Harper\'s Magazine - 03.2020

30 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / MARCH 2020

MARSHALL’S DICTUM OF

PREEMINENCE HAS REMAINED

THE IMPLICIT PREMISE OF THE

AMERICAN GRAND STRATEGY

This is the path that the United States has followed, with only occa-

sional deviations and backslides, ever since. As if by default, therefore,

Marshall’s dictum of preeminence has remained the implicit premise of

the American grand strategy: a stubborn insistence that freedom is ours to

define and that America’s possession of (and willingness to use) over-

whelming force offers the best way to ensure freedom’s triumph, if only so-

called isolationists would get out of the way. So nearly eighty

years later, we are still stuck in Marshall’s world, with Marshall

himself the unacknowledged architect of all that was to follow.

In our so-called Trump Era, freedom and power aren’t what they used

to be. Both are undergoing radical conceptual transformations. Marshall as-

sumed a mutual compatibility between the two. No such assumption can be

made today.

Although the strategy of accruing overwhelming mili-

tary might to advance the cause of liberty persisted

throughout the period misleadingly enshrined as the Cold

War, it did so in attenuated form. The size and capabilities

of the Red Army, exaggerated by both Washington and the

Kremlin, along with the danger of nuclear Armageddon,

by no means exaggerated, suggested the need for the

United States to exercise a modicum of restraint. Even so,

Marshall’s pithy statement of intent more accurately repre-

sented the overarching intent of U.S. policy from the late

1940s through the 1980s than any number of presidential

pronouncements or government-issued manifestos. Even in

a divided world, policymakers continued to nurse hopes

that the United States could embody freedom while wield-

ing unparalleled power, admitting to no contradictions

between the two.

With the end of the Cold War, Marshall’s axiom came

roaring back in full force. In Washington, many concluded

that it was time to pull out the stops. Writing in Foreign

Affairs in 1992, General Colin Powell, arguably the nation’s

most highly respected soldier since Marshall, anointed

America “the sole superpower” and, quoting Lincoln, “the

last best hope of earth.” Civilian officials went further,

designating the United States as history’s “indispensable

nation.” Supposedly uniquely positioned to glimpse the

future, America took it upon itself to bring that future into

being, using whatever means it deemed necessary. During

the ensuing decade, U.S. troops were called upon to make

good on such claims in the Persian Gulf, the Balkans, and

East Africa, among other venues. Indispensability imposed

obligations, which for the moment at least seemed tolerable.

After 9/11, this post–Cold War posturing reached its

apotheosis. Exactly sixty years after Marshall’s West Point address, President

George W. Bush took his own turn in speaking to a class of graduating cadets.

With splendid symmetry, Bush echoed and expanded on Marshall’s doctrine,

declaring, “Wherever we carry it, the American flag will stand not only for

our power, but for freedom.” Yet something essential had changed. No longer

content merely to defend against threats to freedom—America’s advertised

purpose in World War II and during the Cold War—the United States was

now going on the offensive. “In the world we have entered,” Bush declared,

“the only path to safety is the path of action. And this nation will act.” The

president thereby embraced a policy of preventive war, as the Japanese and

Germans had, and for which they landed in the dock following World War II.

It was, in effect, Marshall’s injunction on steroids.

We are today in a position to assess the results of following this “path of

action.” Since 2001, the United States has spent approximately $6.5 trillion

Battlefield memorial for a dead U.S. soldier, Normandy, France, 1944 (detail)