All right y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our first guest on the show today is Andrew J. Bacevich.
He is Director of Undergraduate Studies and Professor of International Relations and U.S. History at Boston University.
He previously taught at West Point and Johns Hopkins.
He's the author of Washington Rules, America's Path to Permanent War, The Limits of Power, The End of American Exceptionalism, The Long War, A New History of U.S. National Security Policy Since World War II, and The New American Militarism.
The list goes on.
In fact, he's a regular writer at tomdispatch.com and of course we run all of those pieces under Tom Englehart's name at antiwar.com, which we're doing today.
The piece is called The Passing of the Post-War Era.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you, sir?
Very fine, thanks for having me on.
Well, I really appreciate you joining us today and I really appreciate this article.
It's a pretty succinct look at the end of an era from right in the middle of it, which is, I guess, true.
I mean, the gist of the article is, first of all, acknowledging how difficult it is to discern real change, big change, transformative change.
Nonetheless, it seems to me to be fair to speculate that we're in the midst of that right now.
And to make that case, I cite four factors.
One, the failure of George W. Bush's freedom agenda, his plan to liberate the greater Middle East.
Two, the collapse of the American economy that began in 2008.
Three, the Arab Spring and the transformation of the greater Middle East that is happening because Arabs want change, not because Westerners are imposing it.
And then, four, the European economic crisis and the evidence that the European Union is today looking more and more to Beijing rather than to Washington and New York for economic salvation.
Yeah, Romney's phrase in the debate the other night was that America should continue to lead the free world, which I guess meant the West, and that then they, we must all, the West, lead the rest of the world, and it must be like that for the next hundred years, and it will be under a Romney administration.
Well, I mean, it was funny.
I was just talking to somebody about that remark that he made, and in particular about the use of this phrase, free world.
Of course, free world was a term coined to describe the anti-communist camp during the Cold War.
You have to wonder exactly what free world means today.
We're more than 20 years after the end of the Cold War.
Communism has collapsed, except perhaps in the People's Republic of China, and of course, we're deeply in debt to those people.
So, the whole perspective that Governor Romney expressed seems to me to be suggestive of the extent to which our political elites, and this is not a partisan comment, because Democrats are just as bad, our political elites really haven't kept up with the way the world is being transformed.
We're just not living in 1945 or 1948 or 1958 any longer.
You know, something that's been very hard for me to accept is that I understand how the world works that much better than somebody like Mitt Romney, who's now on his second try running for President of the United States and has a real shot at it, and I have known more about it since I was just a little kid, or at least a teenager in high school.
I was always saying, all empires fall.
It's the only way to destroy America is to overextend it, to try to conquer the world like Peaky and the Brain.
You'd have to be some narrow-minded, megalomaniacal simpleton, really, to think that you're just going to go ahead and do it, and because you say so, it's going to work, and they've really pretty much destroyed America with this.
They really are dumber than me as a sophomore in high school, sir.
Well, when you were a sophomore in high school, you appreciated that American power does have a limit, which is the beginning of wisdom, and yet these people running for high office at least profess to believe otherwise, basically ignoring any number of facts in the economic realm, in the military realm, in the political realm, all of which, especially over the last decade, have emphasized the extent to which our power has very real limits indeed.
Is it just the consensus in D.C., the kind of, well, we all believe that, so go ahead, sort of like we all agree that Barack Obama's going to bring in this hope and change, and people just sort of assent to the common conventional wisdom, is that it?
Because nobody could have a real argument for, yeah, America's going to conquer Eurasia, and it's going to be fine.
Well, I mean, that's a good question.
My sense is that politicians will say whatever they think they need to say in order to advance their political fortune, and for whatever reason, our politicians seem to lack confidence that the American people can take on serious realities.
They seem to think that we the people prefer to have a smoke blown at us, and all this talk about American centuries and leading the free world really does simply amount to no more than a bunch of smoke.
So I think that's one explanation, is that the politicians, and the other one I think is that we have to recognize that there are institutions deeply invested in maintaining the status quo, whether we're referring to the military-industrial complex or the national security state.
Those are large institutions with people who are absolutely committed to avoiding any significant change in the way things have been done over the past half century or more.
Well, now from a military perspective, do you worry about all those bases scattered throughout the stands, those lily pads that Donald Rumsfeld was so intent on building, and what might happen to them at some point?
It seems like just a setup for a black swan sort of world revolution in a week kind of a thing to me.
Well, I mean, my view on bases is that, you know, it is not that.
We should close down every last base that we have abroad.
What we ought to do, in my judgment, is engage in a sober evaluation of where bases make sense, where they are contributing to stability and to securing their interests, and those bases we should retain.
But we also should be open to the possibility that there are some bases that are completely redundant, for example, those in Western Europe, and also bases that are counterproductive, where instead of contributing to stability, they contribute to instability.
And most of the U.S. military presence in the Islamic world falls in that last category.
Well, I guess the new government in Kyrgyzstan is kicking us out of that air base there, where they have one, I think, just over the hill from a Russian base, which always kind of bothered me.
I wonder if you think that they're going to be able to stay in those stands.
Are those bases that you would consider keeping?
No, that's not where I think we should be.
I believe that the bases that the overseas bases that make the most sense are those in the Asia Pacific region.
I do believe that there the U.S. presence contributes to stability.
Or to put it another way, were we to pull out of Japan and South Korea and elsewhere, there'd be a high likelihood that an arms race involving China, Japan, and South Korea would begin, with Japan probably going nuclear, and none of that would be good for us or good for the world.
So to my mind, the Asia Pacific presence, at least for the time being, probably makes sense to sustain.
And now, what about just the, you know, when you talk about the collapse of the economy and and the freedom agenda, you could put in here the erasure of our Bill of Rights as well, I think.
It occurs to me, Andrew, that it really doesn't have to be this way, that our opportunity costs here are really extraordinary, that we've blown it, that that unipolar moment, if they had just been, you know, that phrase that George Bush Senior used to say, prudence, you know, it wouldn't be prudent to go and act crazy and let Dick Cheney do whatever he wants or whatever.
And it seems like it doesn't have to be this way at all.
This could be an American century, not in terms of dominating the world, but in terms of this country being a-okay, if it wasn't for all these bad decisions that our leaders keep making.
What do you think about that?
I think you're correct.
And I think your use of the word prudence is dead on.
Prudence and realistic thinking has been notable by its absence in Washington for the last 20 years.
All right.
Well, we're over time.
Thank you very much for your time.
Really appreciate it.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.
Everybody, that's Andrew Bacevich, professor at Boston University and regular at tomdispatch.com.
We feature all of his articles for Tom Dispatch under Tom's name at antiwar.com as well, including the article running today, The Passing of the Post-War Era.
And his new book, which is coming out shortly, is called The Short American Century, A Postmortem.
