By David Gushee
I write to introduce you to a hugely important, deeply pessimistic book that ought to be read by every thoughtful Christian, including the one in the White House. The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, was published in 2008 by Andrew J. Bacevich, a professor of history and international relations at Boston University and retired United States Army colonel. It is the most important book on U.S. foreign policy in a long time.
Bacevich does not really begin with foreign policy. He starts his analysis with a probing dissection of a nation in deep internal decline — evident in our current economic disarray, but with roots that can be traced to a national lifestyle of abundance/excess that goes back to our origins. Writing before the Great Economic Collapse of 2008, Bacevich anticipates it, describing us as a nation living beyond our means and thereby gradually creating the deterioration of our own once-dominant economic position in the world.
A key example of our profligacy, according to Bacevich, has been found in our long-anticipated but never adequately addressed dependency on foreign oil. He offers kudos to Jimmy Carter for his prescient 1979 speech in which he warned the nation that we could not keep running through foreign oil in the way we were, in large part because of the impact on our relations with the Middle East. The author reminds us that the country laughed at Carter for this “malaise” speech and elected Ronald Reagan, whose popular but deeply irresponsible fiscal and foreign policies only intensified our deadly spiral, in which profligate consumption at home demanded a militarized, imperial foreign policy abroad.
The overall picture Bacevich paints is of a nation declining economically largely due to its own irresponsibility while attempting to shore up its position by imposing military force on unhappily occupied peoples all around the world in the name of “democracy” and “freedom.” To undertake this unprecedented imperial project, the executive branch has, since the Cold War, created for itself an almost unfettered imperial presidency in the name of a succession of supposed national security emergencies, and a feckless Congress has largely rolled over and abandoned its constitutional responsibilities. The military itself, according to Bacevich, has reached its numerical upper limit without a draft — which is unthinkable given the lack of real popular investment in, or even consent to, our constant war-fighting. (Americans just want to go shopping; we really don’t want to sacrifice our sons and daughters in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.)
Meanwhile, our all-volunteer force (that is, our all-paid military plus private, hired mercenaries), is profoundly overstretched and lacks top-level leaders of the needed caliber. Christian readers of this book will be especially struck by Bacevich’s ongoing dialogue with the writings of Christian ethicist Reinhold Niebuhr, whose insights percolate throughout. Niebuhr’s brutal realism about the way nations deceive themselves, claiming holy purpose for the crass exercise of self-interest, is both quoted and demonstrated in this book. Bacevich sees U.S. claims to be advancing democracy and freedom every time we order our military into action to be hopelessly self-deceptive and hypocritical, and notes that our claims fool few others beyond our shores. Bacevich is also taken by Niebuhr’s insights related to the dynamics of hubris, or national pride, and the moralizing sanctimony by which we blind ourselves to our own errors and wrongs. This quote from Niebuhr aptly captures the spirit of the book as a whole: “One of the most pathetic aspects of human history is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously … and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun.”
Reflecting especially on some of the quasi-messianic rhetoric of George W. Bush, Bacevich views America as living in a mythic world in which history has a clear purpose and direction (toward freedom and democracy); in which the United States is the exceptional virtuous nation used by Providence to advance history and remake the world; in which the United States has gained technological mastery over war; and in which — through repeated virtuous war-fighting — we can bend a billion Muslims, the Middle East and the world to our will. He sees these as illusory beliefs that have repeatedly demonstrated their disastrous consequences.
Bacevich is clear and scathing in pinning the blame for these problems not just on Bush or the Republicans, but on our leaders as a whole, and especially the national-security establishment and the foreign-policy “wise men” who have directed the course of our foreign affairs at least since the Cold War. He urges (and faintly hopes) that the American people take control of their government again and ratchet our foreign policy and its structures back to something more like what it all looked like before 1947.
But he seems mainly persuaded, in a tragic Niebuhrean sense, that we are heading for economic and foreign-policy collapse. Writing in early 2008, it appears, Bacevich was not persuaded that even the candidate promising “change we can believe in” could actually change these deep structural contradictions of American life.
Now Barack Obama is president. And so the questions must be directed to him: Do you agree that our nation is reaping the bitter fruit of its own domestic and foreign policy profligacy? Will you say this? Do you agree that far too much power has been concentrated in the office of the president? Will you voluntarily work to restore a constitutional balance? Do you agree that America has been living on myths and needs to get back in touch with reality when it comes to our role in the world and the efficacy of war? Do you agree that our military is overstretched and exhausted and needs a more limited and manageable role? Do you agree that we need to get back to genuine national defense and away from trying to project an imperial role in the world in the name of freedom and democracy? Do you agree that the national-security bureaucracy, besides being ineffective, has grown too big and unwieldy and needs to be pruned dramatically?
President Obama, you seek to be a transformational leader. Are you willing to be transformational enough to return us to a more modest foreign policy and a more restrained exercise of military power? Will you end this militarized American imperialism before it destroys us?
