Sorry I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America and by God we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing retired army colonel Andrew Bacevich.
He's an academic historian, a retired professor, and as I say, army colonel.
He writes regularly for theamericanconservative.com.
He's writer at large there and whenever anybody asks me, all right, you got me interested.
What am I supposed to read about all this stuff?
I say, read Bacevich, America's War for the Greater Middle East.
That's the history of the terror war and the preceding battle, if you want to call it, including wars for American dominance in the Persian Gulf leading up to the terror war era here.
It's the single best book.
It's the book I was going to write, but now I don't have to because he did it for me.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Andrew?
Doing great.
Thank you.
Very happy to talk with you again here.
Now, you know what?
I'm actually, I've been made aware that there are more and more new people and beginners listening to this show.
So start off with sort of an elementary question here before we get too far into the current article, and that is just, why would a conservative retired army colonel such as yourself have a word negative to say about America's military?
Really full stop right there.
What are you, bad mouthing the soldiers, that kind of thing?
A lot of real grown men believe in that stuff.
So I'd like to kind of hear you address that.
You do nothing but pick bones with the military establishment all day, every day.
What for?
Well, I don't know if that's a fair description, but I certainly, I don't believe I've ever said anything critical about our soldiers in general.
I have said things critical about certain soldiers, you know, the perpetrators of the Abu Ghraib scandal, for example.
But the troops are instruments of U.S. policy, and they do what they are told to do.
They are trying to fulfill the ambitions and expectations of our senior, most political and military leaders.
So my gripe is with those leaders who are formulating policies that I think are wrong-headed, and really wrong-headed in two ways.
The first is that they do not serve the well-being of the nation.
And the second is, I think they end up killing our troops, harming our troops, putting our troops in danger needlessly and recklessly.
So that's the focus of the critique.
You know, why would a conservative have those views?
I think a conservative would have those views if he or she were actually a conservative.
I mean, the point of departure for conservatism, as far as I am concerned, is to conserve, is to preserve that which is of value.
And I think as a general verdict on our post-Cold War military enterprises, we have squandered power, resources, lives.
And I think that anybody who is truly a conservative would see that.
Well, and you know, I guess what it really comes down to a lot of times, I think, is social psychology, right?
That maybe even hearing someone like you talk the way you do about these issues is kind of liberating for people.
That if they really thought that anti-war belongs to Jane Fonda and Michael Moore and pro-war belongs to men in camouflage, then pretty easy for them to decide to pick the right side on that.
Yeah, but I mean, it's more than oversimplification.
It is a mischaracterization.
I mean, I have friends on the left to share my views who are anti-interventionists, who are skeptical about how much money we spend on our military and where it goes.
I don't agree with those progressives on a variety of other issues that relate to culture, for example.
But I can certainly find common ground with them on foreign policy.
And I think that conservatives generally ought to be willing to find allies.
And they're not simply, you know, the tactical alliances.
They are alliances where we can find common ground on certain matters, and ought to.
And we can agree to disagree on other matters.
And that's the way our politics ought to be, rather than imagining that the polity is divided into two irreconcilable camps where we have to hate everybody on the other side and insist that everything done by people on our side is right.
Well, after all, the government is ours, or we're the people are its people, one way or the other.
So left, right divides, notwithstanding, everybody between Bangor and San Diego is in on this thing one way or the other.
So we're going to have to get it together, especially if we want to do the right thing.
And quite frankly, the people who are inclined to see this division into two irreconcilable camps, to my mind, tend to be ideologues.
I mean, they tend to believe that politics, governance, uh, derives from some very specific identifiable set of principles.
And it seems to me that that's the wrong headed approach, that what we need is less ideology and more pragmatism.
I mean, ultimately, the question whether we're talking about war, or we're talking about social policy, or we're talking about economics is, does it work or doesn't it work?
And if it works, we should have more of it.
And if it doesn't work, we should change what we're doing.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, so speaking of which, what a quotable article you've written here for the American conservative magazine, Trump's national defense strategy has the Pentagon popping champagne.
It's at the American conservative.com.
And you're not talking about the national security strategy of what, six or eight weeks ago or whatever.
This is the new one, the national defense strategy.
Yeah.
So this is, this is a document with the Secretary of Defense Mattis' name on the front, not with the president's name on the front, but it derives from that national security strategy in the sense that this is the military's take on how we're going to do what the president says we need to do.
And I found it a remarkable document.
Remarkable in particular, in the sense that although it claims to, the word strategy figures in the title of the document, there really is no strategy.
And when you strip away all the verbiage, what you really have here is a brief in favor of increasing the level of defense spending.
I shouldn't say defense spending.
I don't like that phrase, increasing the level of military spending.
That's what it is because remarkably little of it actually has anything to do with defense.
So this is a call for a bigger budget.
And it's a call for a bigger budget that doesn't even bother to reflect on what the the enormous multi-trillion dollar expenditures of the past decade and a half or so have produced.
It's just give us more because we claim to know what we're doing.
Now, traditionally, do these things ever account for, well, we're in the middle of a long, hard slog in Iraq now or anything like that?
Or are they always this simple?
No, I think you're making a very good point that the people who draft these documents, I mean, it could be when they're sitting around the cafeteria at lunchtime that they're talking to one another about how badly things have gone or how much is being wasted.
But in communicating to the public, and I think also communicating to the Congress, communicating to the elite media, there's the remarkable absence of reflection, of self-criticism, of historical stock-taking.
So yeah, I think that that's common in these documents, but I also think it's important to call them on it, to say, you know, that's not acceptable.
You guys need to tell me, make the case that the wars that we have been conducting for the last decade and a half or so have produced some tangible benefit in terms of improving the security and well-being of the American people.
And I would say that that argument is exceedingly difficult to make, I think impossible to make.
Well, you know, it seems pretty obvious, too, for anybody looking at this at all, even if you're kind of one of them, some think-tanker from D.C., I don't know, a Brookings Institution guy, they say in here, as you quote, that the security environment is now more complex and volatile than any we have experienced in recent memory.
Well, if we're number one and we've been very busy this whole time, then it's obviously at least a question of whether this is happening because of some of the things our government has done, rather than just, it must go without saying that, boy, I guess we should have done more before and must do more now.
Yeah, I mean, the basic question becomes, where does this volatility come from?
And given the level of U.S. activism, not simply since 9-11, but activism preceding 9-11, either there is some correlation between that activism and the volatility that they complain about, or there is no correlation.
But if there is no correlation, it seems to me incumbent upon the drafters of these kind of documents to explain how the volatility has nothing to do with the fact that we invaded Iraq in 2003 in an unnecessary war and an illegal war.
So you can't, the palpable dishonesty of the way they frame the argument for more money disturbs me greatly, and I think it ought to disturb a lot of us.front of the list for that.
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And yeah, you know, invite me to give a speech to your group.
Well, now I haven't had a chance, honestly, to read this document, but I have read the Reuters report by, it's a really great reporter Idrees Ali.
He does a lot of great stuff on Afghanistan, I've noticed too.
But his headline in Reuters is US military puts great power competition at heart of strategy, Mattis.
And that's, it's really China and Russia, never mind the terror wars.
Or yeah, we'll keep all of them going too.
But that's now just background noise, because it's 1967 all over again.
Well, and there certainly is something to say that we're in an era of great power competition.
Now, the way the Trump administration and I think many other observers frame this thing, they put Russia and China in the same camp as the principal competitors, as if those two countries were more or less equal.
And it seems to me it's important to record to distinguish between the two.
Russia has lots of nuclear weapons.
Russia currently has a pretty assertive president.
But Russia is a country in decline.
And as others have noted, the total size of the Russian economy is equivalent to Italy's.
So this is not a great power, except in the single dimension of military power, and they're mostly restricted to nuclear power.
I'm not trying to dismiss Russia as a non-entity.
But we need to be realistic about what they got.
Compare that to China.
It seems to me there really is no comparison.
China is becoming, perhaps, the dominant economic power on the planet.
And it is, by I think most measures, a society that emanates energy, is innovating.
The cloning of the monkeys, the story that came out yesterday, I have no idea myself what the significance of that is.
But it seems to me that that is emblematic of the energy that is coming from China.
So to me, the China problem overshadows the Russia problem immeasurably.
And if we're serious about having a strategy, we should acknowledge that.
But if China, in that sense, is the bigger problem, well, what is the problem?
What are China's ambitions?
It's not simply that China is a challenger for decades-long American dominance in the Asia-Pacific, although it is.
It's also true that China is, I think, the most important economic partner we have in the entire world.
So it's not as if we're facing down some kind of a threat comparable to that represented by the Soviet Union back in the 40s and 1950s.
And again, there's no sort of awareness of that in the strategy.
So yes, there is, I think, a great power competition that is forming.
But the phrase needs to be parsed a little bit.
It's not a great power competition comparable to what existed in 1947, or 1939, or 1914.
And the differences, I think, between where we are now and those other episodes of recent history are important and need to be acknowledged.
But there's no such acknowledgement in the Pentagon strategy document.
Well, and even the rise of the Soviet Union after World War II, such as it was, was just a rise from nothing, right, from losing 27 million people in the war.
And then, you know, they had conquered that territory on the way to defeat the Russians, but they didn't really expand, I mean, to defeat the Germans, but they didn't expand much beyond that.
Really, that's not really the same kind of, I'm no academic on this stuff, I don't know, but I think it's pretty obvious difference.
Well, yeah, you're making an important point is that U.S. policymakers during the Truman years, drafting documents like NSC-68, the basic strategy document that was published in 1950, portrayed the Soviet Union at that time as basically a peer of the United States.
In other words, they didn't trouble themselves to note and to reflect on the implications of all the damage the Soviets had sustained in World War II, far beyond anything that we experienced or our other allies experienced.
So therefore, the threat of that was examined or portrayed in NSC-68 was badly distorted and arguably committed to, or helped to lead to, a flawed strategic response to the Soviet Union.
I think something of the same is going on here with regard to post-Soviet Russia and China.
So the facts matter, all of them, whether they're convenient facts or not.
I remember Rothbard complained in the 1970s about how come the right always talks as though time is on the Soviet Union side, when we know why communism does not work, cannot work, and why they're basically tying balls and chains to themselves as they're trying to accomplish whatever their goals are.
And time's on our side, not theirs.
I'm not sure that argument applies today.
I mean, particularly with regard to China, you know, there's been this argument made by some with regard to China for the last 2025 years that basically said that when the people of China reach a certain level of prosperity, they're going to demand political freedom, and the Communist Party is going to find itself in an unsustainable position.
I understand the logic of the argument.
I actually find the argument appealing, you know, that the people will, having gotten rich, will demand to be free.
But I don't see a heck of a lot of evidence that that's panning out.
The Communist, amidst a dictatorship, it's just an authoritarian, it's not a totalitarian country, but it's certainly an authoritarian country.
And thus far, at least, my sense is that the leaders of the Communist Party in China demonstrate considerable agility, you know, an ability to adjust and adapt, and therefore to sustain their position in power, despite the enormous changes going on within China and the enormous changes of China's status in the world.
I don't know that that nimbleness and that agility will persist for the next, you know, 10, 20, 50 years.
But thus far, they're doing a pretty good job of maintaining themselves in power.
I mean, I think, yeah, I don't think there's any question that China really is rising now, because they're not a communist country anymore.
They have a dictatorship, but they don't have, you know, national ownership of everything the way it used to be under Mao and all that.
That's why they're doing so much better.
I know a guy who is a businessman who traveled to China all through the 1990s and said that Shanghai grew from this small city to this, you know, it's like twice the size of Houston in the size of 10 years or something.
It's just absolutely out of control, the growth there.
And so, but then the thing is, and I think everybody in the Pentagon and all the think tanks have to recognize, right, that real conflict between us and China is absolutely off the table.
We can't, because both sides have H-bombs.
So that's it.
So with all those parallels with the Soviet Union kind of discarded here, if they're really this rising power that's going to come to dominate and or possibly threaten all of our allies in the region, and our dominance over the Pacific Ocean as an American lake, the way it's been for more than half a century now, what are we going to do?
I mean, it seems like the only option is we have to be best friends and partners with them, because we can't be in competition with them in that sense, because it would lead to absolute catastrophe.
Well, I mean, I think you're really raising the $64 question.
And of course, the American nationalist security establishment's response to the issue that you just framed is that we have to ensure that we maintain that dominant position.
And dominance here is expressed in military terms.
And that's a point of view.
I think that that's going to become increasingly difficult as China continues to acquire more and more power.
I would say that the problem is this, that as we move further into the 21st century, the prospects of stability in the Asia-Pacific region require that we take into account the needs and aspirations of other important powers.
It's not simply a two-power issue here.
It's not simply the Americans against the Chinese.
There are the interests of Japan, which are not necessarily identical to ours.
There are the interests of South Korea.
Russia, even though, as I said earlier, I think is a fading power, nonetheless, still is significant and is a significant player in the Asia-Pacific.
And there are other powers that cannot simply be treated as satellites or non-entities.
We're talking about Australia, we're talking about Vietnam, we're talking about Indonesia.
So the challenge, and let me emphasize, I think it is an enormous challenge, is to figure out what sort of political arrangement will allow all those nations to accept a status quo, not to live in brotherhood and harmony, but to coexist and therefore to prevent an explosion.
I think that's the challenge, and I don't think that defining the problem as us against the Chinese and in defining it principally as a military competition, I don't think framing the problem that way is likely to lead to the kind of answer we need.
And let me emphasize, if you said to me, okay professor, describe that multilateral order that would be stable, I would say I don't know that I can.
I know I cannot.
But it seems to me that's the diplomatic task, the task of statecraft that we face, not simply trying to draw red lines and challenging the Chinese to, you know, either to cross them or to pull back.
I have an idea.
We could lead the way in demilitarizing the Pacific Ocean, because after all, communism is over.
The Cold War's over.
The Cold War with China ended in the 70s.
Well, I think, again, I don't want to oversimplify this, but it does seem to me that to see the problem as something other than a military problem at least opens up the possibility for more creative solutions.
And we have an administration now in which the military voice is so prominent, in which the State Department has sort of treated as about the equivalent of the Department of Agriculture in terms of clout, that the possibility of creative statesmanship seems to me becomes that much less.
And I find that troubling.
All right, hang on just one second.
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Well, it was really an anomalous thing where we have a president who, out of all the different major power factions, the Army and the Marines were the only ones who said, Nah, this guy's okay.
I guess we can, you know, everybody else, CIA and state and all the bankers and all everybody tried to stop them and failed.
Then all the neocons, of course.
So this is really his only constituency other than the voters, but they're secondary compared to factions of power.
I think that's a good point.
But the other thing is, there have been commanders-in-chief.
Probably almost any commander-in-chief you can think of, going back to Frank and Roosevelt, whether they were wise or not, nonetheless, took their duties as commander-in-chief seriously, took seriously, tried to master the details of statecraft, put a personal imprint on national security policies that came out of their administration.
I actually don't get a sense that anything that we get out of the White House related to national security or that we get out of the Pentagon bears the imprint of Donald Trump.
It seems to me he signs off on things.
He reiterates certain slogans that date back to his campaign, predominantly America First, but I seriously doubt that he actually read this national defense strategy that came out of the Pentagon.
It's Mattis' strategy, or perhaps more broadly, it's the strategy of Mattis and Kelly and McMaster and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
There really is no civilian counterweight to these people.
I'm not trying to imply that they're evil people and warmongers, but I do think that they share a common worldview, a common set of experiences that make them more inclined to see, for example, the Asia-Pacific problem as a military competition between us and China.
It makes them less likely to see the Asia-Pacific problem as a multilateral issue in which factors other than military power may turn out to be decisive.
I don't know about you, but I was a little bit relieved to see that they brought in the head of Exxon to be the Secretary of State because I thought, well, not that he's a good person or a bad person necessarily, but just somebody in that position at least has an understanding of the way things work in the world that's just a bit different than these other guys' experience.
I mean, even Trump as a businessman, he's a skyscraper tycoon.
He's not really a capitalist in the sense that Rex Tillerson is in terms of really engaging in the global economy in vast ways the way Exxon does.
I guess I was hoping that he would have a little bit of a broader perspective to share, but I guess if Trump's not listening, he's not listening.
Well, you know, it's hard for us to tell as outsiders, but sort of going by what you read in the papers, it appears that Tillerson is a pretty marginal figure.
I mean, without implying that I think a big State Department bureaucracy is somehow the solution to all our problems, and indeed I don't think that, the reluctance to fill key positions in the State Department, whether we're talking about overseas representatives or the regional assistant secretaries and the like, that doesn't exactly give you much confidence that Tillerson is a serious player.
Yeah.
Well, and think how crazy that sounds, too.
They're like, oh man, at least there's a guy from Exxon in there, but nope, he doesn't even have the power.
We got to put us a heck of a note to have to root for the Rockefellers.
All right.
Listen, thank you very much for your time again on the show.
I'm glad that we talk mostly about the Pacific rather than the Middle East this time.
You bet.
Very interesting to hear your perspective on all of that, and really appreciate your time again.
Okay.
Bye-bye.
All right, you guys, that's Andrew Bacevich.
He wrote all these great books, but you got to read America's War for the Greater Middle East.
That's on the top of your list right there with Fool's Errand.
The New American Militarism and the Limits of Power and many, many more really great stuff, and he writes regularly for TomDispatch.com and the American Conservative.
This one is called Trump's National Defense Strategy Has the Pentagon Popping Champagne.
And you know me, I'm scotthorton.org for the show, foolserrand.us for the book, antiwar.com for things I want you to read, libertarianinstitute.org for more things I want you to read, and follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
Thanks very much.
