The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism

This book contains some good questions about where we are as a nation and what we are making priorities by how we spend our money and how we excercise force with our military might. This was written before president Obama took office. Several things that were blamed on Republicans or neo-cons are still things that are practiced by the current administration. But there was some discussion on how some things have stayed the same. The government keeps getting bigger and Americans seem to keep on believing that we are an exceptional nation that makes the rules that the rest of the world needs to follow. We are spending and consuming our way into oblivion.

He discusses how the military sees war currently and how the view has changed since WWII and since Vietnam and how the nation's view of what war means has changed. This included discussion on how we have rejected the draft as a means to create a citizen army and how we now depend on a professional fighting force. It is easier politically to send a professional force into war than it is to convince the country that drafting people away from their normal lives is appropriate.

The military does not plan to win wars. We win battles and topple regimes but we stayed in Iraq and Afganistan this time with no military plan to win. He was fairly critical of Gen Tommy Franks (commander who was in charge of invading Iraq and Afganistan) and his failure to plan beyong beating the convential forces we attacked.

In his summation chapter he deals with two ideas I didn't feel he really discussed earlier on that I disagree with. One was nuclear disarmement. He wants the US to totally get rid of all our nukes and states "Furthermore, the day is approaching when the United States will be able to deter other nuclear-armed states, like Russia and China, without itself relying on nuclear weapons." He goes on to talk about how precision munitions are better. He also makes an offhand comment about how America was not justified in using the atom bomb to end the war with Japan. I completely disagree. More nations are getting access to the bomb and giving up this option leaves us at the mercy of their threats unless we strike as soon as they threaten.

The other idea was that we needed to end our dependence on energy sources outside our borders and to do this we need to end global warming. I'm not convinced these two things tie together really well.


A retired army Colonel, the author's son was US Army Lieutenant killed in action in 2007. There are many negative comments about the direction our country is going. Some of these come off as reasoned and some of them are reasonable. However, I have to wonder how much of his view on this subject is informed by the fact that his son died fighting to support our efforts in the middle east.

We Americans are in denial. as long as they insist that the power of the USA is without limits, they will continue to guzzle imported oil, binge on imports, dream imperial dreams. We will ignore the necessity of settling accounts, the budget, debt, and consumption as politicians (both parties) erode military might on unnecessary and winnable wars. We will continue to allow officials responsible for failed policies to dodge accountability. Are we willfully self-destructive? It often seems so. Bacevich analyzes the more dangerous national myths that currently (mis)guide American policy.

"The United States today finds itself threatened by three interlocking crises. The first of the crises is economic and cultural, the second political, and the third military. All three share this characteristic: They are of our own making."

Concerned about the direction the US is headed? You need to read this book.

Status quo, according to an old joke, is Latin for “the mess we’re in.” Andrew Bacevich—a retired U. S. Army colonel turned historian of international relations—dissects the status quo in this brief, erudite book and concludes that we are, as a nation, very deep in a very serious mess of our own making. Bacevich argues that, between 1960 and 1980, the United States abandoned fiscal discipline and personal responsibility in favor of a culture of mindless consumerism, creating an insatiable thirst for cheap oil. Determination to secure the nation’s supply of foreign oil encouraged overseas adventurism, and changes in American military culture – the end of the draft and the delusion that technological change had fundamentally altered the nature of war – isolated politicians and the public from its consequences. The distrust sown between politicians and generals during the Vietnam era broke the traditional civil-military power structure, and placed decisions about war and peace into the hands of Presidents and their circles of unelected, unaccountable national security advisors. Iraq and Afghanistan are, Bacevich argues, merely the latest results of pernicious transformation for which Democrats and Republicans bear equal responsibility.The argument of this book is thus – in effect – that of Bacevich’s The New American Militarism, tightened and streamlined, with incandescent anger allowed show, more clearly, beneath the generally measured tone. Where that book dug deeply into the historical roots of America’s shift to a permanent war footing, this one sketches them briefly and then moves on. What that one covered in a series of thematic chapters, this one knits into three broad sections devoted to crises cultural, military, and political. Figuratively, where that was an entire course, this is a set of three impassioned lectures.Even more than in The New American Militarism Bacevich is writing a jeremiad here, and the book shares the limitations of that genre. It is better on defining the problem than articulating a solution, and its indictment of post-JFK American culture ("vulgar and soft") feels more rooted in a conservative's disdain for the 1960s than in the specifics of American social and cultural history. These issues do not, however, diminish the book’s power, or blunt its timely message. The Republican administration that took the nation to war in Iraq and Afghanistan was, as the book was published, yielding to a Democratic one. Six years into that new administration, Bacevich’s picture of a systemic crisis that transcends partisan politics seems alarmingly relevant.

This short book by Andrew Bacevich deserves close attention from everyone concerned about the direction our country has been traveling. He dissects root causes and incompetence ruthlessly and reasonably, which is just what a new Administration and Congress need to read.

Every American needs to read this book, and read it soon. Bacevich, a retired Army Colonel and now History Prof in Boston, puts forth the case that we, the American people, have allowed our present economic, military and political status to come about through our own non-involvement and obsession with consumption at any price. It is a convincing argument and although I was somewhat dismayed that the conclusion settled for hopelessness with a touch of condescension, the book as a whole is a grand charge for change....and not change from DC...but changing our ways of living before we drown in our own profligacy.

Bacevich's book, which is dedicated to his soldier son killed in Iraq, argues that the U.S. is no longer a true republic, and that it is now governed by an “imperial presidency” and is “a de facto one-party state” in which a Congress marked by pervasive “corruption” is ruled by “an Incumbents’ Party” and politics is theater. The “national security state,” Bacevich believes, is marked by failures: 1) to avert 9/11; 2) to bring to justice its architects; 3) to respond appropriately to Islamic extremism; 4) in the Iraq and Afghan wars. Bacevich shows that George W. Bush did not break with past tradition, he has affirmed a long-standing ideology of national security informed by four convictions with deep roots in American history: 1) History has a purpose; 2) The U.S. embodies freedom; 3) American success is guaranteed by Providence; 4) Freedom must prevail everywhere for the American way of life to endure. This highly elastic ideology, now “hardwired into the American psyche,” serves chiefly to legitimate action of the American executive. The ideology serves the “self-selecting, self-perpetuating camarilla” [i.e. cabal]—a power élite of “hawks” in control of national security policy since WWII. The gargantuan national security state shrouds itself in secrecy and lies. It has done “more harm than good.” The Bay of Pigs fiasco led Kennedy to realize that the system was out of control and he changed leadership, revamped institutions (McNamara, Bundy) and worked around the apparatus (e.g. did not use the NSC in the Cuban missile crisis, instead devising a small extra-constitutional group, an approach often replicated since). The actual institutions of the national security state undergo perpetual reform while those who hold power regard them as “not partners but competitors” and “the American people remain in the dark,” the apparatus remaining in place because it provides legitimacy for “political arrangements that are a source of status, influence, and considerable wealth.” We should learn 1) “[T]he ideology of national security, American exceptionalism in its most baleful form, poses an insurmountable obstacle to sound policy”; 2) “Americans can no longer afford to underwrite a government that does not work”; 3) “To attend any longer to this elite would be madness . . . today’s Wise Men . . . have forfeited any further claim to trust."