Guns and Butter (Review in The Sydney Morning Herald)

Andrew J. Bacevich
The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism
Black Inc; $24.95; 206pp

One of a number of high-profile authors to have broached the issue of American power, military and otherwise, in the twenty-first century, Andrew J. Bacevich is not alone in calling for a fundamental rethink of how and with whom the US does business. But whereas Robert Kagan, say, is proposing a US-led alliance to combat the rise of authoritarian states, Bacevich clearly regards such a prescription as so much neoconservative hubris. For him, the US must recognise its limits. It must temper its appetites and revise its ambitions.

In The Limits of Power, Bacevich identifies three fundamental and interlocking crises. The first is the crisis of over-consumption, or, as he puts it, ‘the crisis of profligacy’. Essentially, his argument is that US ‘freedom’ has come to mean the freedom to consume. Since the economy runs on foreign oil, this has entrained a political crisis whereby an increasingly powerful ‘emperor-president’, relying on the advice of a circle of ‘wise men’, has led the US into an imperial war designed to secure Middle Eastern resources. However – and this is the third of the crises – the US military is not up to the job. Unwilling to chose between guns and butter, possessed of a notion of liberty denuded of its spiritual element, the average citizen is far too comfortable ever to think of getting his hands bloody. In short, the US is spoiling for a fight but its citizens refuse to fight for the spoils. This leads Bacevich to the following conclusion: what the US needs is not a larger military but a smaller foreign policy.

Bacevich writes with passion and clarity and much of what he says is incontestable. But it is when you get to the underlying assumptions that his argument begins to show signs of strain. Take the issue of profligacy. This is a well-worn conservative gripe, and no doubt there’s some truth to it. But the notion that US over-consumption is underwritten by a spiritual crisis is, in my view, pious twaddle. Freedom means the freedom to take freedom for granted. To deplore that fact is a short-cut to insanity. And while Bacevich is no Dinesh D’Souza, a puritanical misanthropy is evident. One of his heroes is Reinhold Niebuhr, a solemn Protestant theologian whom he does not flinch from calling a ‘prophet’. (Incidentally, to invoke the authority of Niebuhr is to tell the reader precious little. Niebuhr has many admirers in the US, few of whom seem to admire each other. Like George Orwell and the Hog’s Breath Café, everyone wants a stake in him.)

When it comes to the political crisis, Bacevich is at his most morally frivolous. Here he is on Paul Wolfowitz and his neoconservative acolytes:

In their eyes, Iraq only qualified as an interim objective, a mere way station in a vastly more ambitious enterprise. Baghdad was not Berlin in 1945; it was Warsaw circa 1939.

What is Bacevich saying here? To put it at its most benign, he is saying that the US invasion of Iraq was not an end point but a starting point. But I think he’s saying more than that. I think he’s implying that the neoconservatives bear a closer resemblance to the Nazis than to the Allies. You don’t need to know about the history of Ba’athism to regard this as a moral equivalence too far. Nor do you need to know that Wolfowitz is of Polish Jewish origin to regard it as a lapse of taste.

Our world is changing out of all recognition. The rise illiberal capitalism, the resurgence of Russian nationalism, the spectacular menace of Islamic fundamentalism: these factors make for an explosive mix. For all its serious misadventures, the US is still the best hope we have of building a more democratic world. I think Bacevich does his country a disservice when he characterises it as a ‘vast empire’ erected on a ‘grand bazaar’.