An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America's Future - Couverture souple

Kaplan, Robert D.

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0679776877 ISBN 13 : 9780679776871

Editeur : Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1999

Synopsis

An Empire Wilderness With the same eye to detail that so distinguished his bestselling "Balkan Ghosts, " Kaplan now explores his native land, the United States of America. Map. Full description

A propos du livre

Extrait :

LAST REDOUBT OF THE NATION-STATE

1

Fort Leavenworth

Whereas east coast monuments such as the Lincoln Memorial and the Statue of Liberty speak specifically to ideals, the Protestant memorial chapel at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas-overlooking the Missouri River at the edge of the Great Plains, with the rails of the Union Pacific visible in the distance-invokes blood and soil. The chapel was built from local limestone in 1878, two years after the massacre of George Armstrong Custer's Seventh Cavalry. Six brass pack howitzers from the Indian Wars are embedded in the wall. In addition to plaques commemorating the U.S. Army dead at Little Big Horn and other frontier engagements, the walls are studded with the names of heroes of every war since; Colonel Ollie Reed (July 30, 1944) and First Lieutenant Ollie Reed Jr. (July 5, 1944), for example, a father and son killed weeks apart in France and Italy in the Second World War. In early May 1995, on the fiftieth anniversary of V-E Day, as I stood within this darkened holy of holies, my eyes struggling to read the names in the gloom, I felt as if I were within the core of nationhood.

The poignancy of the moment overwhelmed me, stretching beyond the deaths of those men. For after several weeks at Fort Leavenworth, freighted as it is with historical reference, and after heated discussions with army officers about the failure of ancient Greece and Rome, how could I not think about the future of the United States?
The officers and I did not assume that the United States was going to decline like those ancient empires. That is not the lesson of classical history. Rather, it is that change is inescapable and the more gradual and hidden the change, the more decisive: the great shifts in fortune for ancient empires were usually not apparent to those living at the time. At Fort Leavenworth I was intensely aware of such transformation-of history moving silently beneath our feet however much we deny it-and thus the memorial chapel affected me more intimately than any monumental ruin in Greece or Italy or Egypt.
The setting is fifteen miles northwest of Kansas City, where the Missouri flows swiftly, several hundred yards wide, encumbered with logs and other debris, the untamed signature of the New World. Here the river arcs before turning north. On July 2, 1804, the explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark camped nearby, en route to the Pacific. In May 1827, during the presidency of John Quincy Adams, Colonel Henry Leavenworth, sailing upriver from the direction of St. Louis, commenced construction here of what would become Fort Leavenworth: the advance post of European settlement within the western half of the American continent. Colonel Leavenworth's orders were to construct the fort on the east bank of the river. However, because the east bank was a floodplain, he built on the bluffs of the west bank, in what was officially "Indian territory" beyond the Union, in the future state of Kansas. By the time Washington bureaucrats learned of Leavenworth's decision, the colonel had already begun building.

As much as it is an army base or a war college, Fort Leavenworth is a living museum. French cannons, brought here before Thomas Jefferson purchased Louisiana from France, look out over the Missouri. Lining the parade ground are nineteenth-century redbrick Victorian houses, their facades framed by white porticoes. George Armstrong Custer lived in one, Douglas MacArthur in another. In 1926, when Fort Leavenworth was almost a hundred years old, Dwight D. Eisenhower lived with his family in nearby Otis Hall. It was at Fort Leavenworth that "Ike" learned to play golf. In another brick building, in the winter of 1917-1918, a young officer, F. Scott Fitzgerald, wrote the first draft of his first novel, This Side of Paradise. The post cemetery, designated by President Abraham Lincoln as one of our first twelve national military cemeteries, contains the graves of 19,000 soldiers who served from the War of 1812 through Desert Storm, including Shango Hango, an Indian soldier-guide, four officers from Little Big Horn, and a casualty from Fort Sumter. Fifteen hundred graves are unmarked.

The piece de resistance is the Buffalo Soldier Monument, a sixteen-foot bronze statue of a black trooper mounted on his horse, rearing up before two reflecting pools. The "buffalo soldiers" were two African-American regiments, the Ninth and Tenth Cavalries, which, from the end of the Civil War through the closing of the western frontier, escorted cattle drives and wagon trains, installed telegraph lines, and fought Indians and Mexican revolutionaries. The monument was dedicated in 1992 and was the idea of Colin Powell when he was deputy commander here, in 1981-1982. The magnificent bronze horse and rider could have leapt out of a painting by Frederic Remington: a binding myth, true and necessary.

Inside the post buildings, the theatricality demanded by tradition deepens. The pictures lining the corridors range from a painting of Revolutionary War General Nathanael Greene to a giant photo of MacArthur striding ashore in the Philippines in 1944. For several days, army officials let me visit the varnished meeting rooms with plush red carpets, where I listened to officers in black boots and battle fatigues discuss future war scenarios in the Balkans, Central America, and Africa. The battle fatigues express the difference between Leavenworth and other war colleges, where dress greens and jackets and ties are required: Leavenworth is a frontier post still, and a nostalgic view of the United States is deliberately cultivated here, as if to bind the uncertain future to a reliable past.

Fort Leavenworth symbolizes the frontier. As the most important fort in the West, the place from which the first group of white settlers moved into Indian country, it was the starting point for what would one day be called Manifest Destiny. It was the main base for the exploration of the Great Salt Lake in Utah and of the Columbia River in Oregon. Eight miles west of Fort Leavenworth, the newly opened Oregon and Santa Fe Trails separated. Here a young man from Illinois, James "Wild Bill" Hickok, experienced the West for the first time, amid wagon trains as far as his eye could see. Fort Leavenworth was the base camp for building the transcontinental railroad. From here, troops marched off to the Mexican War and Custer's Seventh Cavalry trekked to the Little Big Horn. In 1881, General William Tecumseh Sherman established a staff college at Fort Leavenworth, and when the frontier closed in1890, Leavenworth began to train officers for fighting overseas-another territorial threshold-which they did in 1898, when U.S. troops carried the flag to Cuba and the Philippines. This has always been the place where the army prepares its commanders "to fight the next war." "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell, MacArthur, Eisenhower, and Powell, to name only a few generals, were indelibly marked by Leavenworth.

Almost every member of the army's top brass has spent at least several months, if not longer, at Fort Leavenworth. More than 90 percent of Army captains take a nine-week course here. More than 50 percent of all majors spend a year at Leavenworth before they are eligible for promotion to lieutenant colonel; of those majors who eventually make it to general, the percentage is much higher. Leavenworth is where military warfare doctrine is written. It was Leavenworth's School of Advanced Military Studies that, in 1990, outlined
the strategy for Operation Desert Storm. When the United States intervenes overseas, the phones and computers at Leavenworth work overtime.

Leavenworth's Battle Command Training Program runs simulated war games-for example, "Prairie Warrior," an annual exercise in which computers link Leavenworth with other U.S. military installations around the world in a "virtual" war situation, with isolated command headquarters, battlefield observers, and so forth. During my visit, Prairie Warrior featured a scenario in an "imaginary Europe" menaced by a failing nation-state in the "north-central" sector near present-day Berlin. The state is both threatened by its neighbors and tearing itself apart through civil unrest and guerrilla insurgencies in densely populated urban areas. Because this scenario was set fifteen years in the future, the weaponry for the war game included "intelligent mines" that can distinguish among trucks, tanks, and people and identify the enemy. While other military institutions look "strategically" and thus more abstractly at the future, Leavenworth, because it concentrates on training captains and majors, the "middle ranks," is "where the rubber meets the road," explained Major Chris Devens.

Another exercise I looked in on involved a humanitarian emergency in Memphis and St. Louis after a major earthquake along the Mississippi Valley's "New Madrid" fault line, where a series of big quakes did in fact occur in 1811 and 1812. More earthquakes are expected, and buildings in Memphis and St. Louis have not generally been constructed to withstand major tremors. This exercise tested the army's ability to work with NGOs (nongovernmental organizations, or private relief agencies), as it has had to do in the Third World.

It was assumed that there would be civil disorder after the quake. "Martial law has rarely been declared in the United States," noted Lieutenant Colonel Marvin Chandler. "That's another thing we look at." Many times in the course of my visit to Leavenworth I heard discussion of the Posse Comitatus Act, which forbids the National Guard to act as a local police force once it has been federalized by the army in a civil emergency. The implication was that turbulence within the United States might one day require the act to be repealed. "The future is icky," said Lieutenant Colonel Chandler, showing me a cartoon of a cow, representing an awkward, slow-moving army, trying to negotiate a series of mud puddles that represent natural catastrophes, political breakdowns, riots, and nuclear blackmail, both foreign and domestic.

Now that technology has erased distances, Leavenworth stands on a new frontier, a global one. Its computers disgorge daily advice to field commanders in Haiti, Rwanda, the Balkans, and wherever else American troops happen to be. "The guy in a tent in Port-au-Prince can access the library here regarding lessons learned in Somalia," explained Major Devens. From Fort Leavenworth, officers fly to hot spots around the world every week. By planning for future conflicts, Fort Leavenworth is helping to transform the nation by redefining where its borders really are.

For example, a captain, looking at a map of a war game in Honduras, told me, "We know more about Honduras than about western Kansas during the Indian Wars. The intelligence on Honduras is more dense. Honduras is closer in time than western Kansas was, a few hours by plane rather than days on horseback. Communications are better, too." The Third World has become like the Old West. For the army, continental frontiers-of the kind that led to the building of Fort Leavenworth and of the nation-have grown dim.

What kind of continent will it be with Honduras this close and getting closer, I wondered? Could the dissolution of distances also dissolve the nation which this bastion of nationness overlooking the Missouri is meant to defend? The prairie surrounding Fort Leavenworth focused my mind on America's continental isolation, its debt to geography, while the tensions I encountered within the fort led me to wonder about the future status of traditional nation-state America in an age when oceanic distances matter increasingly less.

Colonel Jerry Morelock's walls are cluttered with U.S. military iconography: a dogged U. S. Grant, the father of total, unheroic war, leaning against a tree at City Point; Robert E. Lee after Appomattox; and so on. For a computer screen saver, Morelock uses a photo of Ike, George Patton, Omar Bradley, and other generals taken in May 1945 in Germany, after V-E Day. Morelock, who wears wire-rimmed glasses and whose gray hair has begun to recede, lives with his family in "The Rookery," the oldest house in Kansas, built in 1832. MacArthur lived here when he was on post in the early 1900s. A typical title on Morelock's bookshelf is Frontier Regulars: The United States Army and the Indian Wars 1866-1891. He salutes the flag every day at five o'clock, he told me.

"Fifty years after V-E Day, the U.S. has history's strongest military. But it has been eroded tremendously since 1991. And that is nothing new." Morelock then explained to me how following every conflict, including the Revolutionary War (after which the twenty-thousand-man Continental Army was disbanded and replaced by a "regiment" of seven hundred militiamen), military cutbacks ensued as memories faded. This was true of the periods following not just the First and Second World Wars, but also the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the Spanish-American War. "After every war, everyone declared the end of war. Though now we talk about lots of smaller wars, what's to prevent a really big conflagration? The record of history indicates that a new and great threat is certain." The task for officers here is daunting: imagine being at Leavenworth after 1898, when the United States was flush with victory following its defeat of Spain, and trying to predict the rise of Hitler at a time when the words "totalitarianism" and "fascism" had yet to be coined. The horrors of the next century may not even have names yet.

Through most of our history, we have had a weak central government and a small volunteer army. The military draft has been strictly a wartime thing, a radical departure from most empires of the past, especially Rome's.1 The United States, in fact, did not have an adequate standing army until the twentieth century. World War II, the Cold War, and the persistence of a military draft through 1973 masked the reality of a weakly governed, brawling, fractious society. Now two oceans may not seal us off from disintegrative forces elsewhere. As nation-states begin slowly, inexorably to melt into a transnational stew, army officers such as Morelock feel threatened. They think the military must do all it can to help America preserve some semblance of a blood-and-soil, continental identity. Morelock is not sure that this is possible.

"Just like at the end of the Indian Wars in 1890, the army finds it has no more territory left to conquer," Morelock said. "The answer a hundred years ago was imperialism." He meant the Philippines expedition, which, however misguided, primed the army to help Europe in both world wars. (In 1935, with the United States in an isolationist mode, Eisenhower honed his analytical skills by helping reorganize the Filipino Army, even if it was subsequently defeated by the Japanese.) "For now, we're the world's 911 force. The public screams 'Stop those images'-the ones on TV of kids starving. But that's not necessarily a national interest."

Such excursions are only a temporary raison d'etre until a real threat appears. But the real threat could be so unconventional-chemical or biological bombs in domestic water or mass transit systems, for instance-that the "traditional" army of tanks and armored personnel carriers and what it has historically represented to the nation may seem quaint.
At Leavenworth I also saw how the acceleration of technology is driving the wedge deeper between military and civilian societies and bringing about, for the first time, a professional-caste elite, with serious implications for our national future. Today's volunteer army is different from all others in America's history. Soldiers are becoming like doctors and lawyers: a professional group we would like to need less but upon whic...

Présentation de l'éditeur :

"Full of surprises and unusual revelations . . . an informed and disturbing portrait of the new American badlands."-- Chicago Tribune

"[Kaplan is] tireless, curious, and smart. . . . I cannot imagine anyone will concoct a more convincing scenario for the American future." --Thurston Clarke,   The New York Times

With the same prescience and eye for telling detail that distinguished his bestselling Balkan Ghosts, Robert Kaplan now explores his native country, the United States of America. His starting point: the conviction that America is a country not in decline but in transition, slowly but inexorably shedding its identity as a monolithic nation-state and assuming a radically new one.
        Everywhere Kaplan travels--from St. Louis, Missouri, to Portland, Oregon, from the forty-ninth parallel to the banks of the Rio Grande--he finds an America ever more fragmented along lines of race, class, education, and geography. An America whose wealthy communities become wealthier and more fortress-like as they become more closely linked to the world's business capitals than to the desolate ghettoes next door. An America where the political boundaries between the states--and between the U.S. and Canada and Mexico--are becoming increasingly blurred, betokening a vast open zone for trade, commerce, and cultural interaction, the nexus of tomorrow's transnational world. Never nostalgic or falsely optimistic, bracingly unafraid of change and its consequences, Kaplan paints a startling portrait of post-Cold War America--a great nation entering the final, most uncertain phase of its history. Here is travel writing with the force of prophecy.

"Lively . . . Kaplan has a sharp eye for social truth, and his encounters with a chorus of eloquent citizens of the West keeps the narrative humming." -- Outside

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Date d'édition: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0679776877
• ISBN 13: 9780679776871
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 416