How America Is Squandering Its Wealth and Power

Andrew Bacevich is no fan of George W. Bush. The conservative historian and former military officer lost a son fighting in Iraq and has publicly called the administration’s foreign policy record one of “substantial, if almost malignant, achievement.”

Yet in his new book The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, he argues that the country’s foreign policy is a direct result of the American way of life. The only way of changing that policy, he contends, is changing the way Americans live.

In 1995, Bacevich wrote presciently that “to cope with a world in which terrorists and warlords pose as great a challenge as massed armies, a radical revision of military thinking is essential,” arguing that the lessons of Vietnam had largely been forgotten. With those lessons still forgotten, he now says, the country’s problems are of its own making. Bacevich, a professor of international relations at Boston University, recently spoke with U.S. News. Excerpts:

Where do you think American foreign policy has gone wrong?
Most important is to see the connection between the American way of life and the foreign policy that our government conducts. There are some critics of American foreign policy, Noam Chomsky, for instance, who portray U.S. foreign policy as a great conspiracy where certain elites pull the wool over the eyes of the people to benefit themselves and their cronies. I’ve come to believe that U.S. foreign policy is broadly conceived to reflect the will of the American people.

Yet the majority of people don’t now support continuing the war in Iraq.
Not that the majority of Americans thought that invading Iraq was a good idea either, but that they were satisfied and wanted to protect the American way of life, which requires access to massive amounts of oil.

Tacitly, at least, the American people are complicit and responsible for the policies made in Washington. It is one thing to sit on our couches and disagree with policy, but nothing is going to change unless we are willing to make substantive changes in the way that we live our lives.

Is there any chance that such a revolution in thinking is in the offing?
I doubt that there will be any change.

In the aftermath of 9/11, there may have been a moment for a president to turn to the American people and say, “In order to make sure this doesn’t happen again, we have to change the way we conduct our affairs.” Instead, the president made very clear the fact that we would not change. Instead, we were told to keep shopping and go to Disney World.

Now we’re seven years into a war that our country supposedly supports and yet we are running out of soldiers. Why is that? The nation refuses to correct our domestic dysfunction on energy, consumption, entitlements, and endless credit. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said something like, “We need to change the way we live, which is unacceptable, or we can change the way they live.” That reflects a very familiar strand of thought in American foreign policy back to the Native Americans, which says that “they” will always have to change to accommodate our way of living.

But our efforts to remake the world in our image now are making us poorer. We are squandering our wealth. We’re not becoming more powerful. We’re squandering our power, particularly our military power, on which we’ve placed so much emphasis.

Is our military power exaggerated?
The end of the Cold War and the first Persian Gulf War both bred in Americans a bipartisan infatuation with military power. But nobody captured that better than [then Secretary of State] Madeleine Albright’s famous question to Colin Powell about the value of bragging about having a great army if you’re never going use it.

By the 199os, we came to believe that military power was the most effective instrument for bringing about change in the world. Conservatives and liberals differed on the priorities for that military power and what kind of change needed to be brought about, but there was a united understanding of the effectiveness of high-tech military power. But this perception tended to minimize what had been the historical experience of war, in which the resort to arms time and time again produces unintended consequences.

Are you wary of new declarations of victory in Iraq?
We must also ask what we’ve actually won. In the first place, we’ve lost over 4,000 American lives and thousands of others injured. We’ve spent $800 billion and yet have done next to nothing to advance the cause of changing the Middle East, which was the reason for the war in the first place.

One of those 4,000 soldiers killed in Iraq was your own son in May 2007. How has that changed your thinking?
I chose not to talk about my son because it’s very personal, private, and painful. But I don’t think his death had any impact, besides redoubling my desire to tell things as I see them.

Is it possible to realize the limits of power without overreaching?
Every great power has an exaggerated sense of itself. It’s only when you meet failure that introspection is possible. We bumped into failure in Vietnam, which was the beginning of this paradigm shift. Despite its incredible near-term impact on the country, what strikes me now in 2008 is how short-lived the lessons of Vietnam were, how quickly they were swept aside.

Jimmy Carter suggested, in the face of a growing Islamic threat, that we should change our ways. He was swept out of office by a man who said that our greatest days were ahead and that we could reshape the world. I argue that that is an illusion, another example of rendering history into myth. I argue that Reagan’s policies actually accelerated the crisis of profligacy that we are dealing with today.