I'm Scott Horton, it's chaos in Austin.
Our first guest today is Andrew Bacevich, he's a professor of international relations at Boston University.
He's a veteran of the Vietnam War, taught at West Point and Johns Hopkins University.
He's the author of quite a few books.
The brand newest one is The Limits of Power, The End of American Exceptionalism.
Before that, The Irony of American History, The New American Militarism, How Americans Are Seduced by War, American Empire, The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, Empire as a Way of Life, many of these co-author and editor credits I believe.
Welcome to the show, sir.
It's good to have you here.
Oh, thanks very much.
Very interesting book.
Just finished it up last night, The Limits of Power, The End of American Exceptionalism.
And I have to tell you, I enjoyed your talk at the Future Freedom Foundation conference at the beginning of June of this year.
Oh, thank you very much for that as well.
Yeah, it was a very interesting take.
You basically say, as an issue of statecraft, from a utilitarian point of view, in examining American history and the application of American military force, that empire basically was a net gain up until the conquest of the Philippines, is that right?
Or even until later than that?
I think I'd frame it a little bit differently.
My argument is that the foreign policy of expansionism, on which we embarked really as soon as we achieved independence, the foreign policy of expansionism that we followed through the 19th century and through the 20th century, paid off, probably at least until the 1960s.
And it paid off in the sense that expansionism, during that long period of time, had the effect of enhancing American power and making possible American prosperity, and by extension, I think, making possible American freedom.
But that since the 1960s, further efforts at expansionism, most vividly demonstrated in the Bush administration's global war on terror, have had the opposite effect.
They are undercutting or squandering our power.
They are undercutting our prosperity, and I think, in many respects, compromising our freedom.
Now when you say that it was really the 1960s kind of marked the beginning of the era where, well, I guess in the budget sense, we go into the red in terms of American expansionism, in this book you really outline how the seeds were sown for sort of the too-late-to-turn-back, you know, the creeping power of American empire getting to the tipping point where it wouldn't be able to be turned around was really at the end of World War II and the dawn of the Cold War era and the rise of the national security state under Harry Truman, right?
Well I think that that's a very important factor in understanding how we got to our current predicament.
Prior to World War II, and again I would emphasize that prior to World War II, we were a belligerent people who did not hesitate to use force when we felt it was necessary to defend our interests or to embark upon expansion.
There's plenty of wars before World War II.
Nonetheless, prior to World War II, we didn't have this large, permanent, influential national security apparatus and that did become a permanent part of the political landscape once we get to the late 1940s, not only the national security state, but of course also the military-industrial complex that Dwight D. Eisenhower called to our attention in his famous farewell address of January 1961.
Well my friend Gareth Porter, analyst and journalist for IPS News, talks about how of all the interest groups that kind of make up the imperial court and influence in Congress and all the different lobbyists and the military-industrial complex, that really the national security state itself, the bureaucrats and generals in the Pentagon, in the CIA and all the intelligence agencies, that they really are the most powerful interest group of all in the national security state and the hardest to thwart from any political point of view from a president who tries to put them in line one way or another or something like that.
Yeah, I mean, I don't know if they're the strongest, but I mean, I think that the basic point is certainly correct and it is not the case that individuals who are part of this apparatus are necessarily malicious or dishonest or are trying to act in ways that are not in the best interest of the country, but I think collectively and institutionally, if you look at the way the CIA behaves or the way that the military behaves institutionally, they become wedded to priorities, they become wedded to habits that even if they were once appropriate or useful, have outlived their usefulness, but this apparatus can't change and it can't change in part because it sees its own interest as tied to these old routines and old habits.
Mm hmm.
Well, and you talk about really, I think you tackle a subject that very few really get into, which is why the American people put up with this and their belief, whether justified or not, I'm not quite sure your opinion on that, that we all benefit from this, that we all somehow get to have expensive toys for cheap prices because of our empire.
Is that really true?
Well, I think that it has been true.
If you consider the fact that one expression of the American imperial project has been to try to exercise great influence or even control the Persian Gulf, because the Persian Gulf is this great reservoir of energy resources, that effort, if we look at that effort as it begins in the aftermath of World War II, really did help ensure that the American consumer had access to large quantities of cheap oil, even as our own domestic reserves of oil began to be drawn down.
What did that give for the American, for the individual American?
Gave us cheap gas to pump in our cars so we could go wherever we wanted to go whenever we wanted to go there, and at least to a considerable degree, to a considerable number of people, that really was one of the signature elements of the American understanding of freedom in the contemporary era.
So yeah, empire gave us what we wanted.
We wanted cheap gas.
Now, whether or not our definition of freedom was an authentic one, a true one, a sustainable one, is another question altogether.
But I think, at least until relatively recently, that the empire did deliver for the American people what the American people claimed to want.
Well, you know, I'm really interested in that, because it seems as though, well, and believe me, I'm no Austrian economist, really, but I like listening to them because they seem to make a lot of sense, and it seems like the battle over control of oil is really about which companies get to do the pumping and the profiting, and the idea that we, sort of as America as a whole, are benefiting from it, it sort of sounds like we're buying into the propaganda that it's for our interests, when really it's for the interests of, say, Exxon, for example.
I mean, the oil's going to get to market anyway, right?
I don't know that that's the case.
I'm pretty certain that the people who have made U.S. national security policy have not been willing to test the proposition that it's going to get to market in any case.
Their tendency has been to believe that, rather than trusting the laws of economics, we're better served by trying to shape the conditions that exist in that part of the world to ensure that the oil's going to get to market.
I'm not trying to tell you I think that their judgment was a correct judgment.
I'm simply trying to reflect what I think was their judgment.
Well, and certainly, I mean, you prove the case that that was their judgment.
In the book, we talk about basically the Carter Doctrine.
It was Carter who said that the Persian Gulf, America must reign supreme in the Persian Gulf from now on, so that we no longer take the risk of war and revolution.
Yeah, I mean, you're not quoting the doctrine explicitly, and it's not quite accurate to say that he said that, but by implication, that's what the Carter Doctrine has come to mean, yes.
Well, I'm sorry for kind of oversimplifying it.
How exactly did that come about?
The Carter Doctrine?
Yeah.
Well, the Carter Doctrine was enunciated in January of 1980 as part of Carter's State of the Union address that year.
It the doctrine was enunciated in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
There was a perception in Washington.
The perception was an incorrect one.
Nonetheless, the perception in Washington was that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was indicative of growing Soviet military ambition, and that once they had digested Afghanistan, that Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia were going to be sort of next on the Soviet agenda.
Again, this was a preposterous notion.
It was a misreading of what Afghanistan was all about, but that was the way people in the national security apparatus in Washington interpreted Afghanistan.
So the immediate sort of focus of the Carter Doctrine was, in essence, to warn the Soviets to stay out of the Persian Gulf, that we would view their entrance into the Persian Gulf as a threat to our vital interests.
Very quickly, however, as people within that national security apparatus began to think about the application of the Carter Doctrine, they reached the conclusion that from the U.S. perspective, the U.S. would be just as concerned about nations other than the Soviets trying to achieve control or hegemony in the Persian Gulf, nations like Iran or Iraq.
So the application of the Carter Doctrine was not simply focused on the Soviets, but was focused on a wider range of perceived threats to control of the Persian Gulf, and the upshot of the whole thing was that by the time we get to about 1991, in the time of Operation Desert Storm, there's a consensus in Washington that the best way to ensure that nobody else controls the Persian Gulf is that we need to control the Persian Gulf.
So the way I oversimplified it was the later fruition of the Doctrine comes to effect.
It sounds like a lot of mission creep from a vast leap to conclusion, almost a domino theory, only this time headed, you know, in the other part of South Asia, headed west instead of in Southeast Asia.
I think you got it right, and just as in the earlier version of the domino theory, it was based on assumptions that simply were not realistic and were not valid.
Well, now we have even a third domino theory, which I'm not sure if this has been abandoned now, but that we would spread democracy and set an example in Iraq and change the entire Middle East.
Yeah, I think that it hasn't been abandoned in the sense that President Bush has not abrogated his ideas of transforming the Middle East, and to my knowledge, President-elect Obama has not himself rejected that kind of an idea, but I think as a practical matter, the idea has been put to rest.
I mean, it's very difficult, I think, for anybody to look at the events in Iraq over the past five plus years, and the events in Afghanistan over the past seven years, and to conclude from those events that the United States has the capability to spread liberal democracy across the region.
I mean, the two places we've tried have turned out to be enormously difficult and enormously expensive, and so to imagine that we're going to sort of go do this in Iran or Pakistan or Egypt strikes me as kind of silly.
Well, you know, I've always been interested in this because it seems like there's some true believers like, dare I say, Paul Wolfowitz, who really believed in spreading democracy, and I can't read people's minds, but he always seemed like he honestly meant all these terrible lies.
But on the other hand, we have people like Dick Cheney, who I have trouble attributing honest motives to him.
It seems like he just has naked imperial ambition.
So I wonder about that intersection between the we are the city on the hill and we're spreading our freedom and our goodness to people as just a cover for naked imperialism, or how exactly those things play into each other in terms of the people in power actually believing their own lies.
So to speak, well, I don't think I'd use the word lies, at least in many cases.
And I think you're right that somebody like Wolfowitz, I think genuinely believed that the United States had both the mission and the capability of liberating places like Iraq turned out to be a bad idea.
But I think he genuinely was committed to that proposition.
When we think about major policy decisions, let's focus, for example, on the decision to invade Iraq.
I think it would be wrong for us to assume that the decision reflected perfect agreement in the minds of all of the key players who've made that decision.
I think it's far more common, and I think it was definitely the case with the invasion of Iraq, that the decision came about as a result of a consensus.
In other words, Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Rice, maybe even Powell, all agreed that it was necessary to invade Iraq.
It doesn't follow that they all came to that conclusion for the same reasons.
And I would agree with you that I'd be very skeptical that people like Cheney and Rumsfeld viewed the purpose of the mission to bring liberty to the Iraqi people.
I think that their concerns were probably far more focused on a determination to assert control in the Persian Gulf, seeing the toppling of Saddam as the beginning of a much larger project that was less concerned with freeing the Iraqi people from oppression, more concerned with trying to pacify or ensure the order and stability of the Persian Gulf.
So there's no one reason, I think, that can fully explain major policy decisions.
Right.
And well, and it does come back to this whole issue of we.
And it's hard sometimes to differentiate between the line put out by the government and what people believe about it versus what their opinion would have been if they hadn't been subject to years worth of lies leading up to something like the invasion of Iraq.
I'm not sure I followed you on that one.
Well, for example, right after September 11th, I think 3 percent of people believed Iraq did it and we ought to have a war against them.
And then after a year of propaganda, people were you know, everybody was thumping their chest or not everybody.
Many people were thumping their chest and and doing this whole American exceptionalism thing and vowing to get revenge against Iraq for 9-11, which which hadn't done it.
So, you know, I kind of wonder about, you know, the responsibility of or your view of the responsibility of the American people and our insistence on our government doing these things to protect our way of life and so forth as versus the government really propagandizing us and making us fear attack and things like that.
No, I mean, I think there's no question that the in its effort to gin up political support for the invasion of Iraq, members of the Bush administration were at the very least disingenuous.
And certainly there was a concerted effort to manipulate public opinion, to bring the public into line with what they intended to do and probably would have done regardless.
And that's certainly reprehensible.
Have to say, I don't think that somehow that kind of manipulation of public opinion is unique to the Bush administration.
I think that's sad to say that that's sort of a garden variety politics.
Now, the people are not responsible for the fact that politicians are disingenuous.
I think the responsibility of the people lies in in treating what we hear from political leaders with certain skepticism of of of being critical, of trying to ask questions.
And there, I think that's where the charge that the media failed really has some legitimacy.
My own view is that the media's reporting of the war in Iraq beginning in 2004 actually has been probably pretty good.
But I think there's no question that the reporting that the media did in the run up to the war in 2002 and into early 2003 was just plain awful.
So to the extent that the press is supposed to serve as the surrogates for the people in asking those critical questions, the press let us down.
Well, what do you make of how they're treating the idea of escalating the war in Afghanistan?
Now, Robert Gates has talked about sending as many as five more divisions into Afghanistan.
I think President-elect Obama has said he wanted at least two more.
And it seems to be a consensus now in Washington, D.C., that Afghanistan is the good war.
And we need to start withdrawing from Iraq to some degree, at least, and put those troops in Central Asia instead.
Well, I would just a terminology issue where I think they're talking about brigades rather than divisions.
I'm sorry.
It's simply an important distinction, because a brigade is about five.
I know very little about.
Forgive me.
No, no, it's OK.
But I mean, frankly, we don't have five divisions to send to Afghanistan.
We're so completely committed between Afghanistan and Iraq that there just simply aren't five divisions available.
But your basic point is correct, that General McKiernan, who is the commander in Afghanistan, says he needs more troops.
Secretary Gates has publicly endorsed that notion, although Gates has basically said he ain't going to get more troops until he pulls them out of Iraq.
And Obama on the campaign trail said much the same thing.
They may differ in numbers.
But if you look at the public statements of those three important people, there seems to be a consensus in favor of sending more troops to Afghanistan.
I hope they don't.
And I think there's at least some chance that they might not.
And I say that because from what I read, at least, there is a very thoroughgoing scrub of Afghan policy going on even now in Washington.
And that scrub or that reassessment of strategy is one that seems to be taking into account the possibility that there's no amount of U.S. troops that's going to fix this problem and that it may be appropriate, and I think it's appropriate, to try to find a political solution to the problem rather than trying to use U.S. troops to impose our will.
So I don't know how that assessment or reassessment is going to come out.
I don't know how President Obama will respond to it.
But I think there's at least some possibility that he won't do what he said he was going to do when he was running for office.
Well, and what about the kind of larger establishment consensus about America's position in Central Asia?
Because as you point out in your book, we're not just talking about Afghanistan.
We're talking about all the stands that nobody can pronounce either.
Right.
Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, countries that everybody knows are somewhere in there between India and Russia.
I guess my sense would be that, first of all, to the extent that Afghanistan is going south, that's going to potentially at least retard any inclination to dive more broadly into Central Asian politics.
The second thing, maybe more importantly, is that in many respects, I think the crisis in Pakistan is going to overshadow Afghanistan and overshadow Central Asia more broadly.
I think Pakistan in many respects is emerging as the preeminent near-term foreign policy problem that the Obama administration is going to have to deal with.
And I don't know how they're going to deal with it.
And frankly, I don't myself have any great ideas about how to deal with it.
But that is going to diminish anybody's appetite for, you know, mucking around in places like Uzbekistan.
Well, I hope that's true.
Do you think that, you know, when you talk about the scrub, I guess they call it, the kind of going back and looking at Afghanistan policy from the bottom up again, that's going on right now, does this indicate a real reappraisal of the idea of the invincibility of the American military?
It sounds like you're saying they're really running up against the reality of just what the army can do and what it can't.
You know, I think that, again, it would be politically incorrect in an odd sense to say out loud that our military is anything but invincible.
But I think that there is a common realization that today that American military power is far more limited than most people thought a decade ago.
And in particular, in the Pentagon, there is an appreciation for the limits of American military power.
I mean, Gates himself, even if Gates is on the record as supporting sending more troops to Afghanistan, Gates himself is also on the record of saying that we aren't going to be invading and occupying countries anytime soon with the notion that we can rapidly bring about their political transformation.
He knows, does not disguise the fact that he knows that the Iraq and Afghanistan have put us in a position where we are badly overstretched.
So I think that there actually is a real appreciation that we've reached the limits of what we can do.
Well, if we could take it back to September 11th and imagine a situation where rather than having all these differing agendas and people needing excuses and Pearl Harbor incidents to get their agenda through and that kind of thing, if it had just been professionals with the best interests of the Republic at heart, what do you think would have been the best response to September 11th?
I think the best response would have been to define al Qaeda as part of an international criminal conspiracy and to rally nations of the world to participate with the United States in a very intensive and sustained effort to root out and destroy that criminal conspiracy.
But to call it a criminal conspiracy is to imply that the methods that you use to eliminate criminality would have provide the model for how to approach.
In other words, instead of invading and occupying and trying to transform countries, we would emphasize the use of intelligence agencies, of national police forces, perhaps of some special operations forces in a fairly precise way to identify the network and to destroy it.
Is it also a recognition that approach that other nations of the world would have been far more supportive and forthcoming than has been the case with the approach that we actually took?
Well, in defining it as a criminal conspiracy, is that also recognition of just how few in number these guys actually were?
Well, you know, I'm not sure what the number is, but it's probably more in the thousands.
You know, it's not in the dozens.
But I think it would certainly recognize that the adversary was not 10 feet tall.
It would certainly distinguish between the actual adversary, the so-called terrorists, and regimes such as Saddam Hussein, which may have been objectionable for any number of reasons, but which, as you suggested earlier, actually had nothing to do with 9-11 and which we could actually handle, were handling, in ways that didn't require us to embark upon a full-fledged war.
Well, and so then what's your view about, because there are certain neoconservatives who would say that there are tens of thousands of terrorists, anti-American terrorists, a giant Islamo-fascist movement, a clash of civilizations against radical extremism, and all these kinds of things.
What do you think of that?
Is that just an excuse?
Or is there enough truth in that to, you know, give them some credit?
Well, again, I don't know.
I don't know.
You know, if we could assemble all the terrorists and the anti-American terrorists in the world, how many would show up?
I really don't know.
But I mean, the point I think you're trying to make is that the rhetoric that was used by some people, most notably neoconservatives, was rhetoric that compared Al-Qaeda to Nazi Germany.
When people like Norman Podoritz declared that we were engaged in World War IV, that this was the successor to earlier world wars, that really did imply that we faced a threat that was comparable to or akin to the threat posed by Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union.
And certainly that vastly overstated the capabilities of Al-Qaeda and any of its affiliate organizations.
So many, many Americans bought into an exaggerated definition of the threat.
That was a major mistake.
Certainly one of the foundations of a sound strategy would be to appraise the threat more realistically.
Well, another part of that, too, is, well, Tom Woods on the other day said every single war America's ever been in, our government was just standing there and all of a sudden got attacked for no reason at all, except for maybe how good we are.
And that's really part of this, too, is that the underlying premise of why we were attacked fits with the domino theory that we have to remake the Middle East.
These people are poor and disadvantaged and ignorant and illiterate, and we have to come and give them freedom and prosperity so that they won't want to attack us anymore, as opposed to what I would call the real reasons we were attacked, which was all our intervention there in the first place.
Well, I think you're right.
I mean, it's an unfortunate characteristic of the American people, I think, to have short memories and to favor a version of history that's kind of sanitized and leaves out the complexities and the ugly parts.
It's very human, I think, to want to do that, but it doesn't serve our interests.
You are correct.
We had been engaged in a variety of policies in the Middle East for decades before 9-11, some of which may have been appropriate, others that were misguided and stupid.
We had blood on our hands, we had dirt under our fingernails, and that history doesn't excuse anything that happened on 9-11, but the history is essential for us to understand why 9-11 happened.
The American sort of story of history was the story that tended to focus on things like World War II and the Cold War and had put the Middle East and the U.S. role in the Middle East way, way, way on the periphery.
Well, and it remains that way, doesn't it?
Everybody paid a lot of attention to the war for the first few months of it and then maybe again for a little bit of the worst of the violence in 2006, 2007, and then now it's back on the back burner behind celebrity news.
Yeah, we've tuned it out again, and that is deeply unfortunate.
Oh, by the way, and I'm sorry to backtrack on you, I just wanted to ask you to go ahead and narrow that down since you know the answer.
How many brigades are in a division when we're talking about escalation in Afghanistan?
How many brigades are in a division?
Yeah.
I think in the Army these days it's either four or five, but the difference is that, I mean, in essence the Army deals in brigade packages.
The Army doesn't send a division anywhere.
It sends brigades, and that's sort of the package that one would speak in.
Think of a brigade as about 5,000 soldiers.
So what they're talking about is sending...
Somewhere between, let's say, 15,000 and 25,000 additional soldiers.
Well, and so then when we get back to why we were attacked in the first place and how this fits, Robert A. Pape, for example, the author of the book Dying to Win, says, well, listen, if occupation of foreign countries is what causes suicide terrorism, then we need to occupy them less, not more.
It seems like kind of a basic argument, but it's one that hasn't been won yet.
No, it hasn't.
But, I mean, I haven't read Pape's book.
I'm familiar with the argument, but that argument really...
His view of terrorism is not one that really reflects the commonplace view of terrorism among the typical American citizen.
Right.
Not yet.
We'll have to work on that, I think.
Right.
And now, OK, something else in the last few minutes here, if I can keep it to the top of the hour, that you address in your book here, The Limits of Power, The End of American Exceptionalism, is the imperial presidency and the status of our constitutional system and, well, basically how it's been pushed to the wayside as the presidency, as foreign affairs dominate, the president becomes dominant in government affairs, even here in domestic policy.
Yes.
I mean, what you described has happened.
It's largely, I suppose you could say it began really with the Great Depression, but it really is the American involvement in World War II and then in the Cold War that were most crucial in creating the institution that we should properly call the imperial presidency.
And it does reflect a massive distortion, in my judgment, of what the founders intended to be our system of governance.
I would want to emphasize that it's simply not the case that presidents have, in a sense, hijacked the Constitution in many respects.
The Congress has thrust power at the president, and the imperial presidency came into existence in many respects because the Congress wanted the president to assume this quasi-imperial status, especially with regard to national security matters.
And we're never going to get out of that unless the Congress reasserts itself and insists on playing the role that the framers of the Constitution wished the Congress to play.
Well, now, why would congressmen want to give their authority away?
Well, I think we need to appreciate the way the Cold War was viewed.
I mean, the Cold War was viewed as this unprecedented national security emergency, the belief that we faced unprecedented danger, the prospect of World War III, and there emerged a consensus view in Washington, D.C. that only the president could keep us safe, that the president had to be entrusted with vast new authorities in order to ensure that Soviet aggression would be deterred or anticipated or defeated, and I think that created an environment in which Congress became increasingly deferential to the executive branch on matters related to national security, even though that kind of deference at the time of the Vietnam War had produced enormous catastrophe.
Even the Vietnam catastrophe wasn't sufficient to persuade the Congress that it needed to reclaim the kind of authority that had ceded to the White House.
It seems kind of strange, doesn't it, that this massive power that was built up to protect us from the Soviet Union, and I guess you could say ultimately did, you know, it would seem like with the collapse of the Soviet Union that Americans would be confident in their invulnerability, and yet instead it seems like the constant state of fear and emergency somehow held over to the point where we apply almost Soviet Union-like powers to a group of pirates hiding out in Waziristan.
Yeah, I think that what happened, this would, I'll oversimplify, but there was a brief moment at the end of the Cold War when the idea of a peace dividend became the topic du jour in Washington.
There was an expectation that after the Cold War that there would be a new look given to U.S. national security policy and the size of the national security apparatus, but that inclination got nipped in the bud when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, and we had this first seemingly great military crisis of the post-Cold War era, Operation Desert Storm, and when Desert Storm ended in what seemed, I emphasize seemed, a great and unprecedented military victory, I think at that moment both the American people and the American political elites decided that maintaining a great military power sounded like a pretty good idea, that permanent military supremacy really needed to be a cornerstone of U.S. policy, and after Operation Desert Storm there was no serious debate about major changes in the configuration of U.S. forces.
There was no serious consideration about revising our global military presence.
That was the real turning point.
A turning point that was no turning point.
Right, the turning point where we decided not to turn, and of course I guess the Drug War was sort of a stand-in between the Cold War and the War on Terrorism, if you think in terms of South America policy and that kind of thing.
Well, not just the Drug War.
I mean, if you recall the decade between the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the Global War on Terror, it actually was a decade of enormous military activism.
Bill Clinton was the president for most of that period of time, and Bill Clinton used U.S. forces more frequently for more different purposes in more different places than any other president up to his time.
Now, whether we're talking about Somalia or Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, on and on, it was Clinton who made the use of force routine.
Wow, that's funny.
You know, I had always heard this statistic more than any other president since Truman, but you're saying ever.
Yeah, I think it could make a strong case.
Interesting, yeah.
Well, and I actually have the sound bite here.
It's just a couple of seconds long.
I'll play it.
This is George Bush Sr. after Operation Desert Storm.
It's a proud day for America, and by God, we've kicked Vietnam Syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
And that's that Vietnam Syndrome where the American people didn't want to go and engage in military adventures because of the disaster in Vietnam, and Desert Storm proved, as you said, seemingly that the American military could do anything, which sort of leads us to the quagmire we're stuck in today.
I mean, it's not a straight line, but the dots are there, and if you connect the dots, you're exactly right.
Well, I guess I'd like to ask you for a way out of here.
If Obama had made you the national security advisor and you gave him your sound advice, how do we begin to extricate ourselves from this disaster and try to get back to that limited republic that we've given away here?
Well, I think one of the most important things would be to critically assess what the global war on terror has produced and to consider whether or not global war is the proper response to violent Islamic radicalism.
I don't think it is.
If indeed that's the case, then what is an alternative strategy?
I think the alternative strategy would de-emphasize military power and emphasize alternative forms of power, and that in and of itself might create some space to have a debate about what ought to be the foundation of U.S. foreign policy going forward.
All right, everybody, that's Andrew J. Bacevich.
He's a professor of international relations at Boston University, a Vietnam veteran, formerly taught at West Point and Johns Hopkins University.
He's the author of The New American Militarism, The Irony of American History, American Empire, The Realities and Consequences of American Diplomacy, and The Limits of Power, The End of American Exceptionalism.
Thank you very much for your time on the show today.
Well, thanks for having me on.
We'll be right back.
