'join the army if you fail' b. dylan

In the past five presidential elections, Americans have chosen candidates with no military experience over veterans of foreign wars in each election (and, no, Bush’s National Guard service does not count and Gore’s stint as a cub reporter in Vietnam does). Should this be troubling or is this a sign of a healthy polity?

I’m not completely certain, but I think that it is definitely a sign that the American public remains unconvinced that there is a real threat to the US posed by Islamic terrorism. Obviously, only two of these elections have occurred since 9/11, and, in one of them, the most convinced proponent of the GWOT won.

Nonetheless, it seems to me that most Americans view the American military in the same way that they view their local sports teams. That is, American service men are considered as mascots who travel around the world doing a bit of business, taking a few casualties, and projecting American superiority. The actual nature of their activity is quite unknown to the American public (especially to American intellectuals) and, were it known, it wouldn’t necessarily be an object of public approbation. Thus, while Americans are grateful in some way to veterans for their service, they don’t necessarily care to hear about them or their personal exploits, and they no longer consider those exploits to be qualifications for public office.

The primary problem with this state of affairs (i.e. the consideration of foreign relations as analogous to the support of sports teams) is related to what George Kennan recognized as an inherent problem of conducting international relations in a democracy: the fact that mobilizing public opinion almost always involves governments ceding control over their own decisions to the uniformed. There is little to be done about this unless responsible public officials can convince the great unwashed to mind their own business and let those who actually know a bit conduct the affairs of state.

Absent the emergence of this sort of disciplined sensibility on the part of both public officials and the citizenry (and I have no doubt that it will remain absent), the best that can be hoped for is a reinvigoration of the (ancient) American tradition of isolation best enunciated by JQ Adams when he said:
[America] goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.