Andrew Bacevich: American Power and.
The Limits Of Power End American Exceptionalism Andrew J Bacevich The Limits Of Power End American Exceptionalism Andrew J Bacevich PDF Download The Limits Of Power. Summary of The Limits of Power The End of American. Former military officer Andrew J. Bacevich teaches history and international relations at. The Limits of Power: Andrew Bacevich on the End of American. It was prepared — it specialized in power projection. ANDREW BACEVICH: It still doesn’t do. Description of the book 'The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism': “Andrew Bacevich speaks truth to power, no matter who’s in power, which may be. Bacevich, The Limits of Power. Bacevich. New York: Metropolitan Books. These words of review were composed before we knew the results of the 2. It was generally assumed some seriously major changes in national leadership would be the consequence if ballot results favored Barack Obama. There was also a parallel hypothesis. Just by themselves, recent financial tidal waves could be shock treatment severe enough to work lasting changes in the American future. Those economic and cultural changes ultimately may be more historically important to the country than the identity of the incoming president. All of this is speculative, to be sure. There’ll always be citizens wedded to Ronald Reagan’s cheerleading vision of the United States as a mystical city on the hill. Andrew Bacevich definitely would not be among such beguiled Americans. What the decorated Vietnam War veteran turned professor at Boston College alternatively sees in times ahead is an end to American empire and exceptionalism. This is being brought about by the aforesaid “Limits of Power.”Dimming the American future (again, regardless of who is elected president this year) are “three interlocking crises.” And all of them are “our own making, too.” The first crisis is “economic and cultural, the second political and the third military.”Bacevich enlists the prescient views of theologian Reinhold Niebuhr at critical pivot points in this brief, compelling book. We think, or we had foolishly thought, of being a super- super power, always able to get whatever we wished or commanded. Bacevich rightly contends “Iraq has revealed the futility of counting on military power to sustain our habits of national profligacy,” when personal and national debt once were not seriously grinding issues. But the post- World War II golden age of America and the American middle class has ended. Domestic oil production peaked in 1. Jimmy Carter draws unusual praise in this book for trying to tell his countrymen they must change their energy consumption ways. Only now is Carter’s warning and foresight finally appreciated, and being acted upon. Ronald Reagan proved the anti- Carter, becoming the modern prophet of profligacy. Reagan’s abrogation of ancient bits of folk wisdom (balance the books, pay as you go, save for a rainy day) “did as much to recast America’s moral constitution as did sex, drugs and rock and roll.” But “far more accurately than Jimmy Carter, Reagan understood what made Americans tick: They wanted self- gratification, not self- denial.”It was Reagan who even provided the strategic underpinnings of George W. Bush’s global war on terror. Reagan’s “Star Wars” and Bush’s doctrine of optional war “offered an antidote to the uncertainties and anxieties of living in a world not run entirely in accordance with American preferences.”In the second and third elements of “The Limits of Power,” Bacevich provides juicy hunks of history, and his own dead- on insights and analysis. All make fascinating reading. Much material involves stuff we either never knew or sufficiently appreciated. The mindset that animated Rice, Cheney and others in the Bush administration that “Saddam Hussein’s existence had become unendurable” had roots in the Washington- promoted killings of Iran’s prime minister, Mossadegh, in 1. Guatemala’s president, Jacobo Guzman, in 1. On national security decisions, pretty much since Harry Truman’s era, Bacevich describes policy making as oligarchic, not democratic. Its actual purpose is to control the information provided the American people. Each has also relied on military power to conceal or manage problems that stemmed from the nation’s habits of profligacy. That sort of unhappy and unproductive future will require not only advanced weaponry but the ability to put boots on the ground and keep them there, according to Bacevich, who retired from the U. S. Army with the rank of colonel. He then turned to teaching and writing, a real boon to his fellow Americans. Readers ought to be aware that Bacevich’s son, named after his father, became a first lieutenant in the Army and was a combat casualty in the spring of 2.
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