On 16 October 2003, US secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld sent a memorandum to four key officials. In the memo, Rumsfeld asked a series of key questions regarding the progress of the George W. Bush administration's so-called War on Terror, the majority of which were focussed upon determining whether or not the US could be said to be winning its battle against global terrorism. Though much of the memo was of a cautious nature, Rumsfeld's firm – if pragmatic – conviction regarding the ultimate success of the US mission in the long term was plainly evident. “It is pretty clear that the coalition can win in Afghanistan and Iraq in one way or another,” he wrote, “but it will be a long, hard slog.”Footnote ¹ The sentiment was at odds with Rumsfeld's attempts since 2001 to transform the US military into an efficient fighting machine that could wage wars swiftly and decisively, but was in keeping with his broader sentiments regarding the true nature of US foreign policy after 9/11.

By 2005, Rumsfeld was publicly attempting to recast the administration's approach as being a “global struggle against violent extremism,” “as much an ideological battle as a military mission.” Public dissatisfaction with the war in Iraq had compelled Rumsfeld to try and recapitulate what he felt should be a central message of US policy: that events in Iraq had to be considered in the broader context of the fight against global terror. As the New York Times noted in reporting on Rumsfeld's efforts, “a new emphasis on reminding the public of the broader, long-term threat to the United States may allow the administration to put into broader perspective the daily mayhem in Iraq and the American casualties.”Footnote ² In a 2011 interview with Piers Morgan on CNN, Rumsfeld went as far as to suggest that he had always felt the term “War on Terror” to be a mistake – “I had several problems with the phrase,” Rumsfeld told Morgan, not least the fact that “what we were really engaged on was a competition of ideas with radical extremists.”Footnote ³

For Rumsfeld, then, the War on Terror had always been likely to be a long war. Individual battles within that war might well be won quickly; ultimate success, though, would require a prolonged period of watchfulness and commitment. Though this would require a great deal of sacrifice, the inevitability of eventual success, forged on the back of a powerful restatement of American exceptionalism, would ensure that this was a price worth paying. America was in it to win. Here, of course, Rumsfeld was drawing heavily on lessons from the Vietnam War. The collapse in domestic and international support for the US war in Vietnam had, for many conservatives, been the most salient lesson of that conflict. Victory had been at hand in Southeast Asia, they argued, but was ultimately sabotaged by the failure of the American people and the global community to stay the course. Accordingly, any new war – especially one that was likely to last for years rather than months – would need to try and ensure that this did not happen again.

It is in this rhetorical context of staying the course and ultimate success that Rumsfeld's position on post-9/11 foreign policy will be considered in this essay. In particular, it will examine Rumsfeld's attempts to forge a narrative of eventual, but hard-won, success in an effort to apply what he felt was one of the central lessons of the Vietnam War. Having served in President Gerald Ford's administration as defense secretary at the very end of Vietnam, and having held a number of positions in Ronald Reagan's administration as the effects of Vietnam on US policy began to become clear, Rumsfeld was in a unique position to be able to take those lessons on board and apply them after 9/11. One of the most notable ways in which he tried to achieve this, and where his unshakable commitment to American victory was most transparent, was in his creation of an elaborate narrative of eventual American success around one particular image – a keyhole satellite picture of the Korean peninsula at night, one that showed the bright lights and thriving economy of the South in stark contrast to the darkness and pinhole of light at Pyongyang in the North. In this one picture, Rumsfeld continually averred, could be seen not only the reason why victory would be difficult, but also the reason why victory was inevitable. Crucial to Rumsfeld's message was being able to point to perpetual progress, which was steady, realistic and manageable, and that this was conveyed in an acceptable fashion to the American people and the world. This was not an attempt to suggest that Korea was providing the example for US military policy or nation-building efforts. Rather, it was a consistent message to rally domestic and international support around the idea that staying the course in Afghanistan and Iraq could, in the future, lead to an image like that of Korea.

In this respect there is a clear lineage here between Rumsfeld and another architect of American war, Walt Rostow – adviser to John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, and a key adviser during Vietnam who had strongly advocated that the US needed to go all-out to win in Southeast Asia during the 1960s for matters of global importance.Footnote ⁴ Rumsfeld, like Rostow, foresaw American success as being both possible and of paramount importance, but Rumsfeld, again like Rostow, would ultimately see his model collapse as public support waned and the desire for a new message became overwhelming. In his attempts to discern tangible lessons from the mess of Vietnam, Rumsfeld was correct that retaining the will to fight – both at home and abroad – was crucial. The point he missed, however, and which led to fundamental tensions, was that this was not necessarily resolvable. It relied upon an unsophisticated reading of history. Thus the broader point, that adopting historical lessons in such a selective way, as per Bernard Brodie's famous formulation, leads to “bad history and worse logic,” was neglected.Footnote ⁵ Deigning to learn from past mistakes, Brodie should remind us, is not the same at all as learning from the past. What results is history through a keyhole. In either case, the focus is too narrow to be of real help in understanding the present. Peering through such a keyhole from the present restricts the view to Vietnam “mistakes,” thereby leading to a conclusion that the war could have been won by fighting a better war; peering back through the keyhole from past to present, the argument is made reciprocal – avoiding mistakes made in Vietnam will lead to success in new conflicts. Rumsfeld's solution to the lesson he discerned from Vietnam was, in some ways, absolutely correct. But, in a number of more important ways, it only served to exacerbate the situation as gradual progress was deemed unacceptable amid the clamour for immediate victory.

Rumsfeld's model of perennial progress on the road to success, as glimpsed in the photo of the Korean peninsula, was thus jettisoned in late 2006 for a model of progress as an indicator of the way toward getting out. After Rumsfeld left office, President Bush sought to galvanize support for the war by noting that staying the course was the only way to get out. As it had in Vietnam, the requirement for a public exit strategy had become non-negotiable. Moreover, this model has held firm under Barack Obama, with progress on the ground often cited as an indicator of eventual American withdrawal even as his administration implemented its own surge of 33,000 extra troops into Afghanistan in 2009.

The pressure for Obama, though, has been to guide the US toward this (rather hazy) endpoint while dispelling criticisms that the US is on the cusp of defeat or imperial decline. In the summer of 2010, a few weeks after General David Petraeus took command in Afghanistan, his sometime adviser David Kilcullen predicted that if Obama set deadlines on a planned new troop increase in that country he risked a major defeat. “I think this is a recipe for Dien Bien Phu in the Hindu Kush.” Author of books on counterinsurgency, frequent television and op-ed commentator, sometime adviser to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as well as to Petraeus, Kilcullen is a highly regarded figure in the military–intellectual complex occupying Washington think tanks. Withdrawing American forces in July 2011, he added, would leave Afghanistan up for grabs. “People are clearing the decks for renewed civil war.”Footnote ⁶ Kilcullen's conjuring up of the French debacle at Dien Bien Phu was only one of several references to Vietnam ghosts that have returned to walk abroad in the Afghan mountains in recent years, stirring deep anxieties about the past, present and future. Seizing on an even more disturbing Vietnam memory, General Stanley McChrystal had warned President Obama that the only alternative to sending more troops to Afghanistan was the dreaded “helicopter on the roof of the embassy.”Footnote ⁷ One could almost hear the beating of helicopter rotor blades in McChrystal's sombre warning; and, indeed, that was the very point – to put the weight of past failures onto the scales of decision-making and to make clear the ramifications if the line is not held and the course is not maintained. Consequently, progress has often been highlighted since 2009 while the Obama administration seeks to avoid any clear declaration about when the mission might end. Even as a troop withdrawal was announced in the summer of 2011 – a withdrawal that effectively reversed the 33,000-man surge of 2009 – it was clear that this was only a first step in the de-escalation process.

As this essay will argue, the evolution of US foreign-policy discourse in the decade since 9/11 has been fixed around the perennial debate about where precisely America's interests lie and to what extent, if any, power in itself should be a goal for US policymakers. Rumsfeld's rhetorical model of 2001–6 was ultimately discredited, but was never fully abandoned. For Kilcullen and McChrystal, Rumsfeld's essential lesson of Vietnam remains highly pertinent as any failure to stay the course is framed as a a harbinger of American doom. Hence Obama finds himself dealing with the aftermath of the ultimate contradiction of the post-9/11 era: American exceptionalism has been restated, victory has been deemed to be inevitable, but maintaining the consensus to achieve that is nigh-on impossible, and so the mission instead becomes one of citing progress as part of the road toward a successful withdrawal.

The final extraction of US troops from Vietnam seemed to render notions of American exceptionalism obsolete. “The Vietnam War,” George Herring has noted,

In his address to the American people after the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in January 1973, President Nixon sought to portray the war's end as a triumph of American will. “Let us be proud that America did not settle for a peace that would have betrayed our allies, that would have abandoned our prisoners of war, or that would have ended the war for us but would have continued the war for the 50 million people of Indochina,” he stated. “Let us be proud of the 2½ million young Americans who served in Vietnam, who served with honor and distinction in one of the most selfless enterprises in the history of nations.”Footnote ⁹ Such sentiments pointed to the realization among US officials that the legacy of Vietnam had the capacity to overshadow US foreign policy for years to come.

For Henry Kissinger, national security adviser and secretary of state to Nixon and then, after Watergate, to President Gerald Ford, the true implications were more profound. Too much could be read into Vietnam, he argued; the actual outcomes were that not much could be usefully learned, that the people had been generally supportive, and that it was the lack of rapid progress that had derailed the course of US policy. “The real frustration of Vietnam, in terms of commentary and evaluation,” Kissinger wrote in a draft memo to Ford, “may be that the war had almost universal effects but did not provide a universal catechism.” Perhaps the greatest lesson that could be drawn, Kissinger continued, was the

Inevitable success was to be proclaimed, in other words, but this should not contain unrealistic expectations.

For Donald Rumsfeld this was to prove a salutary lesson – one that cut to the heart of continual US debates about what the country's role in the world was. In the early 1960s, President John Kennedy mused about this alongside the fate of empires. His particular worry was the Cuban revolution. Kennedy had campaigned hard in the 1960 election warning that Fidel Castro, already in the process of seceding from an American-imposed protectorate status, presented a national security threat. In January 1962, a midway point between the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the missile crisis, Kennedy now worried that Cuba was only one of a series of multiple challenges on the periphery.Footnote ¹¹ Reviewing recent events with his National Security Council, the President praised a recent article in the Marine Corps Gazette about combating insurgencies. Our military “must learn how to fight on the edges of the world,” he said. “The record of the Romans made clear that their success was dependent on their will and ability to fight successfully at the edges of their empire. It was not so clear that we were yet in a position to do the same.”Footnote ¹² Kennedy's two key phrases, “the edges of the world” and, speaking of the Romans, “the edges of their empire,” catches the essence of this dilemma. Given the situation at the end of World War II, the purpose of American policy was to fill the vacuum left by the departing colonial armies of the British, the French and even the Japanese in Korea, and thereby produce a soft landing in the endgame of European imperialism, and smooth a transition to an American-led “Free World” Commonwealth of Nations before nationalist revolutions turned to Moscow or Beijing for material and ideological support.Footnote ¹³ Attaining support for such expansive goals, however, was far from easy. Even the much-vaunted Cold War consensus could only legitimize a certain amount of adventure abroad. When mulling over the prospect of whether or not to intervene in Laos, for instance, Kennedy quickly assessed, among other reasons, that fighting a war nine thousand miles away would be tricky if he was not prepared to fight in Cuba just ninety miles from the coast of Florida.Footnote ¹⁴

At the height of the Vietnam War, the essentiality of staying the course had been a recurrent theme. One of the most forceful voices on this front was Walt Rostow. When the going got tough in Vietnam, Rostow urged LBJ not to be discouraged: the right decision had been made, and victory would be achieved in the end. Americans, Rostow told LBJ, needed

Achieving this was of potentially historic importance. So-called wars of national liberation, Rostow said at Leeds University in 1967, were really anachronisms; Vietnam was the last stand of the doctrine of guerrilla warfare, and was destined to prove the case for pragmatism and moderation. And yet there was one contingency to be overcome. If the American “peace movement” triumphed at home, Rostow warned, Vietnam would fall prey to Communist predators, and that would deprive the world of United States leadership. Failure in Vietnam, he cautioned, “could destroy the emerging foundation for confidence and regional cooperation in Asia, with further adverse consequences on every continent.” For Rostow, the US mission in Vietnam had an absolute certainty about it if the war was prosecuted correctly: not only was it an honourable undertaking, but the US and its allies could be on the cusp of a historic success. “If the argument I have laid before you is correct – and if we have the common will to hold together and get on with the job – the struggle in Viet Nam might be the last great confrontation of the post war era.”Footnote ¹⁶

By 1968, though, Rostow's message of certainty was losing its force as the will to fight in Vietnam began to diminish. By the end of March, Clark Clifford, who had replaced Robert McNamara as secretary of defense, noted in a meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “unanimous advice from all sides was that the American people and the Congress would no longer support a policy of merely more of the same.”Footnote ¹⁷ A new narrative was needed – one that was looking for the way out of Vietnam rather than for how to succeed there. Consequently, only six years after Kennedy's ruminations on how America could protect its empire, Richard Nixon outlined his yearning to be free of the Vietnam War so that he could go about the stalled business of building the American Commonwealth of Nations. Talking to interviewer Gary Wills, who would write an insightful book about his struggles to sustain the American dream, Nixon predicted that if he could get past the Vietnam imbroglio, the time was ripe and he was ready to lead the way:

Henry Kissinger was equally aware of the necessity of the US extricating itself from the quagmire in Southeast Asia. Hamilton Fish Armstong, the venerable editor of Foreign Affairs, informed Kissinger in 1972,

Such restrictions did not render the mission wrong; they did, however, point to the inherent difficulty of starting over after Vietnam and of obtaining a consensus to renew American power. Despite his statement to Wills, and try as he might with threats and promises, Nixon could not get unstuck from Vietnam even to save his presidency. But his comment captured a deeper yearning expressed in so much American rhetoric. Defeated expectations became Nixon's legacy but not his alone.Footnote ²⁰ Even the triumphant mood after the end of the Cold War barely concealed the damage Vietnam did to America's self-image and the struggle for complete redemption. Herein lay proof of the fundamental risk of invoking the mistakes of Vietnam to overcome doubts about a new war.Footnote ²¹ Presidents still make decisions that encourage belief in one sort of change or renewal, and when they lead to frustration, instead of going back to the decisions themselves, policymakers put the onus on the media, or Congress, or the electorate for a failure to persevere. When this happens, we are back to being told that we have to stay the course. By the time of the second Gulf war, and especially when Bush's announcement of “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq started to look decidedly premature, Rostow's mantra of staying the course remained crucially important to policymakers seeking to justify their actions. “I'm going to keep repeating this over and over again,” then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told a press conference as an Israeli invasion of Lebanon appeared imminent. “I believe we're in an ideological struggle.” “What we're seeing here, in a sense, is the growing – the birth pangs of a new Middle East. And whatever we do, we have to be certain that we are pushing forward to the new Middle East, not going back to the old one.”Footnote ²²

Rumsfeld's reading of all of this manifested itself in two ways. First, he fundamentally believed that victory was the only acceptable endpoint in Afghanistan, Iraq and the wider War on Terror. He remained devoutly committed to the necessity of an American victory in Iraq, and permitted no doubts to infect his briefings or sneak into his speeches. As he explained in a two-page report to President Bush on “Progress in Iraq” in 2005, “The central question is whether the U.S. will be safer by succeeding in Iraq or by precipitously withdrawing. The answer is clear. Quitting is not an exit strategy. Victory is the only acceptable exit strategy.”Footnote ²³ Second, and just as important, Rumsfeld held that a realistic sense of the struggle ahead, with an inevitable endpoint of American victory, needed to characterize the administration's portrayal of this new global struggle. Rumsfeld's perception that any sustained military commitment would require the creation of a broader narrative of inevitable success harked back to Rostow and Kissinger in the 1960s and 1970s.

As early as 1966, Rumsfeld chastised the Johnson administration for failing to convey an accurate picture of events in Vietnam to the nation. “In short,” he told Congress in April of that year, “the administration has not been candid with the American people” and “failed to communicate to the American people the nature of the pressures we face, and thereby sacrificed, at least in part, their confidence, understanding, and support.”Footnote ²⁴ Writing in his memoirs about the fallout over Vietnam, Rumsfeld pinpoints the chronic drop in public support as eroding any hope for a successful outcome. “Even in the final days of the war,” he explains,

The outcome of this, he continued, was that Vietnam “became a symbol of American weakness – a weakness our adversaries would highlight for years – and an invitation to further aggression.”Footnote ²⁵

Any future military involvement, it therefore follows, would need to address this fundamental point of weakness. This conclusion was evident in 1983, as Ronald Reagan dispatched US forces to the Lebanon. Rumsfeld wrote a memorandum for then-Secretary of State George Shultz, outlining a series of similarities between current US policy in the Middle East and what had previously happened in Vietnam. Among these was a direct echo of Kissinger's assessment of retaining public support. “The level of U.S. commitment hoped for by the GOL [Government of Lebanon] is somewhat beyond what, at least at present, the American people and Congress may be ready to support on a sustained basis,” he noted;

Sixteen years later, Rumsfeld made almost the same point regarding US and NATO operations in Kosovo. Any decision to insert US and NATO ground troops, he informed advisers of the then-governor of Texas George W. Bush, would require “broad public support.” Without this, he went on, the mission would be liable to fail. “The administration said several years ago that U.S. troops would be out of Bosnia in 6 to 12 months. They are still there, all these years later. We need to be honest. Arguments of convenience put forth to pacify the public ultimately damage credibility.”Footnote ²⁷

When he became secretary of defense for the second time in 2001, then, Rumsfeld was already imbued with a clear sense of how any future “long war” should be presented. And it is here, once the tragic events of 9/11 took place, that the image of Korea began to come to the fore. Prior to 9/11, Rumsfeld's role in rallying support for US policies had taken the form of reassuring America's allies. Yet even here there were unmistakable signs of how he would seek to construct an unequivocal view of US policy based on the notion of eventual and achievable success. In June 2001, he introduced a NATO council meeting to the trope that soon became his Discovery Channel view of earth from outer space. “If we were to look down from Mars on Earth, we would see that most of a large number of the like-thinking nations on the face of the earth are in Europe and America.”Footnote ²⁸ A few weeks later, in Australia, he repeated the view that a viewer from Mars could only see “a few handfuls of countries that believe in free economic and free political principles.” An impartial observer on Mars would be able to pick out the divisions of the globe into areas of light and those of near darkness.Footnote ²⁹ In Moscow shortly afterwards, Rumsfeld tried to explain why the United States opposed renewing the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty – because the threat to the “Free World” was no longer a massive attack from Russia but from almost anywhere outside that group of nations who wanted only to mind their own businesses.

After 9/11, Rumsfeld's public role became one of coalition building for the new “long war.”Footnote ³¹ Again, one of the central themes was the view from space and what it could tell any observer about the ultimate state of the world in this new era. Rumsfeld even used the logic of a global perspective to defend President Bush's decision to hold military tribunals to deal with accused terrorists. Before 9/11, interviewer Tim Russert asked him at one point, the United States criticized such tribunals in Peru, Egypt and China. How would Rumsfeld feel if an American were tried in a Chinese military tribunal? “If one looked down from Mars,” came the now unsurprising response, “and looked at the countries of the world … where would you prefer … that that individual be tried in a military commission[?]” “I would think an overwhelming number of the people in the world would prefer it be done in the United States. We have a reputation for being fair and balanced and measured in what we do.”Footnote ³²

Central to these efforts was the notion that it was crucial to provide an accurate portrayal of what the new war would look like. Just a few weeks after 9/11, Rumsfeld jotted down a number of suggestions for a possible speech that outlined the nature of this new conflict. It would not be about “D-Day or an invasion of Normandy beaches; Saving Private Ryan or long battles in trenches; [or] great naval or air battles.” Instead, it would be about stopping terrorist supplies of money, “freezing out guerrillas occupying the land of others”, and “weakening terrorists terrorizing those in countries they operate in.” In short, it would be arduous, difficult and murky; it would involve a new type of conflict in areas not typically open to US involvement; and, it would require “patience”, “time, as did the Cold War,” and “determination.”Footnote ³³ Similarly, in October 2002, a memo generated within Rumsfeld's office outlined a series of points that the administration had undertaken successfully since 9/11. Informing Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Torie Clark and Larry Di Rita that they may want to use them “in briefings,” the report hailed the fact that the administration had conveyed that the “war will take a long time” and that they had managed to “keep expectation low from day one” and to “under promise and over deliver.”Footnote ³⁴

As the parameters of the emerging US response to 9/11 began to take shape, Rumsfeld's depiction of how the world looked from outer space took on a new form. Bush's naming of North Korea as the third member of the Axis of Evil in 2003 offered an opportunity to reshape this view and drum up support for America's global mission. Divided Korea, where the US had fought against communism in the early 1950s, provided an essential lesson for all to see and understand the consequences that those nations who remained in darkness posed to the enlightened nations. In the north, a failed state had nevertheless developed an atomic weapon and aided others outside the peninsula in similar endeavours. Below the 38th parallel, meanwhile, a powerful economic state had arisen as a testament to the long-term power of the American model. Yet there nevertheless remained an American garrison of nearly thirty thousand American troops to “protect” Seoul from a new invasion from the north. If war should come again to the peninsula, a Republic of Korea–American agreement stipulates that the ROK army will take its orders from the US commander. While South Korea is a great success story, therefore, the situation remains dangerous, dependent upon American military credibility. Korea thus provided Rumsfeld with the case study upon which to hone a new narrative of the necessity of America succeeding in its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and of avoiding a Vietnam-like collapse in public and international support.

Using the aforementioned keyhole satellite picture of Korea at night, Rumsfeld began a sustained effort to draw parallels between the Korean peninsula and the War on Terror. North Korea, with its single pinpoint of light at Pyongyang, helped to explain, Rumsfeld argued, why it was taking so long to find the missing weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) Saddam Hussein must have hidden somewhere away from American ground intelligence. What you could not see from space could only be discovered or finally dismissed by military force on the ground. As Rumsfeld stated at a news conference in December 2002,

Rumsfeld also took his satellite photo with him as a perfect argument-clincher when he testified to Congress in 2004 about why the Iraqi WMDs had not been discovered. The challenge facing the intelligence community, he said, “is truly difficult.” Their task was to penetrate closed societies, he said – waving to an aide to put that picture up for the committee members to see – and learn things our adversaries do not want them to know. Then, pointing to the picture,

This image, Rumsfeld argued, provided an illustration of why America had to persevere and what the outcome could ultimately be. “What a difference between freedom and oppression, in one [part of Korea],” he stated in 2003. “The light of liberty outshines everything and in the other the darkness of the dictatorship is so obvious even from so many miles in outer space.” There was no escaping the scientific evidence from the increasingly famous photo that he now kept under the clear mat on his desk. “That is what makes possible the ability of people to be free and to go about their lives improving their circumstances. It's a dramatic photograph. Our task, obviously, is to see that that success continues.”Footnote ³⁷ For Rumsfeld, the patent success of South Korea, especially in contrast to the North, stood as a symbol of what could be achieved in the post-9/11 era if international and domestic support remained strong. On a visit to Seoul, at the top of a skyscraper in the South Korean capital, Rumsfeld invoked similar imagery after a Korean journalist asked him why Koreans should send their sons to fight in Iraq. Americans sent their sons to die in Korea fifty years earlier, Rumsfeld replied, and may well have asked themselves the same thing. And yet, gesturing out of the window “at the lively, free and prosperous city,” it all seemed worthwhile; “there's your answer,” he concluded.Footnote ³⁸

Consequently, Rumsfeld began handing out copies of the photo to visitors in order to guide their thoughts after they left his office and amplify the lesson. Rumsfeld's argument leaned toward the view that one could ignore political history – mistakes included – for technology that told one all there was to know about the world, and where it was going. Everything was going to be okay, he averred, just look at Korea. These rhetorical twists helped to portray an international order where the inevitability of American success was assured despite ongoing problems in existing theatres of war.

The photo thus served as a useful analogy for the War on Terror: a symbol of a difficult struggle, a depiction that the world could be divided into “lightness” and “darkness”, and a portent of inevitable success. Moreover, it seemed to directly address the problem of support for US policy that had been discerned from the aftermath of Vietnam. Its utility only seemed to be reaffirmed as the War on Terror continued and as the hoped-for triumphs in Afghanistan and Iraq remained frustratingly out of reach. Fighting a twenty-first-century war, Rumsfeld informed President Bush in 2005, was hugely “complex and difficult,” not least because of the vast array of information outlets that now charted the war's progress. “Understandably, in part because of these new realities, there is criticism from the press, the public, Congress, and foreign governments, with the attacks clustering around two themes ‘incompetence’ and ‘cover-up’.” But though problematic in some ways, this wide-ranging coverage also offered opportunities to mobilize support in a way that had not been evident in the 1960s:

Part of this, Rumsfeld concluded, lay in educating the public about how the current struggle could be viewed as part of a wider historical sweep. Accordingly, the US should “improve public education so that historical context is available and is considered in weighing and judging the actions of today, not in isolation or measured against perfection, but rather as seen against events of a similar nature in earlier times.”Footnote ³⁹

The photo offered such an educational opportunity. During a town-hall meeting in Kyrgyzstan in 2006, Rumsfeld returned to the Korean Peninsula as seen by satellite, and his encounter with the “young woman” who had not been alive during the Korean War to demonstrate the superiority of a free-market economy, and alliance with the United States. Finally, Rumsfeld found someone who had not yet seen the photo, a reporter from the London Daily Mail. In the wake of a North Korean nuclear test, he “unveiled” a spectacular photo, wrote the reporter, which showed in “stark detail the haves and have-nots of the Korean peninsula.” The regime was so short of power that electricity was turned off every night at 9.30 – apart from Pyongyang, where Kim Jong-il and his cohorts lived. “Except for my wife and family, that is my favorite photo,” Rumsfeld remarked. “It says it all.”Footnote ⁴⁰

Rumsfeld's message, however, contained an inherent problem – simply that no matter how just or appropriate the cause is deemed to be, the inevitable costs of war will, over time, lead to an erosion of domestic and international support. No narrative of eventual success, no matter how catchy, can stem this tide once the financial and human costs of war become fully apparent. After the 2006 mid-term election it was hard to ignore the electorate's verdict that Iraq, at some level, had already become a second Vietnam. Rumsfeld, suddenly, was the scapegoat for a collapse in public confidence, the limitations of his public-relations strategy manifestly clear as the notion of gradual progress became unsatisfactory. In the Weekly Standard, Robert Kagan and William Kristol, in an indication of how far the mood had changed, hailed Bush for his determination to reject Rumsfeld's model and pursue more aggressive policies.

Bush sacrificed Rumsfeld, who, ironically given his views on the matter, paid the price for a lack of rapid-enough progress. Rumsfeld had, to a certain extent, been right about the necessity of positing a narrative of post-9/11 foreign policy that foresaw success but that also suggested that this would both be difficult and take time to achieve. Yet its limitations had been exposed by the erosion of support for Bush's wars once progress was deemed to be too slow by an anxious electorate. As “Mission Accomplished” became “Mission Impossible,” a new Vietnam in another ancient land, the gradual progress of the Korean narrative became inappropriate for the Bush White House.

Despite their heralding of Bush's position, Kristol and Kagan were wrong in their assessment that post-Rumsfeld policy would result in a renewed assault for victory. On the contrary, there was a sharp change in tone after the mid-term verdict and Rumsfeld's replacement at the Pentagon. After consultations inside the government and with outside counselors there emerged a plan for sending twenty-thousand additional troops, most to Baghdad, under the command of General David Petraeus. Crucially, however, this did not mark an attempt to achieve ultimate victory in a way Rumsfeld would have approved of; rather, it marked a sustained attempt to forge a strategy and create a narrative that paved the way for an acceptable way out. Domestic pressures had come to bear.

This “surge,” as it was immediately known, had not yet achieved great results when Bush addressed the 2007 Veterans of Foreign Wars Convention where he reframed Rumsfeld's message. His central theme was a mistake made not on the battlefields of Vietnam, but in the minds of Americans, fostered by a British novel, Graham Greene's The Quiet American, published sixty years earlier. Bush undertook to use The Quiet American to counterattack sceptics and critics who challenged faith in the American mission. At key moments since World War II, Bush began, critics and doubters had dismissed American policy in Asia as “hopeless and naïve.” These feelings had surfaced most dramatically during the Vietnam War, leading to tragedy for the Vietnamese people when Saigon fell to the Communists. “In 1955, long before the United States entered the war,” he continued,

As American involvement deepened with no resolution in sight, Bush went on, “the Graham Greene argument gathered some steam.” War critics insisted there would be no consequences for the Vietnamese if we pulled out. They were wrong. “Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left.” But the price of America's withdrawal could not be ignored. It “was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people,’ ‘re-education camps,’ and ‘killing fields.’” We lost in Vietnam, Bush argued, because the nation failed to persevere when the going got tough. Therefore Vietnam was not really an exception to exceptionalism and the heroic narrative of American successes in bringing democracy to Asia, but rather served as a missed opportunity to achieve substantial good.Footnote ⁴² However many in his immediate audience had ever read Greene's novel, or had seen either movie version of the book with their very different portrayals of the American mission, Bush or his speechwriters apparently thought refuting Greene offered an opportunity to reassert his leadership. Given the increasing level of American investment in Vietnam today and the dominance of English as that country's second language, a cynic might argue that failing to persevere turned out pretty well. But whatever spin could be put on Greene's novel, Bush's stark revision of the Rumsfeldian message within the context of Vietnam initiated a rhetorical shift and ensured that that nation would remain today, to both supporters and opponents of the US presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, as raw material from which to fashion a usable past. Gradual progress and inevitable success – as depicted in the photograph of Korea – had given way to a more visceral demand that America stay the course.

The ultimate irony of the post-9/11 era in US foreign policy, perhaps, is that the lesson of Vietnam invoked by Rumsfeld in his attempts to shape a narrative to depict the War on Terror has, despite its apparent limitations and the counter-rhetoric of change brought forth by Obama, endured for ten years and shown little sign of abating. In fact, claims that America is in decline – like they did in the 1970s – have raised the stakes for US strategists.Footnote ⁴³ Notions of progress in foreign affairs are now as important as ever in ensuring that the nation stays the course overseas and that America's moral force is not depleted. On 11 November 2010, President Obama travelled to South Korea where he hailed the achievements of American soldiers on Veterans Day. North Korea knows the path to prosperity, he said, and should take it. Because the Korean War ended where it began geographically, he went on, some used the phrase “die for a tie” to describe the sacrifice of those who fought there. “This was no tie. This was a victory.” North Korea was the loser that still would rather see its people starve than change. “It's a contrast that's so stark you can see it from space, as the brilliant lights of Seoul give way to utter darkness in the North.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Just a few weeks later, at a dinner for the Richard Nixon foundation, Rumsfeld reaffirmed his faith in this model and hailed the inevitability of American success:

And yet this shared belief in the image of perpetual progress is only part of the story. For Donald Rumsfeld, the image of Korea offered an opportunity to educate the wider world in the notion that America, ultimately, would succeed in its struggle against global terror. From retirement, in a speech when his portrait in the Department of Defense was unveiled, Rumsfeld could not resist repeating this belief. America was the greatest republic ever established, he said, and with the finest military ever, and the brightest symbol of humankind's hopes and aspirations. “And that, I would add, is not something for which we need to apologize to anyone – here or abroad.” America would remain that beacon for the world unless it retreated from the front line, unless it adopted the restrictive policies and made the “truly tragic mistake of modeling our country after systems that are obviously unsuccessful.” The comparison he was reaching for was in the photo. “The night satellite image of the Korean Peninsula, my favorite as many of you know well, captured many miles above the earth, tells the whole story.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Like Walt Rostow, Rumsfeld has held true to the notion that American victory was not only possible but necessary. The line can – and should – be held; victory will be secured.

For the Democrats at present, however, the situation is more complex. Obama and his advisers share their predecessor's desire to see progress as being at hand, but they cannot frame this in the same way as did Rumsfeld. It is not progress toward victory, but rather progress toward ending the war. In the spring of 2010, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told reporters that a planned new Kandahar “operation,” in Afghanistan, renamed “Cooperation for Kandahar,” would focus on efforts to engage the local population, and would not involve house-to-house fighting. “This is not Fallujah,” she said, referring to the bitter fighting and destruction of that Iraqi city. “Lessons have been learned since Iraq. A lot of lessons.” There will be no “tanks rolling into the city”; adding, in a now somewhat obscure reference to the Tet fighting and the aftermath in Vietnam, that care will be taken that the effort “doesn't destroy Kandahar in the effort to save Kandahar.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Clinton's remarks bring us full circle, in the sense that American policymakers always prefer to talk about the “lessons” of the past as specific, fixable problems to be overcome in the present. It is a view of history, as suggested earlier, as a locksmith's toolbox, where the right lesson can be found to turn the key to the future. Even so, there is not a clear picture of the future. It is defined only as “progress,” with an infinite variety of qualifiers. The President finds it is fragile, and not entirely satisfactory; Secretary of State Clinton finds we are making progress “in our core goal”; Secretary of Defense Gates finds it palpable on the ground every time he visits Afghanistan. During a 16 December 2010 briefing after President Obama released an unclassified version of the year-end review of the surge he mandated, Clinton, Gates, General James Cartwright, and White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs deployed the word “progress” twenty-two times to ward off sceptics.Footnote ⁴⁸

The necessity of identifying progress for US officials has only increased as the commentariat, motivated by the impact of the financial crash, have mused on the concept of American decline. As they do so, the need to cite progress as being at hand has become more urgent. As David Stockman, a former director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Reagan, phrased it in late 2010, “We are now at the … sundown as an imperialist power. And we can't have credit card imperialism. We can't be the policemen of the world anymore because we can't afford it.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Likewise, Niall Ferguson, in an article in Foreign Affairs, has suggested that what happened to the Soviet Union twenty years ago in Afghanistan demonstrates that empires do not have a predictable life cycle as historians like to claim: “Rather, empires behave like all complex adaptive systems. They function in apparent equilibrium for some unknowable period. And then, quite abruptly, they collapse.”Footnote ⁵⁰

The US dare not fail in a helicopters-taking-off-from-the-embassy-roof-in-Kabul kind of way, then, as this might lead to irrevocable decline. Accordingly, Obama has inherited from Rumsfeld the necessity of progress but not the rhetorical freedom it afforded, for a time, the former defense secretary. Rumsfeld saw progress and the inevitability of success, as depicted by the image of Korea, as being a way to ensure perpetual support; for him, results could be sketchy – or delayed – as victory would be at hand at some point. For Rumsfeld, this was a central lesson of Vietnam. Obama, by contrast, has to cite progress as being indicative of the way out. In his 2011 State of the Union, Obama conveyed a message of progress leading to withdrawal, arguing that in Iraq lay the seeds of Afghanistan's inevitable success. “Look to Iraq,” he urged,

Moreover, if this could happen in Iraq, then surely it could also happen in Afghanistan. In June 2011, Obama suggested in a major speech that progress toward withdrawal was now apparent there as well; the death of Osama bin Laden, coupled with continued progress on the ground, meant that the end was in sight and 33,000 American troops would be withdrawn from Afghanistan by the summer of 2012:

Obama's message, as Dexter Filkins noted in the New Yorker, “was clinical: Osama bin Laden is dead, Al Qaeda is disabled, and American troops can begin coming home.”Footnote ⁵³

Rumsfeld's expansion of the satellite picture of the Korean Peninsula into a field theory of international relations after 9/11, therefore, is a good example of how we got where we are today and illustrates the stark shift that has occurred in US rhetoric in the last decade. Gradual progress leading to ultimate success has been replaced by gradual progress leading to withdrawal. The common factor between them, though, is that progress, however it is defined, provides the legitimacy to endure. If progress can be identified then the line can be held. Once again, history becomes subservient in this view of the world, and the only choice must be to double-down, or rather double-time down the road of “progress” to the very end. The January–February 2011 issue of Foreign Affairs carried an advertisement for a new report by its Independent Task Force, “U.S. Strategy for Pakistan and Afghanistan,” which concludes with a warning that if the present strategy is not working, “a shift to a more limited mission would be warranted.” The quotation it takes from the report, however, sums up the abiding contradiction as Orwell or even Gilbert and Sullivan might describe it: “The United States cannot afford to continue down this costly path unless the potential for enduring progress remains in sight.”Footnote ⁵⁴