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H-Diplo Roundtable Reviews Volume IX, No 2008 h-diplo H-Diplo Roundtable Reviews www.h-net.org/~diplo/roundtables Volume IX, No. 24 (2008) 8 December 2008 Andrew Bacevich. The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism. (New York: Metropolitan Books, August 2008). 224 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8050-8815-1 ($24.00; hardcover). Roundtable Editor: Thomas Maddux Reviewers: Jerald Combs, Walter Hixson, Michael Hunt, Matthew F. Jacobs Author’s Response by Andrew Bacevich H-Diplo Roundtable Reviews Managing Editor: Diane N. Labrosse H-Diplo Roundtable Reviews General Editor and Web Editor: George Fujii Stable URL: http://www.h-net.org/~diplo/roundtables/PDF/Roundtable-IX-24.pdf Contents Introduction by Thomas Maddux, California State University, Northridge.............................. 2 Review by Jerald A. Combs, Professor of History Emeritus, San Francisco State University ... 7 Review by Walter Hixson, University of Akron....................................................................... 11 Review by Michael H. Hunt, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Williams College14 Review by Matthew F. Jacobs, University of Florida .............................................................. 18 Author’s Response by Andrew Bacevich, Boston University.................................................. 24 Copyright © 2008 H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for non-profit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author(s), web location, date of publication, H-Diplo, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For other uses, contact the H-Diplo editorial staff at [email protected]. H-Diplo Roundtable Reviews, Vol. IX, No 24 (2008) Introduction by Thomas Maddux, California State University, Northridge ince the start of the Iraq War in 2003 an increasing number of historians, political scientists and international relations specialists have offered critical assessments of the Iraq War and President George W. Bush’s initiative, strategy, and management of the war. Several recent books featured in H-Diplo roundtables, most notably Ian Shapiro’s Containment: Rebuilding a Strategy Against Global Terror (2007) and Philip Gordon’s Winning the Right War: The Path to Security for America and the World(2007) have advocated a return to the containment strategy of the Cold War to deal with terrorists and their connections with fundamentalist Islamic regimes as opposed to President Bush’s “War on Terror” and strategy of preemption and unilateralism to advance U.S. hegemony and spread democracy. Other authors such as Tony Smith in A Pact with the Devil: Washington’s Bid for World Supremacy and the Betrayal of American Promise (2007), Walter Hixson in The Myth of American Diplomacy: National Identity and U.S. Foreign Policy (2008), and Joan Hoff, in A Faustian Foreign Policy: From Woodrow Wilson to George W. Bush (2008) reject containment as a reliable policy for 21st century challenges. As with Hixson and Hoff, Michael Hunt in The American Ascendancy: How the United States Gained & Wielded Global Dominance (2007) explores the roots of current American attitudes and policies that shaped the U.S. arrival as hegemon and contributed to current challenges. Hunt suggests the desirability of a retreat to cooperation versus Bush’s unilateralism. Andrew Bacevich discusses many of the same themes and concerns as these authors and directs forceful criticism at American Presidents extending back to JFK, Congressional leaders from both parties, and, more so than most authors, at the American people for their preoccupation with personal freedom and consumption at the expense of service and restraint culminating in an imperial preoccupation with access to and control of Middle Eastern oil. The reviewers note the anger in Bacevich’s critique, and its biting tone, identifying the book as “a searing indictment,” something of a jeremiad. Bacevich, however, is not a “Johnny come lately” to the debate on contemporary U.S. policy and military strategy. His critique of U.S. exceptionalism and consumption has much contemporary relevance. President-elect Barack Obama would profit by setting aside some foreign policy prescriptions from elite policy advisers on the job market in Washington and reflecting on Bacevich’s assessment. The reviewers do raise some issues with respect to Bacevich’s thesis and his development of it: 1.) Bacevich’s central thesis is that U.S. policy has gone widely astray not as the result of a particular leader but more as a product of a very dysfunctional American system that is based upon problems within American society with deep, historical roots. Bacevich develops the sources of this crisis in three chapters starting with “The Crisis of Profligacy.” Noting the early American attraction to accumulation discussed by Alexis De Tocqueville in the 19th century, Bacevich emphasizes an escalation of American acquisitiveness after WWII at the expense of a sense of duty, citizenship, and restraint. The second chapter, “The Political Crisis,” focuses on the emergence of the “Imperial Presidency,” the “National 2 | P a g e H-Diplo Roundtable Reviews, Vol. IX, No 24 (2008) Security Ideology,” and congressional and public tolerance of the hijacking of democracy by “Wise Men” who can’t be trusted. (122-123) In the third chapter, “The Military Crisis”, Bacevich emphasizes the limits on U.S. military power, the illusions of U.S. leaders since Ronald Reagan as to the efficacy of military, and the failure to draw the right lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan which Bacevich places in the U.S. tradition of “Small Wars for Empire.” 2.) The reviewers have reservations on various aspects of Bacevich’s thesis. Michael Hunt, for example, would have welcomed more effort by Bacevich to ground his study in relevant historical scholarship on U.S. foreign relations and to consider the implications of literature on nationalism, race, and cultural superiority in shaping U.S. policy since at least 1900. “Simply getting rid of the hacks in Congress or the blinkered foreign policy specialists is not going to do the job” and bring the necessary changes that Bacevich envisions, Hunt suggests. Furthermore, the “global context in which U.S. policy has developed and functioned” should be examined, Hunt notes, to show “how these international threads binding the United States to the rest of the world were woven, what effect they have had, and what might happen were they to fray or break.” (3-4) Matthew Jacobs questions whether Bacevich’s final recommendations really address the seriousness of the crisis that he presents. “How … does switching to a policy of containing Islamic extremism fundamentally solve the political crisis or the crisis of profligacy,” queries Jacobs, who notes similar problems with Bacevich’s recommendation for the abolition of nuclear weapons. (6) 3.) “The End of American Exceptionalism” suggests that Bacevich agrees with a number of recent authors, such as Walter Hixson, who stresses the pernicious impact of this sense of exceptionalism from the Puritans to George W. Bush. “‘American Exceptionalism’ is like kudzu,” Bacevich notes in his response. “However, diligently historians hack away, they never succeed in killing it. It just keeps coming back….” (1) Unlike other recent critics, Bacevich has little problem with the impact of exceptionalism until the 1960s when it became “increasingly perverse—it prevents us from seeing that adherence to the old expansionist routines … is actually contrary to our own interests.” (1-2) Throughout most of the study, Bacevich emphasizes that since the founding of the U.S., Americans have devoted far more attention to conquest than promoting freedom, applauded by neoconservatives and President Bush. (19-22) As Jerald Combs notes, Bacevich is not a revisionist as he draws inspiration from Reinhold Niebuhr, who is quoted frequently, and he focuses his critique more on whether or not a policy advances U.S. interests rather than “promoting the common good.” Combs views Bacevich as a “soft or restrained” realist who seeks to limit U.S. objectives to what is achievable with available means rather than unsuccessful pursuits of unobtainable goals with many Cold War examples. (see 178-179) “While revisionists and the political left might support U.S. interventions abroad if they were truly on behalf of progressive forces and hard realists support interventions as necessary to achieve vital if extensive American interests,” Combs suggests, “restrained realists would argue for abstention except in extreme cases that posed a moral threat to the United States.” (2-3) Yet does Bacevich free himself completely from the “American DNA” of exceptionalism when he concludes by recommending as a “basis for sound strategy”, the 3 | P a g e H-Diplo Roundtable Reviews, Vol. IX, No 24 (2008) elimination of nuclear weapons and an aggressive campaign to “reduce the level of emissions that contribute to global warming”? (178-181) 4.) Iraq is central to Bacevich’s concerns. Starting with President Ronald Reagan’s involvement in the Islamic world from Afghanistan to Iraq, Bacevich finds many examples of U.S leaders pursuing objectives where the costs exceeded any return in a quest to extend the U.S. empire into new areas such as Central Asia. (44-48) The central focus of this quest, according to Bacevich, revolves about Washington’s effort to bolster American profligacy with oil. President George H.W. Bush’s response in the Gulf War to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 receives
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