Book Review: "The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism" by Andrew Bacevich

Review by Dick Herman

“The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism”
Author: Andrew J. Bacevich
New York: Metropolitan Books

These words of review were composed before we knew the results of the 2008 elections. It was generally assumed some seriously major changes in national leadership would be the consequence if ballot results favored Barack Obama. There was also a parallel hypothesis. Just by themselves, recent financial tidal waves could be shock treatment severe enough to work lasting changes in the American future. Those economic and cultural changes ultimately may be more historically important to the country than the identity of the incoming president.

All of this is speculative, to be sure. There’ll always be citizens wedded to Ronald Reagan’s cheerleading vision of the United States as a mystical city on the hill. Andrew Bacevich definitely would not be among such beguiled Americans. What the decorated Vietnam War veteran turned professor at Boston College alternatively sees in times ahead is an end to American empire and exceptionalism. This is being brought about by the aforesaid “Limits of Power.”

Dimming the American future (again, regardless of who is elected president this year) are “three interlocking crises.” And all of them are “our own making, too.” The first crisis is “economic and cultural, the second political and the third military.”

Bacevich enlists the prescient views of theologian Reinhold Niebuhr at critical pivot points in this brief, compelling book. “What Niebuhr wrote after World War II has proved truer still in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War—-good fortune and a position of apparent preeminence placed the United States under the most grievous temptations of self-adulation.” Those temptations were not resisted. We think, or we had foolishly thought, of being a super-super power, always able to get whatever we wished or commanded.

“Centered on consumption and individual autonomy, the exercise of freedom is contributing to the gradual erosion of our national power.” Electively going to war has been one option to the undergirding of our personal and national profligacy. Bacevich rightly contends “Iraq has revealed the futility of counting on military power to sustain our habits of national profligacy,” when personal and national debt once were not seriously grinding issues. But the post-World War II golden age of America and the American middle class has ended.

Domestic oil production peaked in 1972, thereafter beginning its “inexorable, irreversible decline.” Jimmy Carter draws unusual praise in this book for trying to tell his countrymen they must change their energy consumption ways. Only now is Carter’s warning and foresight finally appreciated, and being acted upon.

Ronald Reagan proved the anti-Carter, becoming the modern prophet of profligacy. Reagan’s abrogation of ancient bits of folk wisdom (balance the books, pay as you go, save for a rainy day) “did as much to recast America’s moral constitution as did sex, drugs and rock and roll.” But “far more accurately than Jimmy Carter, Reagan understood what made Americans tick: They wanted self-gratification, not self-denial.”

It was Reagan who even provided the strategic underpinnings of George W. Bush’s global war on terror. Reagan’s “Star Wars” and Bush’s doctrine of optional war “offered an antidote to the uncertainties and anxieties of living in a world not run entirely in accordance with American preferences.”

In the second and third elements of “The Limits of Power,” Bacevich provides juicy hunks of history, and his own dead-on insights and analysis. All make fascinating reading. Much material involves stuff we either never knew or sufficiently appreciated.

The mindset that animated Rice, Cheney and others in the Bush administration that “Saddam Hussein’s existence had become unendurable” had roots in the Washington-promoted killings of Iran’s prime minister, Mossadegh, in 1953, and Guatemala’s president, Jacobo Guzman, in 1954.

On national security decisions, pretty much since Harry Truman’s era, Bacevich describes policy making as oligarchic, not democratic. “The voices of privileged insiders carry unimaginably greater weight than those of the unwashed masses… Ostensibly, the cult of secrecy exists to deny information to America’s enemies. Its actual purpose is to control the information provided the American people… By and large, members of the national security elite hold the American public in remarkably low regard.”

Every president since Reagan “has exploited his role as commander in chief to expand the imperial prerogatives of his office. Each has also relied on military power to conceal or manage problems that stemmed from the nation’s habits of profligacy. But U.S. forces win decisively only when the enemy obligingly fights on American terms.” The puerile “expectations that armed force wielded by a strong-willed chief executive could do just about anything reached an apotheosis of sorts in the wake of 9/11… The prospect of waging war on a global scale for decades, if not generations, became preposterous.” To reckon otherwise is folly.

In sum, an officer corps bloodied in Iraq and Afghanistan has seen the future and it points to more Iraqs and Afghanistans. That sort of unhappy and unproductive future will require not only advanced weaponry but the ability to put boots on the ground and keep them there, according to Bacevich, who retired from the U.S. Army with the rank of colonel. He then turned to teaching and writing, a real boon to his fellow Americans.

Readers ought to be aware that Bacevich’s son, named after his father, became a first lieutenant in the Army and was a combat casualty in the spring of 2007.