I am almost finished reading a book by Andrew J Bacevich (a professor of international relations at Boston University), The Limits of Power – being near the end of it, I think I can now safely recommend it. In it, Bacevich expresses some profound and sweeping concerns with the way foreign policy is now conducted in the United States. Though the Bush (43) Administration’s policies of hard power projection, an open state of global war and preemptive military action are the central target of the book’s criticism, Bacevich is careful to place the policy in its appropriate political and historical context. The mindset informing an alarmist view of threats to American security abroad, the author traces back to Truman’s Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal and to Paul Nitze, who drastically exaggerated the military capacity of the Soviet Union (as a ‘permanent and continuous threat’) in order to create a country on a permanent war budget; this mindset he links to a notion of American exceptionalism which characterises the United States as the primary symbol of democracy, capitalism and liberal values in a benighted world. Further, he notes prophetically that this power projection abroad corresponds to a growing domestic attitude of consumeristic entitlement and profligacy, satiable only by a growing, unsustainable dependence on cheap foreign credit and cheap foreign petroleum. As a nation, he shouts from the wilderness, we are on a self-contradictory – even self-destructive – course.
For a 200-page book, Bacevich is tackling a lot. The book reads like a searing, if scattershot, broadside against American foreign policy going back at least to Reagan if not to Truman (Reverend Robert Hill of Marsh Chapel – the venue in which Bacevich has been discussing his book over the past two weeks – gave the book the apt epithet of ‘jeremiad’). He is questioning many of the basic presuppositions that Americans (whether or not they hold public office, and regardless of their party affiliation) tend to hold nowadays about their country that might have sounded ridiculous a few short decades ago. He questions the authority and importance which is now vested in an ‘imperial presidency’ at the expense of an increasingly narcissistic and emasculated legislature. He questions the way in which military force is now casually touted as an ‘option on the table’ in dealing with uncooperative regimes. He questions the ‘ideology of national security’ which perpetuates an all-around dysfunctional relationship between the government’s elected leaders, their advisers, civilian agencies and the military. He questions the strategic competence of the generalship which botched the Iraqi and Afghan adventures (for which the goals were surgical action meant to produce quick returns and from which exit was supposed to be easy). He questions the utility and accountability of ‘all-volunteer’ armed forces. Most of all, he questions an American body politic which contents itself with a self-defeating state of perpetual war and hard power projection abroad, from which they derive material consumer benefits without being called to make any material or moral sacrifice whatsoever, noting that Bush 43 in particular lowered taxes and encouraged consumer spending even as two simultaneous open-ended wars of choice were being waged!
Startlingly, he does all of this in the short space he has allotted himself, while still managing to acquit himself admirably in terms of deliberate research, analysis and reasoning. Each of Bacevich’s criticisms, sundry though they are as a lot, is made more forceful by the careful, coherent historical narrative in which he places them. He groups his criticisms into three broad strokes, giving us a sketch of a ‘crisis of profligacy’, a ‘political crisis’ and a ‘military crisis’, but he takes care to provide the reader with the historical background necessary to understand the breadth and shape of each. It is not so much a detailed representation that emerges so much as an impressionist painting, but it is still clear enough to allow the reader to appreciate the scope of the crises being presented.
But this author is no idealistic left-winger. He’s a former military man, a hard-nosed Niebuhrite (he quotes Reinhold Niebuhr a great deal in this book), a conservative in his approach to fiscal matters and at times startlingly palaeo-conservative in his pessimistic attitude toward the capacities of government in general. As such, there are certainly economic policy points on which we doubtless would disagree – he takes the attitude in the book that all debt is bad debt, whereas I would argue that certain domestic social goods are well-worth going into debt over (like health-care and education, provided they are of benefit to the entire society and can theoretically pay themselves back). As a committed pacifist, also, I have some very strong reservations about Niebuhr’s theology, but Bacevich’s Niebuhr-inspired call for modesty and realism in foreign policy is one with which I can very readily sympathise at this point in history. Ours is a society which has been – in an ironic, Hegelian-style self-negation – simultaneously insulated from global affairs and made comfortable with its government’s role of global constable and informal imperial hegemon; this development should be as troubling (if not more!) to serious Christian pacifists in America as it clearly is to conservative realists like Andrew Bacevich.
Though Bacevich is concerned primarily with the exaggeration of the utility of hard power by idealists of a more interventionist bent, he does try to take after Niebuhr in some areas by warning people off of idealism in general. In his view, it is a dangerous road one starts down once one considers his own motives and the motives of the society that produced him to be benign and altruistic; he sees this as a key component in the ideological exceptionalism to which he takes exception. In a way, we pacifists can be as guilty of this kind of exceptionalism as many of our fellow countrymen can, though it isn’t as much of an issue for us since we have for a long time been relegated to the margins of the foreign-policy discussion. We sympathise with an idealised self-image Bacevich begins to imply (as Niebuhr had done before him) is unhealthy and emasculating.
Niebuhr had his problems; one of which being a perennial straw-man argument against non-violence. In his rebuke of non-violence as a popular political strategy, he failed to provide a satisfactory answer to the success of Gandhi against the government of colonial India, and his insistence that non-violence only works inside a framework within which liberal and democratic values are shared and respected is, sadly for his own argument, speculative at best. (Non-violent methods and civil resistance did work against the Nazis, for example, to the very limited extent that they were actually put into practice – for example by Wallenberg, Schindler, the Trocmes and the Bulgarian and Danish governments.) However, his point should be very well-taken that pacifists ought to take a far more serious and critical approach to problems of human evil, and pay closer attention to how easily the best of human intentions can stagnate or be corrupted, without a hard-nosed and pragmatic strategy behind them.
In that sense, Bacevich’s work, which draws so heavily upon a Niebuhrite theology, does have some useful correctives to offer. In my opinion, it is well worth a careful reading and a thoughtful discussion.
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