Hussein's palaces), it's almost as predictably gone tomorrow (as roadside bombs start to explode and suicide car bombings mount).

As another measure of the speed with which victory left the premises, the phrase "the New Rome" or statements like that of right-wing columnist Charles Krauthammer's in Time magazine about the U.S. being "more dominant" than any global power "since Rome" would have a remarkably short shelf life. The invasion of Iraq occurred in 2003 and, by early 2004, comparisons of the United States to Rome and a prospective Pax Americana to the Pax Romana had vanished. Similarly, whereas the original American "victory culture" had lasted a couple of hundred years and taken almost half a century to collapse, its sequel crashed and burned in Iraq in a scant few years, leaving the Bush administration standing in the rubble of its own imperial project. This part of the story I take up in a new afterword, which carries the tale of the demise of American triumphalism from Gulf War I to late last night.

By September 11, 2006, with victory culture again having bitten the dust, and the United States looking like anything but a New Rome, an observer might have been pardoned for wondering whether there hadn't been two losers in the Cold War. Had the Soviet Union, the weaker of the two great powers of the second half of the last century, simply imploded first, while the U.S., enwreathed in a rhetoric of triumph and self-congratulation, was slowly making its way to the exit without waving goodbye? When the post-9/11 years are reconsidered, the top officials of the Bush administration, pursuing their ambitious schemes for global military dominance, may well be seen as having inadvertently given American imperial decline a decisive shove downhill.

In the meantime, even as we continue to dwell in the "afterlife" of America's victory culture, this book, now fully updated, provides a look back at its inexorable demise.