Conversations with History: Andrew J. Bacevich

welcome to a conversation with history I'm Harry Kreisler of the Institute of International Studies I guess today is Andrew bacevich who is professor of international relations at Boston University and is the author most recently of the new American militarism Andrew welcome to Berkeley oh thanks very much for having me where were you born and raised I was born in the Midwest in Normal Illinois in 1947 my my parents were living there my dad was going to Illinois Wesleyan University on the GI Bill but after he graduated from Medical School in the early 50s I really grew up in Indiana mm-hmm and looking back how do you think your parents shaped your thinking about the world well I think probably to two important facts first of all they were they they were and I am Roman Catholic and took took that Catholicism pretty seriously and secondly they were both World War two veterans my dad had served in the Coast Guard my mom had served in the Army Nurse Corps then my dad served as a lieutenant during the Korean War this was right just as he came out of medical school and I think those two factors sort of 50s vintage Roman Catholicism and the war service as big events in their lives probably made me gave me my sort of worldview at least to start out mm-hmm and and what what what was most important in your concluding that you wanted to be a professional soldier well I I didn't go to West Point necessarily thinking I was going to be a professional soldier I went to West Point probably because I was absolutely determined as a Midwestern or to go somewhere out east for school that seemed like the definition of sophistication out east and West Point was an attractive opportunity and it was free so I didn't go necessarily thinking I was going to I knew I had it was going to have an obligation to serve for a period of time but it was really only after I had graduated that a five-year commitment transitioned into a longer period of service and and what were some of your postings were you in Vietnam yeah I graduated from West Point in 1969 and served in Vietnam from the summer of 1970 to the summer of 1971 so that's sort of after Tet you know sort of a very bleak part period of the war and then pretty much did the sort of things that army officers did in the latter part of the Cold War meaning we spent a couple tours in Germany we bounced around different posts in the United States attended various military schools and also had a posting in the early 1990s in the Persian Gulf as we began to make this transition to a military focus on a different part of the world do you think in retrospect that your the education you got at West Point adequately prepared you for your life and work as a soldier I think I think it prepared me well for my life as a soldier in retrospect I really don't think I got the education that I wished I'd gotten in that regard it was going to graduate school in history at Princeton I think that really began to open my eyes and I'm very grateful that the I was the army that sent me that president had that opportunity but intellectually I think graduate school made all the difference and and when in your military career did you go to Princeton mid-seventies I was a captain and the army had decided that I would have an assignment teaching history at West Point and so they sent me to Princeton for a couple years of graduate study to prepare me to teach and I ended up teaching there for three years before going back into the real army to do you know regular kinds of assignments and what was your the focus of your work in in history at Princeton I mean I'm sure you took a broad education but then what did you want to do your district I mean I specialized I guess you would say in US diplomatic history principally 20th century and really principally early twentieth century my advisor was the then chairman of the department he's now deceased richard Challinor and i also did a lot of work with also now deceased arthur link the great Wilson scholar so I think under the influence of both those scholars I became very interested in the period from around the spanish-american war through the Progressive Era and that's really where I focus in diplomatic history or right oh yeah I ended my dissertation which was published as a book called diplomat and khaki was a biography of an army officer who's who had certainly a reasonably successful military career but actually achieved greater prominence as a soldier who was a diplomatic troubleshooter for Teddy Roosevelt for Henry Stimson for Herbert Hoover his name was Frank Ross McCoy he wasn't mean just as a and this is he's a third ranking figure believe me but but if you remember when the Japanese invaded Manchuria in 1931 not that either of us remembers it but when the Japanese invaded Manchuria in 1931 the League of Nations decided that they were going to put together a commission to investigate this to determine the causes and if they found that it was indeed Japanese aggression which of course it was presumably to impose some sorts of sanctions and the Hoover administration and in particular Secretary of State Henry Stimson decided that the United States would have a representative on this commission which at the time was a big deal because of course we had refused to join the League of Nations and for that position Stimson turned to his friend Major General Frank Ross McCoy of the US Army so McCoy was the American member of the of what was called the Litton Commission I'm curious about your your intellectual evolution in this interview and to what extent and in what ways was the the Princeton Education the focus on history on diplomatic history was that an eye-opener in terms of putting the military in a larger context did that happen to you I'm just curious because clearly as we as we look at what you've written your thinking has has has really evolved in your understanding of the military is is embedded in a broader historical context right I mean going to Princeton and studying at Princeton and doing this dissertation set me on a trajectory in which I became interested in the military's role in foreign policy or or how how thinking about military power formed a component of our foreign policy having said that I think that the journey has taken me quite far from where I began let me reference Arthur link again I mean link is a great biographer of Woodrow Wilson and is a was a scholar I was a titanically important scholar and when I was with link very much under his influence I have to say that I I probably adhered to a great man view of history that it was the Woodrow Wilson's of the world and the Henry Stimson's and then when you slip down a couple of ranks the Frank Ross McCoy's who were the movers and shakers who made things happen as I got older I moved away from that and and I no longer really think that it's the george w bush's or the Condoleezza Rice's or the Paul Wolfowitz --es or the Bill Clinton's or the Bill Clinton's who are really determining our fate that I have come to believe that they are themselves shaped by all kinds of other factors that they represent that they manifest but that if you want the answer how did this happen how do we get here I don't think you begin by saying well what did George Bush mean what did he do but rather you have to say where did he come from and what were the influences that shaped him that gets us closer to the truth I think before we talk about your new book I want to pursue this this the shaping forces with regard to your intellectual Odyssey and I guess I am curious about how your ideas about the military evolved as you were getting this this this broader education did you come to see things about the military that you had not perceived when you were just a soldier I began to see the military and more critical a even when I still was a soldier my first book actually it was actually it appeared before my dissertation was published was a little volume that I did back in the mid 1980s called the Penn Tomic era a little tiny monograph and the Penn Tomic year was an examination of the US Army and how it had changed between the Vietnam War excuse me between the Korean War and the Vietnam War sort of mid to late 50s into the early 1960s this was a time when the military's fascination not just the Air Force's fascination all the services fascination with nuclear weapons was at a it was at a very high level and in many respects the study was about how the US Army grappled with the proliferation of nuclear weapons I don't mean the International proliferation but proliferation throughout the US military and the development of all kinds of small nuclear weapons and what I came to see is that the the Army's fascination with nuclear weapons and the Army's vociferous opposition to President Eisenhower's policy of massive retaliation which meant that all the Bucks were going to go to the Air Force that the Army's resistance to that was was could only be explained in part by institutional rivalries that the army was staking out positions at least in part not because the this is what the officer corps felt was in the best interest of the country but it was us against them where them was the Air Force so I began to have a more sophisticated I think view of what really motivated our our defense institutions when I got out of the Army in 1992 the Cold War's over Soviet Union's gone Desert Storm is now recent history i I was especially struck by the extent to which the United States and in particular the Department of Defense did not really respond to what seemed to be a brand-new set of facts in terms of what the international environment looked like but rather seemed to be committed to maintaining a course of action and and to put it bluntly to sustaining what had become to be a position of American global superiority in a military sense or supremacy in the military sense indefinitely interviewed into the future regardless of what the international environment looked like and I began to scratch my head and say you know it's something there's an explanation for this and the explanation is not simply that the United States stands for peace and freedom does this does this this is a theme we'll pick up in a minute when we talk about your book but I'm curious because the other interesting point to me may here there there was a evolution in your political lighting during the period that you're talking about because I think originally did you write for some of the conservative well I I didn't I started writing I didn't do any political writing when I was a serving officer no right I understand after you and I began to in the 1990s when I got out of the army I knew I wanted to find a career mm-hmm somewhere in teaching or writing I didn't know I was gonna end up teaching at Boston University but I wanted to be somewhere in that world and so I began to write for a mostly conservative magazines in the 90s I wrote for National Review for the Weekly Standard when when it opened up a couple of things for commentary magazine a fairly frequent contributor to first things which is a sort of right-leaning magazine that is concerned with religion and in politics so very seldom that I appear in anything that looked it mean left so so in a way that there was a there was a kind of a perturbation in in the world in terms of where you thought the military should be going or the way it should be thinking with the end of the Cold War versus the way it was really responding and then more broadly the the way the US response was responding to this new world that opened up after the end of the coal I think the reason though that I defined myself as a conservative when I sort of became politically conscious was probably more related to cultural issues than do foreign policy issues I mean I'm I'm probably on the traditionalist side in the in the so-called culture war and I probably remained there today actually if we were going to talk about those sorts of issues and I assume that my allies in the culture war would also be my allies in terms of thinking about u.s. foreign policy but that turned out to be quite wrong quite wrong because I think that the people on the right foreign policy thinking on the right came to be imbued with a sense of hubris and confidence and belief that we possessed the power to transform the world mm-hmm and probably you know needed to transform the world for our own well-being and that of all of humankind and it was that type of thinking and the way it actually manifested itself in real policies that set me off in a different direction in terms of foreign policy let's talk now about your new book which I will show the camera the new American militarism how Americans are seduced by war published by Oxford University Press and and I guess the first question would be in what what is the new militarism how is it manifested and then we'll go into the very complex explanation of the forces and factors that that have brought into being well the definition of militarism that I use in the book and I understand this is a loaded term and and and when I say that there's a new American militarism I don't mean that it's like German militarism or Japanese militarism I think I think that just as we do Empire in our own peculiar way we have come to do militarism in our own peculiar way but nonetheless I define it in the book as including a couple of things one is a a greatly overstated confidence and the efficacy of force that that force is an eminently useful tool in American hands and this is that therefore military power is an opportunity to be exploited rather than something to be viewed skeptically so that's one aspect of it second aspect is that militarism that I try to describe is reflected in a conviction that it that military power has come to be to be the the chief sort of emblem of national greatness you know it's not the productivity of our factories or the quality of our education system it's by golly that you know we've got 12 carrier battle groups and that that's what makes America stand apart from other nations of the world and the third component of the new American militarism is a romanticization of soldiers I mean an inclination to at least give lip service to the notion of soldiers being America's best and brightest and a group of people morally not simply set apart but morally superior to the average citizen that that's how I describe the phenomenon how I think it manifests itself a number of ways and a number of very concrete ways I mean first of all the manifesto manifests itself in the size and configuration of our forces you know we when I was a kid growing up a phrase like British Empire or Royal Air Force or Royal Navy these conjured up institutions that were to be reckoned with we're serious but we live in a time now when the United States is spending more money on defense than every other nation of the world put together spending an order of magnitude more money then all of our would-be adversaries put together and far far out spending even our what would appear to be a significant ally like Great Britain and we've got 12 carrier battle groups they have none today the United States Marine Corps which most of us tend to think of as the force that charges over the beaches today the United States Marine Corps has more attack aircraft than the Royal Air Force and of course the Unites States Marine Corps is only one of actually three Air Force's we've got because we've got the United States Navy and we've also got this thing called the United States Air Force today the Marine Corps has by itself has half again as many men and women in uniform as the entire British Army and of course we have a second army that we actually called the army and although maybe most people aren't aware but the army actually operates its own Air Force 5000 aircraft in the US Army so the answer to how this militarism manifests itself is impart lean the size and configuration and the cost of these US forces but also manifests itself in where they are over 60 years as you and I speak were 60 years after VE Day and we still have US forces in Germany we're almost 60 years after v-j day we still have forces in Japan we have forces in literally dozens of countries around the world I know you've hit Chalmers Johnson on this program Chalmers Johnson's counts as we have forces in more than a hundred countries around the world and the number is increasing not decreasing just in the last couple of weeks the head of the Afghan government invited the United States to keep US forces permanently in Afghanistan and and this is something we all know in a sense and sort of shrug off we just a sort of accepted but militarism also manifests itself in an increased willingness to use force I mean during the Cold War which was a time of heightened military awareness we actually used force fairly infrequently I think by my count there are six major interventions during the Cold War since the Cold War ended in a period of both conservative Republicans lease ostensibly conservative Republican and liberal democratic administrations we've come to use force almost on an annual basis they're benign major military intervention since the end of the Cold War and the nine doesn't count innumerable lesser uses of force like Bill Clinton launching cruise missiles you know at Afghanistan or Sudan or wherever the case may be so the use of force has become almost routine so I could go on but I mean it's it's a it's in things like that and an important point to me is things that we have come to take for granted as part and parcel of our position in the world mmm the in a sense the most disturbing aspect of it is the extent to which see these are things we just shrug off that's an interesting point because as you were talking one of the the striking things in all of this is the extent to which we're not aware of these things is in in our sense of ourselves yeah well is it that we're aware of them and yet we're not aware in a sense of what perhaps they really signify right right but but you're you're really saying in a way so that then in your book you you point out a number of things that have changed over time for example the whole notion of the citizen soldier right the what has changed over time the the military notion well if you don't have a Soviet enemy and more than you don't need the forces that you have so that again and again we don't recognize what's going on in the context or of our own history or in the way the world has changed it's exactly right I mean there it would be wrong to argue that we have been a peaceful people we have not been a peaceful people where we have been a people where when we've identified an important cause or interest we've dealt with it and some of the causes have been very good causes some of the causes have been pretty dubious but there was a clear pattern to the way we constituted and maintain military forces over the first two centuries of our history and the pattern was that when we needed big forces we built them to go fight Mexico and take California in 1846 - you know crush the Confederacy in 1861 to liberate Cuba in 1898 we work for those causes we would raise up a big force and after the crisis had passed whatever the crisis was we would radically trim down the size of the force that's what changes after the Cold War for the first time I don't we even did that after World War two you know yeah not after the Cold War the Cold War again with remarkably little debate with remarkably little discussion of what are the implications of the course upon which we are embarking well what we did was to commit ourselves to perpetual military supremacy and and that that is a commitment that has the endorsement of both mainstream liberals as much as it does mainstream conservatives I mean Hillary Clinton and John Kerry endorsed that notion as much as do george w bush now a importantly in your book you you look at a number of factors so that we understand that all of this change does suddenly happen because bush is a bush a43 is elected president and we are attacked by al-qaeda let's talk about some of those evolutionary changes that we're going on in our society one day you emphasize greatly which picks up on what you were talking about before as you spoke of your first book and how you came to an understanding of how the military responded to the nuclear technology and that is the the way the military changed after the Vietnam War to make sure that a situation like Vietnam did not happen again and and I think what you're saying is that in the in in the military's primary goal was to protect itself and its institutional status and it mix the biggest the bigger picture yeah you Huggy does reinforce a couple things you said very quickly because there at least in the argument I tried to develop they are crucial to it and the first one is that if if if an individual is not happy with what's going on in terms of our military policy don't just blame President Bush this is this is not some conspiracy that was foisted upon us by a bunch of crazy people in Washington in the aftermath of 9/11 rather 9/11 provided an opportunity for a group of people to implement with greater vigor a process that was already well underway that's one thing you said the second thing you said is that American militarism has roots that go back a pretty pretty far away and and what I would read the bulk of the book is devoted to trying to provide a considered answer to the question where did this come from and the simple answer to the question is that the new American militarism emerged as a as I think in many respects an unintended consequence of the reaction induced by the 60s in the Vietnam War that is to say that period of time that set of historical experiences that in the eyes of many Americans were very positive the Semyon here in Berkeley I suspect there there are many students faculty who would say the 60s was a positive time in American history was a time when the circle of freedom opened up there was a time when old sort of notions that have outlived their purpose were cast aside and the country was better for it I'm not not questioning that view but I would assert that there are tens of millions of other Americans who looked at the same set of events in the 1960s and said this is a disaster mm-hmm that this is where the country jumps off the precipice loses its way and losing its way most clearly manifested by the fact that we suffered defeat in Vietnam and these Americans my argument is these Americans saw in the reconstitution of American military power in the 70s and in the 80s the antidote everything they had got thought had gone wrong in the country in the 60s their intentions were in a sense honorable and we're trying to do bad to the country they thought they were trying to save the country and one of these groups is the officer corps I mean the officer corps the officer corps of the Cold War up to Vietnam enjoyed substantial status and club in Washington certainly in contrast to what the officer corps had to wear had stood in American society in the 19th century and between the two world wars and the and during the Cold War the officers of course statuses is elevated in American society and Vietnam shatters that and my argument is that when the officer car comes back from Vietnam it initiates a comprehensive program of military reform and effort to rebuild the service in particular my old service the army which was the one that was most devastated by the defeat in Vietnam an effort to rebuild the services motivated chiefly by a desire to restore the military's collective status in its standing in the eyes of American citizens and how could I how could I make that claim well I would make that claim by pointing out a very important point and that is that when the US military came home from Vietnam it didn't say well by golly we're gonna figure out how how we got whupped and we're gonna make sure that the next time we go fight one of those kinds of Wars we're gonna win that's actually how the French army reacted to its defeat in Indochina they said we're gonna figure this out and we're gonna win the next one on the contrary the American military comes back from Vietnam and and and says we're never gonna do that again what we're gonna do is we are going to reconfigure ourselves in this reform project so that we are prepared to fight the sorts of wars that were most comfortable with wars in which the generals are in control not all the nagging politicians like Robert McNamara wars in which there's a prospect of decision victory not just sort of endless mucking around in jungles and in rice paddies and Wars in which the moral stakes will be clear and therefore we can enjoy popular support rather than Wars as was the case in Vietnam where the moral issues were murky to put it mildly and the people mostly turned away and abandon the military well weren't work where was the military going to find this war this this this prospect of war this this contingency and the answer is Europe so the post-vietnam military reform project instituted by the military was to get ready to defend Western Europe conventionally now was it likely that that contingency was ever going to happen the answer's no and it became even more likely what's the cold war but that but in a sense that was part of the point yeah the purpose is not to rebuild the military to go off and fight wars which are nasty and terrible things the purpose was to reconstitute the institution and somehow overcome the divide between the institution and the American people that had resulted from from Vietnam so the officer corps becomes one of the important institutions that sees the reconstitution of military power as the antidote to its particular problems that came out of the 60s and and its defeat as opposed to looking as and thinking about the world the way the world might change and anticipating new threats on the horizon as opposed to old ones right yeah I mean you will you will recall that when the Cold War of course ends much to the surprise of everybody at least most of us that in in in a remarkably ironic episode just as the cold war ends saddam hussein chooses to invade Kuwait and literally many of the forces that were in Germany that had been preparing for this big war against the Warsaw Pact that were about to be brought home instead where they were going to stand down instead were sent to the Persian Gulf to fight a war which turned out in a sense to be the war that they had wanted kept instead of being against it rather formidable soviet army it was against a sort of rattletrap third-rate there the army although nobody particularly noticed that in in celebrating what seemed to be a decisive victory in your book you go on and we don't have enough time to cover all the the way these various forces and factors came together you have a chapter on the neoconservatives and the evolution of their ideas you have a chapter on the Christian evangelicals and and the evolution of their ideas the point being that in a way all of these trajectories come together to empower the president who was in place in a way we could say when when 9/11 happened there is one other group I want to focus on because it also harkens back to some and this is you have a chapter called The Fight Club where you work look war-club sorry I was thinking of the movie sorry the the war club where you talk about the script the strategist especially Albert will stutter and and hear that development of thinking became very important for putting the military together with the technology technological revolution that was occurring and technology is always very important as we go out to try to to shape the world cuz we we we believe that it's a combination of our ideas about democracy on the one hand but also the the capability that comes with the technologies that we're developing I mean one of the one of the most radical aspects of President Bush's national security strategy is the so-called Bush Doctrine of preventive war you know the president argues that we no longer can wait for threats to develop we have to destroy them before they are even threats and in many respects we implement it it's not just talk because we implemented that doctrine in our invasion of Iraq the book argues that in many respects the group that is most responsible for making that notion persuasive the notion that force is now so certain that we can use it in this preventive way the group that's most responsible for doing that are the the priesthood of defense intellectuals and the story I try to tell to oversimplify would be this that this priesthood began an immediate aftermath of her own Hiroshima with the formation of things like Rand down in Santa Monica began with the idea that nuclear weapons had made war obsolete that the only purpose or just about the only purpose of military forces henceforth was going to be to prevent Wars from happening because if war happened nuclear weapons would be used and there could be no political rationale that would justify that that's where the priesthood began at study but by the time the priesthood began to think its way through nuclear strategy in the 1950s members of this group had come to decide that deterrence making sure the other guy didn't act was actually an enormous ly complicated business president eisenhower's massive retaliation strategy assumed that a declarative posture on the part of the president backed up by the bomber forces of Strategic Air Command would suffice to prevent the Soviets from doing anything rash the intellectual said that Eisenhower was naive that what wall stood are called the the balance of terror was very delicate and required constant attention indeed by the time we got to the 1960s these defense intellectuals were arguing that in order to maintain nuclear deterrence we had to have the capability to actually go fight small Wars brushfire Wars Wars of national liberation that is to say the defense intellectuals helped to create the climate in which American decision makers like Kennedy and Johnson persuaded themselves that we needed to intervene in Vietnam well Vietnam turned out to be a disaster and in many respects Vietnam gave the lie to the project of the defense intellectuals who had argued that we needed to have this flexible response and counterinsurgency capabilities well gave a light tone but they didn't give up they came out of Vietnam with their own set of lessons and the the most important thing they took from Vietnam was to conclude that the very first glimmerings of precision weapons which were employed in Viet Nam's the in Vietnam actually had the potential to transform the very nature of warfare at the end of the Vietnam War the Air Force was using some TV guided bombs against North Korean North North Vietnamese bridges just to take out a bridge but the defense intellectuals said hey wait a second this is the this indicates something enormous ly significant and if property properly exploited information technology precision improved targeting then it's possible to create a whole new category of capability that will actually transcend weapons of mass destruction and created the opportunity ability to have discriminating offense basically with little or no collateral damage precise so that you could fight so the fog of war would be gone precisely yes and and and it's that vision well I've also glimpsed in sort of primitive form and Operation Desert Storm in 1991 seen in somewhat mature mature more mature form in nineteen 99 with the Kosovo campaign remember Kosovo is broadcast as the first war that we've won without any Americans being killed and then also advertised in the run-up to the Iraq invasion where it was said that a demonstration of shock and awe would be sufficient to topple the regime and also sort of quickly transition to a political order that would enable the Bush administration to achieve all of its its objectives now again it it's not that all of those notions come from the defense intellectuals but I do think that they played a decisive role in in in creating the rationale that ended up persuading people that shock and awe was going to quickly dispose of our Iraq problem another trajectory here that's very important and I don't want to spend a lot of time but but really that what we have beginning with President Carter is the evolution of a policy toward the Middle East that step-by-step beginning with the Carter doctrine and then followed up by by all the presidents through Bush 43 is a policy that commits ourselves to that region the primacy of the region involves committing forces and then finally ending up where we are now yeah I have one chapter that talks about the evolution of our military activities and presence in the in the Persian Gulf or the Islamic world and I actually think maybe my next book I'll try to expand on that to much greater detail but in a nutshell here's the story the way I tell it we Americans we Americans basically think of the Cold War as the dominant in a sense controlling event from the late 1940s all the way up until the fall of fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and we are deceived when we think that it's not that the Cold War's not happening and is important it is but there's something else that's going on in a sense that's being obscured by all the tension given to the Cold War and the something else that's going on is the beginning of a struggle to control the Persian Gulf and it's President Carter who of course is widely and I think terribly unfairly derided as being somehow a weak president it's President Carter who in many respects begins that project and he begins that project in his State of the Union address of January 1980 when he articulates what ends up being called the Carter doctrine and the Carter doctrine simply says the Persian Gulf is a vital interest of the United States and will fight to prevent the hostile power from controlling it now when he says that the principle hostile power he's worried about is a Soviet Union but what he does by saying that is to militarize to begin the process of militarizing US policy in the region prior to Carter our military profile in the region is very low and we rely on proxies we rely on the CIA we rely on diplomacy to try to maintain stability in the region and access to oil beginning with Carter we start to march down a path in which we rely on military power he starts it with his intervention to try to rescue the hostages Reagan continues it bombing of Libya Beirut peacekeeping mission that ends in disaster the the tanker war in which weary flag Kuwaiti tankers and of course the elder Bush reinforces that even more with Operation Desert Storm which doesn't end when Kuwait is liberated who rather gives rise to this large US military presence that continues to act conduct active operations against dirac throughout the 1990s and then of course meaning during the clinton era and then of course the present president bush Wretch's it up a further not with the invasion of of iraq so I'm not arguing that this succession of presidents had a clear vision of how the use of military power was going to lead to some common end I'm actually arguing that recklessly without thinking the matter through they tripped down this path which led to the ever greater militarization of our policy and again it's not just the current guy who did that he was in many respects building on a legacy that he had been handed by several predecessors Democrats and Republicans alike and then you're suggesting that over the the time then that all of this is happening what you get is a foreign policy consensus about our need to master that region and to realize in a way I think you're also suggesting that that our definition of our own freedom depends on mastery of that region in access to the oil I mean part of the part of the reason that I tried to argue against the notion of identifying a scapegoat like President Bush or even the neoconservatives it's because I do believe that we're all kind of complicit here mm-hmm that I have no doubt that we are we as a people are devoted to freedom but as chiefly our own freedom and it's a freedom sort of as we design it for ourselves you know you have your notion of freedom and I have my notion of freedom but in many respects wood pays for this freedom is the material abundance of the United States it's it's it's the political economy as it plays itself out which allows us to as individuals pursue our own definitions of freedom and there's a lot of explanations for that affluence comes from but of one very important one in the post-war era is the availability of cheap energy so when these presidents are tripping down this path of of militarizing US policy in the Persian Gulf there are in a sense doing it doing what we want them to do because we want cheap gas and we've not really been willing to face up to what the total cost might end up being we just want cheap yes I have a question for you which harkens back to the earlier part of the interview which you you were describing yourself and you were saying that on values issues you were and they still remain a conservative but not on the foreign policy issues and then you explicate it how your change in thinking came on the ladder if one were to reverse the course of what you're describing you you have to it seems to me create a new political coalition because what's very clear that emerges from your book there's a lot of consensus or at least all these trajectories are going forward so the question is can you envision a a value-based conservative domestic agenda that that combines with a kind of a reappraisal of u.s. foreign policy along the directions you're suggesting to build some sort of a new coalition otherwise it strikes me is fairly hopeless basically hopeless but it's a quixotic yes yes I I'm sorry to say that the only way I can envision a meaningful political change along the lines that I guess I would like to see would be in reaction to a awful disaster economic or military you know probably both yeah meaning some something that would have would affect our well-being in a material sense Madonn sub security because it have to be that kind of a jolt to get us to be willing to undertake the examination of our domestic arrangements that leads to the policies we we pursue and I believe me I don't hope for that because it would be awful yeah so I think the best we can do is to try to something that's best someone like myself can do is to sort of poke people and challenge them to examine the country and its international posture but also its domestic arrangements with a with a critical eye and that's what the book tries to do it tries to poke people to get them to think critically looking toward the future if how would you advise students to prepare for the future in other words you're clearly somebody who comes from a military career who began thinking in a broader context through historical studies but is still you know very much concerned about national security and so on so what what is the what is the complex mix of education or job training do you think that would prepare students for this kind of future well I don't know I mean the one thing I would and I actually do try to nudge my own students at Boston University to do this I think we need to re-examine some of the basic premises of our military policies that we've become comfortable with I mean I think that the creation of the all-volunteer force after Vietnam or at the end of Vietnam was embraced widely across American society because this seemed to be one of the ways to draw a line under the decade of the 60s and say okay we're moving beyond that now we're going on and I would certainly argue that in 80s and the 90s the that arrangement seemed pretty good worked well satisfactory now I think we really need to re-examine that because what we did when we ended the draft was not simply in the draft what we really did was to render obsolete an old principle that had been that could be traced back to the earliest days of even the American colonial period and that was the notion that somehow exercising the privileges of citizenship was bound up was tied to a set of obligations and the obligations included defending the the your community and that all went away and what we did after Vietnam was to contract out national defense to a professional elite to what the founders would have called a standing army and maybe that made sense back in the early 1970s but I don't think it makes sense anymore today among other things it's probably not sustainable today because the the global war on terror to which the president has committed us is rapidly grinding away at that all-volunteer force and as we sit here the Army in the marine core of both missed their recruiting goals for the last three months if they can't turn that around then there's a serious crisis on the horizon I myself in and I'm not trying to imply that the answer is the draft I think for all kinds of reasons the answer is not the draft but I think we need as a as a society to find a way to share the responsibility for national defense more equitably so it's not just people of color and working-class people that go off and do our dirty work but it is people drawn from all sectors of Americans xiety how to get that make that happen I think is a complex and difficult question but but to sort of avert our eyes from that and simply assume that this depend on the elite arrangement is sustainable I think is foolhardy what about this fusion of military capability with American idealism that that seems to be come problematic in in a world of which we think that means that we should go out and use force to change societies that have very different histories very different cultures I mean and this is where I think 9/11 really does enter the picture I mean if you go back and look at the rhetoric of the Clinton administration in the 90s almost all the rhetoric was there of the indispensable nation that was on the right side of history these are phrases that Clinton and Albright used and there was there was also as I mentioned earlier this increased propensity to use force but there still was a certain amount of restraint as well it's after 9/11 that President Bush becomes a born-again Wilsonian Wilson on steroids almost and and now Wilson on steroids married to this great confidence that we have mastered the art of warfare and that our high-tech professional forces can are invincible that's what comes out of 9/11 and and of course that's what leads us down the path to Baghdad and and to our our current predicament so I'm all in favor of I'm not in favor of disarmament I'm not in favor of pacifism I'm in favor we need military strength given the way the world is I'm in favor of thinking about military power in ways that in my judgement would reflect a bit more realism and balance and would keep faith with what the founders thought which was to be very wary of excessive military power but I'm also in favor of a more realistic way of looking at the world that the Wilsonian vision as propounded in the Bush national security strategy of 2002 where we sort of you know declared categorically that there's only one sustainable system for Prosperity that every nation has to adhere to in it's ours we need to back away from some of that yes we need to support democracy but I think the place to begin doing that is by trying to address some of the flaws in our own country and to exercise more restraint in the way we try to impose ourselves on others Andrew on that note and hope for the future I want to thank you very much for writing your book that I will show again the new American militarism and thank you for coming to Berkeley and being on our program I thank you very much thank you and thank you very much for joining us for this conversation with history

Channel: University of California Television (UCTV)

Views: 17,121

Rating: 4.8899083 out of 5

Keywords: militarism, America, Andrew, J., Bacevich

Id: 9O1PEIYNBBE

Length: 59min 24sec (3564 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 31 2008