Testing: One, Two, Three

Only the Soviets' intelligence appraisal that the West was not napping stayed the hand of the politburo from launching World War III, according to this psychological projection. Nowhere in this SAC assumption did the ordinary contingencies and headaches of a tottering military power figure in: the quagmire of Afghanistan, a collapsing economy, a technologically backward conscript military, grain shortages, restive non-Russian Soviet republics, even a borderline demographic collapse of the Russian people. No, the Soviets could afford to ignore the very factors which ended their state in favor of an offensive crouch in preparation for instant global military victory.

In the scenario of the SAC briefers, the entire ramshackle Soviet apparatus was testing us 24/7: were we ready, did we blink, did we let our guard down for an instant? It is retrospectively obvious that if the American political culture could be made to believe in that hypothesis, it would do wonders foremost for SAC's budget, but also for that of the entire military-industrial complex. But it would be a mistake to think that this mindset is merely a matter of antiquarian interest now that the cold war is two decades past. Bad habits linger even after the circumstances that created them cease to exist.

Abundant evidence of this came when vice presidential candidate Joe Biden, whose larynx is frequently disconnected from his cortical functions, made the following pronouncement: "Mark my words. It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama... The world is looking... We're going to have an international crisis... to test the mettle of this guy... I guarantee you it's going to happen." [1]

The usual uproar ensued, with the media calling Biden's statement a "gaffe" (which invariably means a truth told inartfully, rather than a lie, inaccuracy, or distortion), and the opposition party pouncing on it to political advantage. But, as is almost always the case in political controversies, the fundamental premise of the statement went unexamined: do foreign powers "test" a president?

In an impersonal sense, this is almost certainly true: whoever becomes president on January 20th will be "tested" by circumstances beyond his immediate control. The worst global economic crisis since the Crash of 1929 comes to mind, as does the possibility of highly unpleasant situations arising in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, or any number of potential flashpoints. But these contingencies are almost like bad weather from the point of view of the American political system: they arise for reasons internal to their own nature, and not as a deliberate "test" of a U.S. president's crisis management abilities. And to the extent foreign political crises impinge upon the country, it is primarily because a 60-year U.S. tradition of persistent meddling in other countries' business has made these crises "ours."

As for the notion of foreign leaders consciously testing a green U.S. president (no doubt the sense in which Biden intended his statement), what is the historical evidence for that? Biden undoubtedly based his premise on the pseudo-historical cliché according to which the blustering Nikita Khrushchev took the measure of the callow John F. Kennedy at the Vienna summit conference and subsequently "tested" him over Berlin and Cuba.

Khrushchev's actions regarding Cuba were connected with Kennedy, but not according to the narrative of the cliché. As one of the first foreign policy acts of his presidency, Kennedy approved the Bay of Pigs invasion, providing Khrushchev with an immediate pretext for placing missiles in Cuba. Khrushchev, according to his lights, was concerned about the ring of SAC bases in close proximity to the Soviet Union, and particularly the intermediate range ballistic missiles in Turkey. The unremitting hostility of U.S. administrations, both Democratic and Republican, to the Castro regime in Cuba provided Khrushchev a convenient rationale to offer Castro the "protection" of ballistic missiles, which would thereby break the ring of U.S. nuclear encirclement (as Khrushchev saw it) and expose U.S. territory to the same short-warning threat that Russia faced from Turkey. This dynamic had very little if anything to do with Khrushchev's taking the measure of Kennedy, but rather with the escalating tit-for-tat of U.S. and Soviet policies.

Does anyone speculate anymore about whether and how the Soviets tested Eisenhower? Was the shooting down of Francis Gary Powers' U-2 a test of Eisenhower's character? Or was the incident (and, obviously, the very fact of U.S. reconnaissance flights over Soviet territory) just one more milestone on the road to the Cuban missile crisis? For that matter, was the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 a test of Eisenhower's character? Was the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1967 a test of Johnson's character? Or the Soviet Union's shoot-down of a Korean air liner in 1983? Was the politburo testing Reagan's will? How about Kim Jong Il — is he testing Bush's will?

The fact that no serious person advances such arguments should put us on our guard. All this bunk about "testing" is a device used by the American foreign policy establishment to denigrate candidates who are perceived to espouse foreign policies a shade less belligerent than those of the post-World War II Washington Consensus. Significantly, presidents generally perceived as hawkish usually get a pass, regardless of what disasters occur on their watch. That Joe Biden would express the testing canard, even to the detriment of his own running mate, shows how steeped he is in the assumptions of his fellow mandarins who run our foreign policy.

The testing hypothesis is just a subset of the overarching myth of American Exceptionalism, the complex of adolescent fantasies about How Special We Are. It appears that at some level, Americans find it comfortingly affirming of their specialness to imagine that foreign heads of state spend every waking moment obsessed with us, rather than local crop failures, bank runs, or domestic unpopularity. You see, it's all about us, even if it's happening in Nagorno-Karabakh. [2]

The testing mantra is also a symptom of Americans' tendency to personalize complex historical processes. Since the American president has become a Sun King, about whom everything revolves, it is only logical that world history is the story of how presidents reacted to events. And the mano a mano facing down of evil is a beloved American frontier myth: Gary Cooper in High Noon is about the purest expression of how the adolescent mentality on display at The Weekly Standard sees the American president as he confronts the world. If the president is Gary Cooper, every Third World caudillo is Frank Miller arriving on the noon train. Or, to use the Standard's favorite trope, every president (if he's a Republican) is Churchill, or Neville Chamberlain, if he's a Democrat. Every presumed adversary, even if he's a Somali warlord in a Toyota pickup truck, is the very incarnation of Adolf.

The American political system also perceives cases of countries "testing" or "challenging" the United States in many instances where the country in question has a perfect right to pursue its own policies as an expression of political sovereignty. The Washington Consensus is inextricably linked with globalized financialism; it is an implicit assumption of the Consensus that other nations must accept the requirements of globalized financialism; otherwise, they will be treated as troublemakers, if not rogues. Typically, being a nation in good standing involves allowing its financial sector to be controlled from New York or London; privatization of local utilities and transport; giving multinational corporations favorable terms to exploit the country's mineral resources; and subjection to International Monetary Fund austerity policies. Those who do not play ball, whether tiny Ecuador or mighty Russia, are "challenging" the United States and, accordingly are "testing" a new president.

All that having been stipulated, yes, it is true that Pearl Harbors do happen. But their rarity no less than their catastrophic nature should impel us to be more discriminating about perceiving real "threats" and "challenges" and "tests" from the background events of ordinary international conduct. Evo Morales in Bolivia is not testing anything other than his domestic popularity, no matter how much American energy companies may dislike him.

It is to be expected as a matter of course that should Obama be elected president, the noise machine of the Murdoch press will jump on every remote terrorist attack in Indonesia, every diplomatic incident or cross-border incursion anywhere in the world, every friction in the workings of the international system as a deliberate action on the part of sinister forces to test the President of the United States. Should an incident occur on Obama's watch like that of the Chinese internment of a U.S. EP-3 spy plane as happened early in the Bush presidency, we can only imagine how the Kristols, Krauthammers, and Victor Davis Hansons would work themselves into a demented fury about the president's manifest unfitness to be commander in chief.

If there are issues that give one pause about Barack Obama's judgment, they lie less in the substance of what Joe Biden said, than in the fact that Obama chose Biden to bolster his own foreign policy credentials in the first place.

* Werther is the pen name of a Northern Virginia-based defense analyst.

[1] CNN.

[2] This attitude dominates our historical memory. Other countries' internal conflicts, say, the civil wars in Spain or the Congo, are just hideous, senseless butcheries. The American Civil War, by contrast, is so lovingly recreated by living impersonators that it has become a major cottage industry; and historians such as Shelby Foote and James McPherson rhapsodize about the specialness of the Civil War to the point where it becomes a transfiguring, almost religious myth. Usually, the emotional commemorations tactfully leave out discordant facts such as Andersonville Prison or the massacre at Fort Pillow.