Andrew J. Bacevich is a Vietnam vet and West Point grad who now teaches International Relations at Boston University. He’s contributed articles to such conservative periodicals as National Review, The Weekly Standard, and First Things.
Now Bacevich has written one of the better political books to come out this year. Rather than a shrill anti-Bush screed, The New American Militarism tries, in a largely non-polemical fashion, to understand how we got to where we are and what we might do about it.
By “the new American militarism” Bacevich means a mindset or worldview that manifests itself in “a romanticized view of soldiers, a tendency to see military power as the truest measure of national greatness, and outsized expectations regarding the efficacy of force” (p. 2). He characterizes this view as “Wilsonianism under arms,” which seeks “a world remade in America’s image and therefore permanently at peace” (p. 10).
Our own day has seen the revival of Wilsonina ambitions and Wilsonian certainty, this time, however, combined with a pronounced affinity for the sword. With the end of the Cold War, the constraints that once held American ideologues in check fell away. Meanwhile, in more than a few quarters, America’s unprecedented military ascendancy, a by-product of victory in the Cold War, raised the alluring prospect that here at last was the instrument that would enable the United States to fulfill its providential mission. (p. 11)
Rather than the concoction of a sinister cabal of oilmen or neoconservatives who hoodwinked the American public after 9/11, Bacevich thinks that the roots of this “military metaphysic” go much deeper. It is the result of a confluence of forces that sought, largely with honorable motives, to rebuild American honor and prestige after the disaster of Vietnam. These include the military itself, certain public intellectuals, a certain mythology about America deployed by politicians – preeminently Ronald Reagan, and politically conservative evangelical Christians.
The prestige of the military was at an all-time low after Vietnam, and officers like Creighton Abrams undertook a very deliberate program of rebuilding that consisted of refurbishing the image of the American soldier as virtuous, efficient, and dedicated to the common good and building up the physical capacity of the military to guarantee that it would win any future conventional wars handily. In other words, to avoid another Vietnam at all costs.
In the realm of ideas, certain public intellectuals (people like Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol) has become increasingly appaled by what they saw as the hippie irrationality and nihilism of the New Left. In addition to corroding cherished American values, the New Left threatened to enervate America’s ability to stand up to international communism abroad. In the aftermath of Vietnam, with its calls for America to “come home” (as embodied in the McGovern campaign), the Left, in the eyes of these “neoconservatives” (as socialist Michael Harrington dubbed them), was recapitulating the days of Weimar Germany, when a flaccid liberalism was unable to withstand the onset of fascism. For the necons it is always 1939 and the greatest danger is always “appeasement” of fascism, communism, or Islamic radicalism. The neocons saw it as their appointed task to restore America’s confidence in its values so that it could sustain a free and decent society at home, and lead the battle against the Soviet Union on the world stage.
Thus these intellectuals, most of them Democrats in the Truman-Humphrey mold, found themselves supporting the candidacy of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Reagan’s effectiveness as a politician, Bacevich thinks, had a lot to do with his ability to deploy a mythology of America as a land of unlimited possibilities. Jimmy Carter, in his famous “malaise” speech, had suggested that Americans needed to learn to live with lowered expectations, by, for instance, reducing our dependence on foreign oil. Reagan countered that it was morning in America and that all we needed was to unleash the creative potential of the American by removing the shackles of big government. There was no need for Americans to limit their consumption or their freedom. America was a force for good in the world, not the evil empire of “Amerikkka” that radicals on the Left deplored.
For better or for worse, it was Reagan’s vision of America that prevailed, and the 1980s saw a dramatic revision in the public perception of the military. Reagan went out of his way to praise the armed forces, to appear in public with soldiers, and to emphasize the inherent goodness of the military calling. Whereas post-Vietnam Hollywood had focused on the horrors of war and what it did to the men serving, the 80s gave us the sanitized, heroic version of military life in movies like Top Gun.
Another group that saw the revitalization of the military as a key part of an American moral renewal were politically conservative evangelical Protestants. Leaders like Jerry Fallwell combined a loathing of godless communism with a belief in the virtue of soldiers as a key to a greater moral renewal in America. Indeed, one of the interesting stories Bacevich tells is how evangelical leaders made major inroads into the military chaplaincy, with cooperation from the military who, as we saw above, had their own reasons for wanting virtuous, disciplined recruits. Bacevich also notes that conservative evangelicals tended to see the U.S. (and Israel) as exempt from the normal restraints of just war fighting due to their exalted status in God’s plan.
The final piece in the puzzle that rebuilt the confidence in a strategy of “global power projection” was the innovative thinking of an elite group of war strategists, associated with think tanks like the RAND corporation. Thinkers like Albert Wohlstetter and Andrew Mashall were proponents of what came to be known as the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). The basic idea is that technological advances have reduced the costs and increased the effectiveness of military intervention, making possible relatively painless military actions rather than the massive clashes of armies that characterized the two World Wars.
All of these efforts came to fruition in operation Desert Storm. The U.S. rallied the nations of the world to punish the aggression of a rogue state. An incredibly efficient, technologically advanced military routed the Iraqis out of Kuwait with lightning speed and with casualties (at least on our side) kept to a minimum. Soldiers were not seen as dropouts or psychopaths as they sometimes had been in the Vietnam era, but well-trained and virtuous professionals. We had finally, it seemed, put the “Vietnam syndrome” behind us.
Next I’ll discuss Bacevich’s views on what went wrong, why we got involved in the Middle East in the first place, and his vision for a genuine “common defense” of the U.S.
A Thinking Reed 
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