The New American Militarism

"Packer and Robert Kagan have been very important intellectual voices post-9/11, and so has Bacevich. He is a West Point graduate and Vietnam veteran who spent a lot of his life in the military and who had a son who was killed in the Iraq war. Given the structure of American intellectual life, it is unusual to have a prominent figure writing about American foreign policy who has such deep ties to the American military and whose family has experienced the cost of war in such a personal way. His background makes Bacevich a singular voice. “Neoconservatives often take American exceptionalism to mean that we have a special mission and that the more we are freed from international constraints on our power, the more good we will do.” Like Packer and Kagan, Bacevich responded to 9/11 by trying to recover an intellectual tradition. Kagan was looking back to American history for the roots of the aggressive, what I would call neo-imperial, American foreign policy that dominated during the Bush era. Packer was looking for a democratising strain within a liberal perspective. I think Bacevich responded by recovering what you could call the anti-imperial or even neo-isolationist strain in American foreign policy, which suggests that our power and wisdom are really very limited and what makes American society so precious is endangered by the moral and economic costs of empire. So Bacevich draws from figures like William Appleman Williams, a very important historian starting in the 1950s, who argued that American empire was motivated by economic concerns. He draws from Charles Beard, who wrote even earlier about the way in which American economic interest led to American empire, which endangered American democracy at home. And also Bacevich writes a lot about Reinhold Niebuhr. Bacevich writes about Niebuhr from an anti-imperial or neo-isolationist perspective but liberal hawks and even neoconservatives also grappled with Niebuhr. Part of what he talks about is the way in which the American economy has become dependent on the American military. This old point about the military-industrial complex stretches back to President Eisenhower’s famous farewell address. But Bacevich also writes about the way in which we rely on American empire and American military power to do things like make sure we have a steady supply of cheap oil because we’re not willing to do things at home that would be required to wean us off oil. He also talks about the way in which elites are insulated from the costs of military action, since we have an all-volunteer military where most of the political elite don’t serve or have children who serve."