A Dangerous Irony

Our primary alliance through the eyes of Reinhold Neibuhr

I was fortunate enough to have my father-in-law give me Reinhold Niebuhr’s work, The Irony of American History (1952). Niebuhr was one of the pre-eminent US theologians of the 20^th Century. Admired by the likes of President Obama. He is, fortunately, a very good writer, which makes what are very weighty issues easier to navigate. For this stack, I will use many of his quotations, primarily because my knowledge of early US history is only slightly more than my profound ignorance of theology. I will hopefully take back control in the last third of the stack.

The ruthlessness of the foe would only be secondary cause of disaster. The primary cause would be that the strength of a great nation was by eyes too blind to see the struggle; and the blindness would be induced not by some accident of nature or history but by hatred and vain glory.

The text was written not long after the descent of the Iron Curtain, and the spectre of Marxism haunted the American psyche. Much of the text is dedicated to this debate between two ideologies: US exceptionalism and Marxism. It is interesting, but not core to Niebuhr’s far more incisive analysis of the United States. It is Niebuhr’s observations on the growth and paradox of American exceptionalism that are enduring.

The title embodies his core thesis. Niebuhr confronts American exceptionalism and its illusions from theological, ethical, economic, and geographic perspectives. He traces the growth of this phenomenon in the early stages of the nation, through both Calvinism and Jeffersonism (the creation of God’s American Israel). Nested in a richly abundant land, the unique concept of the ‘pursuit of happiness’ has now translated into an inexhaustible drive for material accumulation. The ‘new entity in a corrupt world’ becomes corrupted. It is not, as commonly described by others, a post-World War 2 phenomenon; this marker was when it externalised in a new form of imperialism.

He presents it as such:

Yet our American nation involved in it’s vast responsibilities, must slough off many illusions which were derived from the experiences and ideologies of its childhood. Otherwise we will seek escape from responsibilities which involve unavoidable guilt, or we will be plunged into avoidable guilt by too great confidence in our virtue.

There is a further sting in the tail, which I have already mentioned—the false equivalence of prosperity and happiness. Prosperity is viewed as a virtue in itself and is supposedly protective of humanity against the incongruities of life.

But the final wisdom of life … (is) the achievement of security within and above it.

The race for this material wealth is resisting the finding of a lodging place for humility, mercy and peace in society. The attempt to accumulate wealth beyond the wildest dreams of Crassus erases true virtue.

The generation of Niebuhr, Scowcroft, Said, and Arendt has passed, particularly at the senior levels of government and law. Our primary ally swims, indeed thrives, in Niebuhr’s hatred and vain glory. Power now embodied in military power (Neibuhr saw economic power as having primacy in the 1950s) is used to see itself as superior to those it arbitrarily calls weak, and is somehow verified by an overwhelming confidence in technical superiority.

I now turn to the simple question that sits at the centre of this stack. Based on Niebuhr’s insights, is the US a suitable primary ally for Australia? This question transcends the Mad Mango, as Niebuhr demonstrates, we appear not to understand the nature of the beast we have shackled ourselves to for seventy years. Perhaps we should have been asking this question decades ago?

I do not have an answer. But given Niebuhr’s status in US theology, it should be seriously considered rather than treated as a transient or unimportant phenomenon. He asserts that, at best, US exceptionalism is a see-saw, highly dependent on individual virtue, making it at times highly effective or, when lacking, disastrously destructive. Niebuhr, of course, highlights moments of great virtue (the founding of the UN, for example, so there is a lesson in the Republican and Israeli tearing down of that institution). Plus, when discussing the competition between Marxism and US capitalism, he clearly supports the democratic system. However, he sees constitutional monarchies as a superior form of such. He doesn’t hesitate to laud US achievements, but asks the question: to what ends, and it is then that you stare into the void.

A good security strategy requires understanding threats. I would posit that Australia does not understand its primary ally. Or worse, it thinks it does and sits in a star-spangled delusion of a special relationship. The slick, sleek, scripted statements spoken from shiny AUKUS stages are supplication, not strategy.

Niebuhr’s work has somewhat jarred me. Maybe those with a lifetime of geopolitical study would shrug despairingly at my naivety. However, I do not, at least publicly, hear such questioning about the nature of our primary ally. Indeed, a good friend of mine, who has more insight into contemporary thinking in the Canberra bubble, is somewhat despondent that, overall, the worldview remains unchanged. Yes, it is a more dangerous world, but the primary causation remains dissonantly ignored. We seem unable to contemplate pulling the IV (plus the iron lung, pacemaker, and colostomy bag).

This discussion does not even consider the current level of strategic incompetence the US is demonstrating, even Baghdad Bob would be aghast.

I will conclude with a very important lesson about individual virtue.

For when judgement define the limits of human striving it creates the possibility of a humble acceptance of those limits. Within that humility mercy and peace may find a lodging place.

I would put it to you that the Australian strategic debate is slowly maturing (mainly outside the parliamentary circle). But some of the dogma, hubris, technical zealotry, and greed of narrow-minded industrial lobby groups taint our debate, as Niebuhr described. We fail to recognise our limits when we are in the presence of a behemoth. We are unable to find our lodging.

The damage our primary ally can, may have or is doing needs to be debated. Again, not as a transient phenomenon. As Lord Palmerston reminds us: We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow. It is naïve to believe interests will be fully congruent, but the idea that they can, on the face of it, be aligned yet, behind the veneer, dissonant, has not been fully considered.

An example of this veneer is the recent fawning hosting of COMD INDO-PACOM in Australia. Whilst one of his peers incompetently wages an illegal war, and another is actively committing war crimes. Niebuhr’s irony is a present security reality rather than an apparently abstract theological debate. We would do well to name it for what it is. Perhaps ‘irony’ is too light a word without studying Neibhur’s work; ‘tragedy’ is currently too strong a word, so far.