Editing and excerpting by Carolyn Bennett from Andrew J. Bacevich’s The Limits of Power: the End of American Exceptionalism.
The passing of the Cold War yielded no “‘peace dividend’. Nor anything remotely resembling peace,” Bacevich begins The Limits of Power. When the East-West standoff called by some the ‘Long Peace’ ended in 1991, the United States had already embarked on a decade of unprecedented interventionism.
In the years that followed, “Americans became inured to reports of U.S. forces going into action — fighting in Panama and the Persian Gulf, occupying Bosnia and Haiti, lambasting Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Sudan from the air.” All of these turned out to be but an overture. In 2001 came the main event, open-ended global war on terror — known in some quarters as the ‘Long War.’
The price of the long war is high indeed.
“The United States today finds itself threatened by three interlocking crises, Andrew Bacevich writes. The crises are “economic and cultural, political, and military.” All share a critical characteristic: “they are of our own making.”
We embrace an unexamined notion of freedom as consumption, which threatens society, individuals, and our posterity. Entrenched powers insist on our dependency as freedom — as nine-eleven shoppers. Heinous acts are committed in the name of it and entrenched powers reap great dividends from the people’s perpetual dependence.
Freedom as dependence, exceptionalism
“For the United States the pursuit of freedom, as defined in an age of consumerism,” Bacevich writes, “has induced a condition of dependence—on imported goods, on imported oil, and on credit. The chief desire of the American people, whether they admit it or not, is that nothing should disrupt their access to those goods, that oil, and that credit. The chief aim of the U.S. government is to satisfy that desire, which it does in part through the distribution of largesse at home (with Congress taking a leading role) and in part through the pursuit of imperial ambitions abroad (largely the business of the executive branch).”
Meaningful action to reduce U.S. dependency is nonexistent—Why? Because “The centers of authority within [federal] Washington—above all, the White House and the upper echelons of the national security state—actually benefit from this dependency: It provides the source of status, power, and prerogatives.”
Imagine, for example, “the impact on the Pentagon were this country actually to achieve anything approaching energy independence. U.S. Central command would go out of business. Dozens of bases in and around the Middle East would close. The navy’s Fifth Fleet would stand down. Weapons contracts worth tens of billions would risk cancelation.”
Instead of “addressing the problem of dependence, members of our political class [are] hell-bent on exacerbating the problem,” says Bacevich. “Rather than acknowledging that American power is not limitless, they pursue policies that actually accelerate the depletion of that power—this most assuredly has been the case since 9/11.…
“In the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Washington’s resolve that nothing [should] interfere with the individual American’s pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness hardened. That resolve found expression in the Bush administration’s with-us-or-against-us rhetoric, in its disdain for the United Nations and traditional American allies, in its contempt for international law, and above all in its embrace of preventive war.”
Collaboration, containment strategies
After 9/11, President George W. Bush abandoned substantive collaborative and containment approaches.
“No president had ever told so many other governments what they ‘must’ do, with such unvarnished insistence. Bush obliged nations to choose: They could align themselves with the United States, or they would find themselves pitted against the world’s only superpower.…”
War after 9/11 became a seemingly permanent condition. “In the Pentagon, senior military officers spoke in terms of ‘generational war,’ lasting up to a century. Two weeks after 9/11, then-U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld instructed Americans to ‘forget about exit strategies [and look] at a sustained engagement [carrying] no deadlines.’…
“Hubris and sanctimony have become the paramount expression of American statecraft. After 9/11, they combined to produce the Bush administration’s war of no exits and no deadlines.
Instead of endless war or global war on terror, Bacevich recalls a better, tried-and-true alternative to perpetual war.
“A strategy that aims to contain violent extremists would likely be far more agreeable to American allies and could persuade them to shoulder a greater portion of the load. Reinventing containment, however, does not mean creating a new NATO or funding a new Marshall Plan. It means intensified surveillance of Islamist activity combined with sustained, multilateral police efforts to prevent terrorist attacks and to root out terrorist networks. It should deny [violent] Islamists the sanctuary and the wherewithal—especially financial wherewithal—necessary to pursue their agenda.
“Containment during the Cold War did not preclude selective engagement. Nor should it today.
“A strategy of containment should permit and even underwrite educational, cultural, and intellectual exchanges. It should provide opportunities for selected students from the Islamic world to study in the West; and it ought to include a public diplomacy component.”
Added to this, “Americans ought to give up the presumptuous notion that they are called upon to tutor Muslims in matters related to freedom and the proper relationship between politics and religion. The principle informing policy should be this: Let Islam be Islam. In the end, Muslims will have to discover for themselves the shortcomings of political Islam, much as Russians discovered the defects of Marxism-Leninism and Chinese came to appreciate the flaws of Maoism—…even as we ourselves will one day begin to recognize the snares embedded in American exceptionalism.”
The Citizen
Into the mix of progressive thought and action, overcoming an oppressively dangerous status quo, comes the citizen and citizenry “reeducation” and responsibility.
The belief that all (or even much) will be well, if only the right person assumes the presidency or commander in chief of the armed forces is merely to underwrite the status quo, Bacevich says. “Counting on the next president to fix whatever is broken promotes expectations of easy, no-cost cures, permitting ordinary citizens to absolve themselves of responsibility for the nation’s predicament…
“Rather than seeing the imperial presidency as part of the problem, [citizens] persist in the fantasy that a chief executive, given a clear mandate, will ‘change’ the way Washington works and restore the nation to good health. Yet to judge by presidents’ performances over the past half century, including both [John F.] Kennedy and [Ronald] Reagan (whose legacies are far more mixed than their supporters will acknowledge), a citizenry that looks to the White House for deliverance is assured of disappointment.”
Ultimately a nation must act out of its own and the world’s interests.
“Acknowledging the limits of American power is a precondition for stanching the losses of recent decades and for preserving the hard-won gains of earlier generations going back to the founding of the Republic… A nation satisfies its interests more easily when those interests are compatible with the interests of others.…
“A realistic appreciation of limits…creates opportunities to adjust policies and replenish resources—perhaps even to renew institutions. Constraints subject old truths to reconsideration, promote fresh thinking, and unleash creativity.”
Source and notes
Andrew J. Bacevich is Boston University professor of history and international relations.
The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (Bacevich, Andrew J), New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008, pages 1, 2, 6, 10, 171-177
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