Facing problems with a sword

Andrew J. Bacevich’s “The New American Militarism” is a concise, sinewy book that looks at the emperor and concludes that indeed he has no clothes.

Bacevich makes the case calmly but with piercing clarity that during the latter half of the 20th century the United States slipped, almost imperceptibly, into a general state of belief that all its major challenges could be met, and all its largest problems solved, by going to war.

All the while the American leadership was protesting that our national goals -- and this is where the question of clothes comes in -- were in the name of spreading democracy or “freedom,” though they were actually the more mundane preoccupations of a great power, the maintaining or increasing of influence, specifically, for America, the securing of a reliable and plentiful supply of Middle Eastern oil.

Bacevich has an authoritative background. Currently professor of international relations and director of the Center for International Relations at Boston University, he is a graduate of West Point and a veteran of the Vietnam War.

He describes himself as a conservative Catholic who came to think about politics late, after having been baffled by the contradictions of his formative years in Vietnam. His judgments and his point of view are evenhanded and steady, and he lays the blame for the militarization of the country’s state of mind on conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats, alike. He pointedly says that the people he used to believe were directing human events, like presidents and their minions, in fact barely comprehend the larger processes that control the movement of history.

“The clamor after Vietnam to rebuild the American arsenal and to restore American self-confidence, the celebration of soldierly values, the search for ways to make force more usable: all these came about,” Bace- vich writes, “because groups of Americans thought they glimpsed in the realm of military affairs the solution to vexing problems.”

To each of these groups Bacevich devotes a chapter of analysis: the soldiers who sought to rehabilitate their profession; the intellectuals who feared that America might share the fate of Weimar (these became the neoconservatives of current dominance); the strategists wrestling with the consequences of nuclear weapons (starting with Bernard Brodie and continuing through Albert Wohlstetter); conservative Christians “appalled by the apparent collapse of traditional morality.”

Bacevich writes that “none of these acted out of motives that were inherently dishonorable. To the extent that we may find fault with the results of their efforts, that fault is more properly attributable to human fallibility than to malicious intent.”

And yet, he adds, “in the end it is not motive that matters but outcome.” And that, he says, is that several decades after Vietnam, “the American people have persuaded themselves that their best prospect for safety and salvation lies with the sword.” Bacevich likens the current state of the public mind, this “new American militarism,” to the environmental pollution that came about as a result of industrial progress: “the perhaps unintended, but foreseeable by-product of prior choices and decisions made without taking fully into account the full range of costs likely to be incurred.”

What is to be done? Bacevich lists 10 principles he hopes the country will again cling to: Heed the intentions of the Founders; revitalize the concept of the separation of powers; view force as the last resort; drastically reduce dependence on foreign oil; organize the armed forces for national defense, not power projection; spend less on the military in accord with more modest requirements for its use; employ “soft power” -- persuasion, for example -- rather than force to achieve American goals; revive the concept of the citizen-soldier; bring the reserves and National Guard more fully into military preparedness; reconcile the American military profession with American society.

Bacevich’s analysis is acute and unsparing; his hopes for reform quite in line with America’s historic conception of itself. But has the trend toward militarism already gone too far to be pushed back? A pessimist would say that Bacevich has merely described the steps by which the United States, like the Roman Empire before it, slipped all too easily from being a virtuous republic into the full trappings of world military empire. The most an optimist can say is that there is still time to avoid that fate.

Anthony Day is a regular contributor to Book Review.