NQ Must-Read – The Limits of Power

As the economy and our system of government seem to be crumbling, no one has really offered an explanation for how or why this has happened. Well, nearly anyone. In The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (American Empire Project), Andrew J. Bacevich offers an unflinching perspective on how we got here.

Bacevich starts the book with an epigraph from the Bible.

Set thine house in order.
-2 Kings, chapter 20, verse 1

More video below.

Bacevich divides his book into three parts: 1) The Crisis of Profligacy, 2) The Political Crisis and 3) The Military Crisis. Each crisis has the potential to be an existential one for the US, but more problematically, they are intertwined. Even worse, they are of our own making.

Of the Crisis of Profligacy, Bacevich contends that the word most emblematic of our national character now is more.

Others have described, dissected, and typically bemoaned the cultural – and even moral – implications of this development. Few, however, have considered how an American preoccupation with “more” has affected U.S. relations with rest of the world. Yet the foreign policy implications of our present-day penchant for consumption and self-indulgence are almost entirely negative. Over the past six decades, efforts to satisfy spiraling consumer demand have given birth to a condition of profound dependency. The United States may still remain the mightiest power the world has ever seen, but the fact is that Americans are no longer masters of their own fate.

The ethic of self-gratification threatens the well-being of the United States. It does so not because Americans have lost touch with some mythical Puritan habits of hard work and self-abnegation, but because it saddles us with costly commitments abroad that we are increasingly ill-equipped to sustain while confronting us with dangers to which we have no ready response. As the prerequisites of the American way of life have grown, they have outstripped the means available to satisfy them.

In the part titled the Political Crisis, Bacevich looks to how our government is functioning.

Since 1940, a succession of national security emergencies, real and imagined, have permitted the federal government to assume a vast array of new responsibilities at the expense of state and local authorities. [Along with this], the presidency has amassed greatly expanded prerogatives.

While he notes that critics of all presidents have decried the “imperial presidency,” it is posturing by members of a political class who are “serving, gaining access to, reporting on, second-guessin, or gossiping about the emperor-president (or about those aspiring to succeed him). . . And Congress having willingly ceded its authority to the executive branch is ineffective and incumbent bound.

No one today seriously believes that the actions of the legislative branch are informed by a collective determination to promote the common good. For this very reason, periodic congressional efforts to curb abuses of presidential power are mostly for show and mostly inspired by a desire to gain some partisan advantage.

The chief remaining function of Congress is to ensure the reelection of its members, best achieved by shameless gerrymandering, doling out prodigious amounts of political pork and seeing to the protection of certain vested interests.. . .The United States has become a de facto one-party state, with the legislative branch permanently controlled by an Incumbents’ Party.

Bacevich’s opinion of the national security state is nearly as contemptuous.

And so the national security state perdures. It does so not because its activities enhance the security of the American people, but because, by its very existence, it provides a continuing rationale for political arrangements that are a source of status, influence, and considerable wealth. Lapses in performance by this apparatus might logically raise questions about whether or not the United States would be better off without it. Instead, failures inspire new efforts to reorganize and reform, which almost invariably translate into further institutional expansion. The more the national security state screws up. the more sprawling it becomes. In the meantime, presidents occupy themselves cultivating ways to work around, ignore, or subvert those institutions.

As for the Military Crisis, Bacevich spares neither the military leadership nor the civilian leadership. Addressing the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Bacevich says three illusions about military power are at the heart of the crisis and have led to misuse of our armed forces: 1) The US reinvented, through dominance, armed conflict in the 80s and 90s; 2) U.S. civilian and military leadership have a common set of principles for deploying force; 3) The military / civilian fracture begun during the Vietnam years has healed. None of these are true.

Stemming from these illusions are false arguments about “lessons learned” from Iraq and Afghanistan such as: 1) whether better technology or more troops on the ground would have worked; 2) how and what kind of nation building activities the military should engage in; and/or 3) whether we should re-institute the draft because so many Americans are not engaged while a very small number are deployed time and again. Those arguments are not informative because they do not correctly address the real military problems in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The problems says Bacevich, are that: 1) regardless of military prowess or size, there are always (to paraphrase Rumsfeld) unknown unknowns, such as the lowly IED that managed to stymie both technology and strength in numbers. 2) The military is too blunt an instrument to achieve political ends such as democratization and is of questionable use in nation building. 3) “Preventive war” does not work and never did. 4) And lastly, the art of strategy and basic understanding is missing from both civilian and military upper leadership.

America doesn’t need a bigger army. It needs a smaller – that is, more modest – foreign policy, one that assigns soldiers missions that are consistent with their capabilities.

In his conclusion, the author considered the political climate of 2008 and the likely candidate for President (Obama).

Yet to imagine that installing a particular individual in the Oval Office will produce a decisive action on any . . . front is to succumb to the grandest delusion of all.. . The real aim [of elections in general] is to ensure continuity, to keep intact the institutions and arrangements that define present-day Washington. The veterans of past administrations who sign on as campaign advisers are not interested in curbing the bloated powers of the presidency. They want to share in exercising those powers.

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Paradoxically, the belief that all (or even much) will be well, if only the right person assumes the reins as president and commander in chief serves to underwrite the status quo. 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. The same Americans who profess to despise all that Washington represents look to – depending on partisan affiliation – a new John F. Kennedy or a new Ronald Reagan to set things right again.

Ultimately though, Bacevich suggests, we face the problems we do because of our collective inability to curb our appetites. As a result, we create a governing system that caters to keeping us happy, if not well.

For the United States the pursuit of freedom, as defined in an age of consumerism, 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).
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Whoever moves into the White House on January 20, 2009, the fundamental problem facing the country – a yawning disparity between what Americans expect and what they are willing or able to pay – will remain stubbornly in place.

Dedicated to his son, a first lieutenant (USA) who died in 2007, this book has all the speed and punch of someone who is profoundly angry about how our country has changed and the terrible costs of not keeping our house in order. Bacevich does not offer quick fixes, formulaic answers or policy statements but should be required reading for any discussion of civic responsibility.

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Below is further video from Bacevich’s interview with Bill Moyers last year. If you only have time for one part, go to part 5. However, the entire interview is well worth your time.

Pt2

pt3

pt4

pt5