The Irony of American History

"Yes, Reinhold Niebuhr’s classic book. It is also a prophecy by a theologian, the son of a German émigré to America. It’s one of the most important books in American self-criticism. It was written after America had risen as a giant, as victor in World War II, when many believed it had won the mandate of Heaven and had ‘dreams of managing history’, when some even entertained the thought of a preventative nuclear war, as the US became embroiled in global antagonism with the Soviet Union. Reinhold Niebuhr, as a pessimistic theologian, was uneasy with American idealism and self-exaltation. He wrestled with the dangerous and intoxicating idea of American exceptionalism, and he found in that ideology the seeds of American self-destruction. The book is called The Irony of American History and there were a number of ironies in America’s condition. First, America became a superpower without a conscious grand design, without its people lusting for world conquest and despite the fact that it was created partly in order to reject the power struggles of the old world. It stepped into a vacuum created by war and the exhaustion of European nations. Drawing on its heritage as the ‘light on the hill’, it assigned itself the role as ‘tutors of mankind in its pilgrimage to perfection’. Second, America as a superpower controlled its destiny less than as a continental power, because the more far-flung and global it became, the more it collided with other wills and forces which it could never ultimately master. And third, as the country reached for power and interpreted history as the triumph of the American way after World War II, it was becoming like the enemy in milder form and could destroy itself. Like Marxism-Leninism, Atlantic liberal democracy married with the might of the American superpower was becoming heedless of the ‘limits of all human striving, the fragmentariness of all human wisdom, the precariousness of all historical configurations of power, and the mixture of good and evil in all human virtue’. “The temptation to see itself as the world’s great redeemer and all-powerful was almost irresistible, even though it was very dangerous.” Unlike quite a lot of American patriotic visionaries at the end of World War II, who believed they were trying to interpret history and the meaning of America’s role in it, Reinhold was more pessimistic. He believed that not only was history indecipherable, but it would never end. Yes, I think he pointed up a number of great dangers in what can happen with a country which has ‘the victory disease’. This is the idea that in a moment of great success the country starts thinking that its strength alone makes it wise, and it starts to assign itself a role of global superpower. It is very understandable why that happened because America was stepping into a huge vacuum of the old European empires which had exhausted themselves. And the world we know benefited hugely from America’s new role as it rebuilt Europe and extended its military shield. But the temptation to see itself as the world’s great redeemer and all-powerful was almost irresistible, even though it was very dangerous."