Peter Beinart: The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris. Harper Collins, 2010. ISBN: 9780061456466. Website
Greek mythology is ripe with parables and one of its most didactic tales is the story of Icarus, a young man whose father built wings of wax and feathers to enable his son to fly.
Before he takes off, Icarus' father warns him that he should fly neither too low nor too high but at a moderate height. If he flies too near the sun, the wax will melt and his wings will disintegrate. As it happens, Icarus becomes intoxicated with the thrill of flying; as he soars towards the sun, his wings fall to pieces, plunging him to his death.
Peter Beinart's latest book, The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris, charts the ideological and intellectual underpinnings of American foreign policy from Teddy Roosevelt to Barack Obama. What is the Icarus syndrome? Beinart argues that it has been the cyclical tendency of American foreign policy makers to fly into the sun, to become intoxicated with success and blinded to the real limits of American power.
Beinart argues provocatively that each time America has become blind to the limitations of its power, it has been wrenched back to reality by failure; it has 'gained wisdom through pain'. He builds his argument through examination of American intellectual history as well as political history: Reinhold Niebuhr figures as much as Franklin D. Roosevelt and Francis Fukuyama as much as Colin Powell.
The book divides American foreign policy in the 20th century into three manifestations of hubris: the hubris of reason, the hubris of toughness, and the hubris of dominance.
Beginning with the pre-WW1 period, personified in Woodrow Wilson, Beinart argues that America's foreign policy was guided by a vision of a rationalised world, where force was exercised rarely and where international institutions would shape inter-state interaction. Beinart calls this the 'hubris of reason' — alive in a period where American foreign policy was 'shaped by a refusal to meet the world on its own terms' and to accept that politics between nations would never match the ideals to which Americans clung.
Indeed, American ideals, says Beinart, have sometimes blinded Americans to the dark parts of America's soul; to the reality that, in the words of Niebuhr, 'reason is always, to some degree, the servant of interest'.
In Beinart's thesis, the hubris of reason continued to influence American policy through successive administrations of the inter-war period pursuing policies clouded by an attachment to that ideal of a rationalised world without power politics and war. Despite the appeals of a weakened France, desperate for security in the face of German resurgence, and despite the militaristic tendencies of Imperial Japan, the Harding, Coolidge, Hoover and Roosevelt administrations ignored the developing threats.
This American naiveté was, argues Beinart, in part responsible for Germany's quick early victories in WW2 and France's defeat. America had tried to act as a neutral umpire, refusing to become engaged in power alliances, but in doing so had allowed Germany to spread its armies across Europe.
In the post war years, Beinart argues, the 'hubris of reason' was replaced by a 'hubris of toughness,' a political and ideological stance founded on American fear of their Soviet competitors and of America's waning manhood. This 'hubris of toughness' was, according to Beinart, the hallmark of the Kennedy administration, with episodes such as the Bay of Pigs part of a general policy of forcefully confronting Soviet influence around the world.
The 'hubris of toughness' was even more pronounced under the Johnson administration where 'global containment', the famous theory of confronting Soviet power penned by George Kennan (and later distorted), was put into action in Vietnam. Here Beinart argues that America's leadership became fixated by the idea that communism had to be confronted on a global scale, failing to recognise that not all communists were alike or aligned.
Finally, with the end of the Cold War, a 'hubris of dominance' replaced the 'hubris of toughness'. In a world where America was ideologically triumphant and economically and militarily supreme it could set its sights higher; 'rather than merely containing evil, it could impose good'. And with military victory after military victory from the First Gulf War to Afghanistan in 2001, American confidence grew, finally morphing into the belief that America could surgically remove regimes without great cost or loss of American life.
This hubris contributed to the launching of an invasion of Iraq in 2003 by the neo-conservatives — an ideological group who differed from more traditional realists like Kennan. The operating principle of this period was, says Beinart, 'the beautiful lie': the belief that there are no limits to American power, that America can accomplish anything. Beinart asserts that America has grown so used to triumphing in the conflicts of the 1990s that 'mere stasis is [now] easily viewed as retreat'.
Throughout this book several key themes emerge. Beinart argues that American hubris in all its forms has been fostered by a lack of knowledge, which has led to American policy makers being either overly fearful or comfortably optimistic.
He points to a key tension in American foreign policy making, between ideals and realism. Throughout the 20th century, if America's ideals became intoxicating they could blind Americans to their own limits (and the limitations of others), leading to bloody consequences. But if those ideals vanished completely, eroded by resigned realism, then America could become numb to evil.
If Icarus flew too high his wings would melt, but if he flew too low his horizons would be diminished. Beinart argues persuasively that American foreign policy makers must adopt more disciplined habits of mind; that Americans 'must become short-term realists with long-term, nonrealist dreams'.
The scope of this book might make it seem like Beinart is playing Icarus himself. But Beinart's thesis is captivating and his book, while being readable, is a work of intellectual depth.
Ben Coleridge studies Arts at the University of Melbourne.