The American war of choice on Iran will inflict widespread suffering across the world for a long time. This catastrophe might be understood as the work of an unbalanced and easily manipulable president who wagered on the quick collapse of Iran’s government and its replacement by gratefully pro-U.S. Iranians, only to find himself stupefied by a resolute adversary. But blaming a deranged president for this calamity obscures the climate of opinion that made it possible.
It is no surprise that the Democratic leadership, which recently criticized Donald Trump for not being tough enough on Iran, did little to stop Trump’s new war. Hillary Clinton presaged Trump’s genocidal rhetoric against Iran by promising, in 2008, to “totally obliterate” the country if it dared to launch a nuclear attack on Israel. (Clinton advanced this absurdly implausible notion because she wished to partake in a popular American fantasy of annihilating Iran.) Other opponents to Trump stand ready to adorn the president’s multiple threats of obliteration with a humanitarian motive: Michael McFaul, an ambassador to Russia under Barack Obama, asserted as late as mid-March that he “would love to see the Iranian people liberated,” and that “if [Trump’s] war achieves that objective, I will withdraw my criticism of his war and praise him.”
The increasingly ruinous moral and ideological confusions of American society extend beyond Trump, to his harshest political antagonists. Among these delusions is the perennial faith that Iranians are potentially ardent converts to American-style freedom, rather than inheritors of an ancient civilization with a trajectory outlined by its own specific history. This bizarre expectation—which Thomas L. Friedman summarized when he said, “I want everyone to become an American”—has been a bipartisan ideal shared by individuals across a range of institutions, from pundits at the American Enterprise Institute to liberal missionaries of the American way of life at the New York Times, the Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, and The Atlantic. In the case of Iran, this desire dates back many decades.
In 1953, Iran became America’s eager understudy following a CIA-led coup against the government of Mohammad Mosaddegh. In his stead, the United States propped up the venal and repressive shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who proved to be a pliable ally readily serving its oil and armament interests. His enforcers were trained in torture techniques by the CIA and educated in the theories expounded by the political scientist Samuel Huntington. Iran’s mentors were naturally taken aback by the volcanic eruption of popular anti-Americanism in the country in 1978. Many of them urged the shah to toughen up and crack down harder on protesters. iran quieter as shah shows some muscle was the New York Times headline on November 19 that year. After the shah was overthrown in 1979, during the Iranian Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini took power, and American diplomats, military personnel, and businesspeople were forced out. Traumatized by the expulsion of their compatriots and by the prolonged humiliations of the 1979–81 hostage crisis, U.S. leaders supported Saddam Hussein’s onslaught on Iran. Despite this history, the aspiring American saviors still cannot grasp why Iran’s rulers would rather destroy the world’s economy than surrender their hard-won national sovereignty to a sadistically imperialistic United States and its Middle Eastern proxies.
Lurching from promises of liberating Iranians to threats that “a whole civilization will die,” Trump embodies an old national pathology: a compulsive pattern of infatuation, expectation, frustration, recrimination, revulsion, hostility, and reinfatuation. His abusive relationships with foreign countries, untempered by any knowledge of the history that has made or unmade them, reenact an American tragedy whose script was written long before he assumed office. Interventions in foreign countries have long been attempts to refashion America’s identity and to reinvigorate, through external validation, the weakening faith of Americans in their own institutions.
As a novel political experiment, the United States lacked the indigenous sources of identity available in older, more tradition-minded societies. Ideas about uplifting other societies (rather than their own racially abused minority populations) began to define many white Americans’ own place in the world as the United States swaggered into the twentieth century. Indeed, the turbulent inner history of America has had foreign-policy consequences since the early decades of its global imperium, beginning with the war against Spain, undertaken on false pretenses in 1898, which Richard Hofstadter blamed on “the psychic crisis of the 1890s.” In order to displace the insecurities engendered by rapid economic and technological shifts, U.S. political elites improvised military expeditions with grand humanitarian visions in Cuba and the Philippines.
This ostensibly moral investment in the outside world only deepened alongside the exponential growth of American power following World War I. Behind a great apathy and ignorance about remote Asian countries lurked a formidable paternalism shared by many rich and influential Americans, including Henry Luce, the founder of Time and Fortune: a belief that Americans had protected their Chinese wards from European and Japanese imperialists and that they ought to be loved for it. John Dewey, one of the more perceptive American visitors to China at the time, warned his compatriots in 1926: “Unless this country has more than the average amount of parental understanding, it may soon be charging China with ingratitude.”
More than just a country of economic and strategic significance to the United States, China was a crucial setting for American self-regard. This geopolitical narcissism, which benefited crooked and maladroit pro-U.S. Chinese leaders such as Chiang Kai-shek, was dealt a great shock on October 1, 1949, when Mao Zedong, having defeated Chiang and the Nationalists, who then retreated to Taiwan, proclaimed the People’s Republic of China at Tiananmen Square. Nevertheless, the preposterous question “Who lost China?” (as though China were ever America’s to lose) helped launch the U.S. national-security state and justify the United States’ permanent mobilization for war. Given a brutal emphasis by Senator Joseph McCarthy, the interrogative made Cold Warriors prone to seeing godless Communism on the march everywhere. Reopening the door to China in 1972, Richard Nixon reawakened his forebears’ dream of making China embrace American-style democracy and capitalism. As late as 2011, Fareed Zakaria was still propounding a U.S.-led liberal world order in which China was a “stakeholder.”
I first sensed the insidious influence of such American perceptions of the world in the spring of 1989, as Chinese demonstrators clashed with security forces in Beijing. I was then living in the city of Varanasi, where I occasionally met American students, most of them enrolled in exchange programs at Indian universities. Their political opinions were exclusively on the left wing of the American ideological spectrum, incited by such scandals as the Iran-Contra affair, and they shared a visceral hostility to America’s Republican establishment. They were too self-aware to conform to Graham Greene’s archetype of the earnest American with an “unused face” who arrives in Asia “determined . . . to do good, not to any individual person but to a country, a continent, a world.”
And so I was intrigued by their response to the Tiananmen Square killings, an outrage that seemed totally out of proportion to their knowledge of China, not to mention the overall implications of the atrocity for Americans. That same weekend, Ayatollah Khomeini died in Iran, a few months after issuing a fatwa against Salman Rushdie. Surely the demise of America’s most strident ideological foe, ten years after the humiliations of the Iranian hostage crisis, called for greater attention? Meanwhile, death squads in Central America, armed and supported by the United States, were still far from ending political killings that included the massacre in 1981 of hundreds of civilians in El Salvador. Still, the brutality in China exercised these students’ consciences a great deal more, spurred as they were by their conviction that the youth massacred by Chinese security forces had been fighting for those twin pillars of American virtue: democracy and freedom. This heroic narrative, wherein good battled evil, was also manifest in the American newsmagazines I could easily find in India: Time and Newsweek, periodicals that I did not then know incarnated a peculiarly American mode of journalism, prone to dramatizing or novelizing current events, often at the expense of analysis and intellectual complexity. It was clear from these reports, which played up the presence of a statue resembling Lady Liberty at Tiananmen Square, that Americans wanted the Chinese to have what they had; they wanted the Chinese to be more like Americans.
Though horrified by the killing of hundreds, possibly thousands, of unarmed protesters, I had trouble navigating the proprietorial attitudes of so many American onlookers—especially the vociferous student critics of Reagan and Bush, who seemed to have succumbed to the strange American urge to see U.S.-style freedom bloom in alien and distant parts of the world. I had feared a violent outcome to the protests in Beijing from the time I’d heard about thousands of people congregating in the city’s main square. The Indian government, far more committed to democratic procedures than its Chinese counterpart, had crushed dissenters for actions far less provocative.
Given the long history of the Cultural Revolution, during which student followers of Mao had unleashed violent anarchy across the country, the crackdown ordered by Deng Xiaoping (himself a victim of the Cultural Revolution) surprised me less than the attempt by some Chinese leaders to talk to the students at Tiananmen Square. And I struggled to grasp the American assumption that democracy must be synonymous with American-style individual freedom. In a country like India, subjugated early in the history of capitalist imperialism, and then bullied after independence by the West, a degree of self-renunciation and collective sacrifice was widely understood to be requisite to economic and political self-strengthening. The aspiration to individual rights received much less emphasis in popular culture than a sense of duty to the nation. Freedom, for most people, meant a stable existence free of poverty and its indignities.
What could democracy and freedom mean in the Chinese context? By the late Eighties, the Communist government was embracing market reforms and dismantling the social protections of job security and health and welfare benefits—the famous “iron rice bowl” of Chinese tradition. Needless to say, this wasn’t a question taken up at length by those convinced that China should become a pro-U.S. capitalist democracy. It took me many years, much reading, and a few visits to China to begin to understand the nuances of the country’s situation in June 1989. It was only then that I learned that many demonstrators had been protesting the losses they suffered during the national switch to a market-oriented economy, and that most of those killed had been not students but workers. In other words, they were trying to come to terms with precipitate and distressing change in their own society rather than aspiring to a wholesale adoption of American values and norms. Meeting Chinese thinkers and writers, I learned what they feared from modernization under American auspices: loss of social cohesion, corruption, hyperindividualism, hedonistic materialism, and depoliticization.
The expectation that free markets ensure greater political freedom has since been crushed in the United States as well as in China. American society—grotesquely unequal and divided, helpless before its demagogic and oligarchic manipulators—is no longer a stranger to the dark ambiguities of lopsided economic progress. Nor does freedom of speech seem an unambiguous value as a tidal wave of toxic disinformation washes over the republic in its 250th year. Americans are learning what less fortunate societies have known for some time: that the pursuit of pure freedom, whether in enterprise or speech, risks creating uncontrollable disorder if it is not mediated through institutional norms and social constraints.
Czesław Miłosz once wrote:
Americans accepted their society as if it had arisen from the very order of nature; so saturated with it were they that they tended to pity the rest of humanity for having strayed from the norm.
But it is the United States that now seems to have been the great anomaly in human history. Its extravagant self-image, parasitic on the false perception of a materially and spiritually inferior world outside America, has been cracking for some time, evident not only in its chaotic 2021 flight from the Taliban’s ragtag military but also in the steady erosion of its national industries, from manufacturing to entertainment, where the United States once led unchallenged. An addiction to displays of “lethality,” combined with fracturing awareness of global events and trends—such as the availability of cheap Iranian weapons or China’s rise as a clean-energy superpower—culminated in Trump’s reckless assault on Iran.
Embarrassment over a vulgar and inept political class seems unlikely to open out into severe introspection among the United States’ intellectual and cultural elites, who are primed to regurgitate the narratives of American exceptionalism. Though repelled by the proud brutishness of Trump and his fellow travelers Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Alex Karp, liberal Americans are hardly likely to suddenly start seeing capitalist imperialism through the eyes of its victims, or understand how it is the original source of the challenges still being overcome by China, Iran, and most of the rest of the human population. But there should be no doubt that Americans are freer now amid the ruins of U.S. power and prestige than at any other time in the past—free to relinquish their role as exemplars and tutors and to recognize the grim fate they share with the rest of humanity.