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PARTISAN REVIEW
517
In whatever sense America can be said to have become an imperial state,
the active carriers of that imperialism have not been Lenin's villains,
the bankers and foreign investors, nor Professor Kolko's villains, the in–
dustrialists seeking raw materials, nor Professor Williams's villains, the
exporters seeking foreign markets. The active carriers have been our
politicians, diplomats and, most espeoially, our military leaders. Tocque–
ville foresaw this ago when he wrote his great chapter, "Why Dem–
'ocratic Nations Naturally Desire Peace, and Democratic Armies, War."
"The army, taken collectively," Tocqueville said, "eventually forms
a small nation by itself, where the mind is less enlarged and habits are
more rude than in the nation at large.... A restless and turbulent spirit
is an evil inherent in the very constitution of democratic armies and
beyond hope of cure."
Let us take the case of escalation in Indochina.
Has
the clamor of
American business for foreign markets been responsible for the widening
of the war? To ask the question is to expose the fatuity of the Williams
thesis. At every stage of our descent into the quagmire, the military
have played the dominant role. First, they defined the problem as a
military problem, requiring a military solution. Then, at each point
along the ghastly way, the generals promised that just one more step
of military escalation would bring the victory so long sought and so
steadily denied. The Pentagon has not only succeeded in casting the
problem in military terms; it has cherished the war for its own institu–
tional reasons. Vietnam has become an invaluable testing ground for
new weapon systems as well as an indispensable place for on-the-job
training and for promotion. "Civilians can scarcely understand," General
Shoup, the admirable former commandant of the Marine Corps, has
written, "... that many ambitious professionals truly yearn for wars
and the opportunities for glory and distinction afforded only in com–
bat." All the services, General Shoup tells us, wanted part of the action
in Vietnam and competed for "the opportunity to practice their trade."
Here surely lies the operative cause of our imperial drift: the incessant
pressure of the professional military in an age of incessant crisis.
Let me hastily distinguish the point I am making from the fashion–
able hyperbole about the military-industrial complex. The conception of
the military-industrial complex implies that the military are nothing but
the creatures of the business community, obediently carrying out the
bidding of the business leaders. Only old Leninists like Dwight D. Eisen–
hower could believe that. What we must understand is that the military
are
not
the agents of the businessmen; they have arisen as a powerful
force in their own right, an entirely independent influence on the forma–
tion of national policy. Of course they have a complex network of
al-
