Andrew J Bacevich, _The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War,_

One of the advantages of being the centre of the world’s wealth is the ability to be endlessly introspective. Whatever attitude one wants to find about America, there will be a literature to support it – and a counter-position to oppose it. Andrew Bacevich’s recently re-released book is a deliberate attempt to provide balance in one of the most polarising settings in intellectual life. Most non-Americans visiting the USA quickly remark on how militarised this uniquely powerful country is. That this should be considered a surprising thing – something requiring the sort of ‘brilliant, abrasive [and] important’ comment for which some reviewers have praised this book – is an index as to the self-referential nature of American public thought.

The book has much in it which is worthwhile – it provides a good understanding of the various trends which converged to make the seemingly incredible (ie. post-9/11 American unilateral action leading to the decline of its moral suasion) plausible (at least to Americans). Bacevich properly points out that this was not the result of a single elite cabal – but rather the confluence of the interests of a variety of elites running together along lines permitted by themes deeply embedded in American culture. For a foreigner such as myself, his account of the rise of neo-conservatism (including its conflicted nature) provides a worrying insight into the influence of the press – left and right – in advanced democratic societies, both for good and bad. The role of journals, universities and intellectuals in the formation of the American malaise is a chilling reminder of the need for public ethics and an engaged and mutual, rather than conflictual and ghettoised, public conversation. The New Left convinced the world of the importance of ideas, writes Bacevich, and the New Right read their script. The result was the influence of Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and Walter Laqueur, among others in the first generation, through journals such as Commentary, laying the basis for the second, activist generation who filled the ranks of George W. Bush’s cabinets. Ideas are dangerous things – even (or perhaps especially) ideas that are true.

Bacevich doesn’t really seem to have much of an idea as to the role of ideas, and how they should be understood. His strong suit is his knowledge of the actors and the minutiae of American public debate. His weak suit is in sustaining the necessary public ‘rage’ which would justify a book which is long on description, and short on analysis and a substantive ethics. The book repeatedly resorts to a weak doctrine of the fallen humanity as an explanation of why the best intentions fly apart – an approach satisfactory to neither those who believe in such a doctrine, nor to those who don’t. Good public debate needs to be well framed, both in terms of content and method. This book has good content – but its methodological assumptions leave much to be desired.

The reason is that Bacevich is himself captured by the nation state. While, as foreigners, those of us reading this text a long way away are pleased that he notices something which is so obvious to external observers, it is clear that he is writing for Americans alone. Key to his argument is Woodrow Wilson’s interventionism, based on an assumption that American principles of national self-determination were universal and sufficient. Bacevich – like Wilson himself – does not see the problem of the nation state itself under the pressure of globalisation. As Arnold Toynbee once noted with regard to nation states, as soon as a line is drawn on the map, it becomes necessary to defend it with the sword. Universalising states are supported and legitimised by universalising religions – and the American religion is not, and never really has been, Christianity per se. Rather, the saints in the American pantheon are the signatories of the Constitution, its early heroes (such as Washington), its mythological figures. The reason why Bacevich’s Catholicism is so remarkably suppressed (except, as I will note below, in the negative) is that in addressing an American public, he has to use the founding civil religion of ‘self-evident’ truths. For this reason, one critic notes:

The author’s solutions also disappoint. If American militarism is the result of fundamental social
currents resulting from the humiliation of Vietnam and the unrest of the 1960s and 70s, then remedies should also address changing social and strategic outlooks, not urging Congress to change itself or to suggest greater inducements to enlist.¹

The argument – undermined by its lack of method – glides to an end without much to say. It lacks the strength of its own convictions, and like much American public debate spoils a good argument with the appearance of being inflated (genuflecting at the shrine of Washington, pp. 224-5) and/or self-serving (proposing, for instance, increased engagement with civilian universities – such as his own – as part of the panacea, p. 223). The solution cannot, in the end, be (as Bacevich proposes) simply a reinforcement of the American sense of national propriety by such moves as paying attention to the nation’s founders and bolstering the separation of powers between the Executive and the Congress. In a global setting, the nation state is not in itself the solution – indeed, in cutting across more (or less) mobile forms of identity, and in defining itself in modernist terms as purely political and economic in form, it is part of the problem.

Bacevich’s book also misconstrues another key theme, that of an assumed core democratic norm in countries based on the American model. ‘Representative’ democracies, however, depend enormously on their representatives – and the sort of disengagements which Bacevich describes in this book indicate profound issues in this regard. If films such as The Hunt for Red October are sufficient indicators of a shaping of American culture, then the same might be said for Evan Almighty, Wag the Dog, or the many other standard presentations of corruption in high places. If the American military is disconnected from the American people, then the American people are disconnected from the lobby-ocracy which typifies the American nation. As the latter remains unexplored in the book, the obvious question (whether the two disconnections have common causes which differ from those proposed for the merely military end) remains likewise unexplored. Is this a crisis of democracy, or of the nation state as a form, or both? We never find out.

Of particular interest is Bacevich’s treatment of the evangelical contribution to American militarism. His general argument is that – in emerging from isolation after (and because of) World War II – neo-evangelicals engaged American militarism uncritically, responding to a perceived slide in American public/ private values by coopting the Puritan ‘city on a hill’ themes inherent to American foundations, and contributing both mass mobilisation, effective organisational ability (through lobby groups and chaplaincy services), and a fairly scary Zionist millennial perspective to the rise of the ‘new American militarism’. Abandoning their traditional pacifism, evangelical leaders ‘articulated a highly permissive interpretation of the just war tradition, the cornerstone of Christian thinking about warfare.’ (p. 123) In a sense, they bought a ‘devil’s bargain’ – selling their souls for entry into the mainstream and political suasion. It is a powerful argument, and one which needs to be taken seriously. As Bellah, Linder, Pierard et al. have shown, American civil religion is a powerful force which has been steered (corrupted?) evangelical priorities for centuries. There are some problems with the analysis in this case, however. First, while 69% of white evangelicals generally voted Republican at the time the book was released (now down to 62% at the time of writing), 40% of evangelicals (black and white) don’t.² As schisms in the Southern Baptist Convention in the 1990s demonstrated, American evangelicals are not a homogenous group and are likely – as they did in the recent election of Barack Obama – to vote generationally, and on a conscience basis, in ways which make the potential vote far less decisive. The tendency to divide evangelicals simplistically into the ‘left’ and the ‘right’ ignores their tendency to organise around issues rather parties, and also ignores ‘the evangelical center’. Secondly, while Bacevich holds up the standard of a just war tradition, that too is a non-homogenous intellectual tradition, which is not sufficiently explored in the book so as to make an adequate criterion for judgement. Most of Bacevich’s sources are mainline Protestant or secular sources, a critical secondary literature which does not provide him with sufficient counterbalance to his own Catholic presumptions as to the monolithic nature of ‘correct’ theology. The issue, notes Gushee, is not that evangelicals universally justify war, or that they simply roll along with the Republican band-wagon, but rather that evangelicals are drawn (like most Americans) by an uncritical patriotism which leads them to support ‘the president, the troops and the country’. The issue, again, is not the religion so much as the underlying consensus on which American nationhood is founded, and the pragmatist civil religion (which Bacevich himself seems to accept) which binds it all together.

The analysis is also a form of pop-intellectualism – cherry picking a prominent issue – rather than good history. While pointing out the role of evangelicalism and its putative role in entangling the USA in the Middle East, Bacevich ignores the role of other religious traditions and their contribution to American adventurism in the past. While hardly Zionists or millennialists, for example, Episcopalians during the 1910s and 1920s contributed to American involvement in Turkey, Syria and Lebanon, and helped frame much of the internationalism which underpinned post-war Wilsonian doctrine. (Secretary of State Dean Acheson, for instance, was the son of an Episcopalian bishop, and carried many ‘British Empire’ values into repositioning American relationships during his term, 1949-1953).³ Remarkably, Bacevich also has little to say about the influence of post-Spanish Civil War Catholic anti-Communism in influencing American foreign policy, particularly as relates to the American involvement in Vietnam which forms such a cornerstone of his book. The claims of balance should have suggested to him some treatment of the well-documented involvement of the Catholic Church (especially Cardinal Spellman, the American Friends of Vietnam and journals such as America) in supporting Ngo Dinh Diem, both before and after the election of the Kennedy presidency.⁴ Indeed, this Democrat-oriented constituency supports Bacevich’s key point – that support for militarism arises across the spectrum in the USA, not merely on the Right. It is short sighted, as John Anderson has pointed out, to write off the Catholic contribution to ‘third wave democratisation’ in places as separated as Brazil, Chile, Eastern Europe, South Africa and the Philippines, simply because religion is not permitted as an explanatory category in much liberal/ secularist literature. Indeed, without this contribution, it is doubtful that neo-cons could have pointed to the ‘success’ of the Reagan years as the touchstone for their further expansion.⁵ As one Catholic commentator has pointed out, Reagan in his post-Hinckley period was heavily influenced by the Catholic cadre which surround him (from CIA Director, William Casey, to key advisor, William P Clark, to the writer of his famous ‘march of liberty’ speech at Westminster, Tony Dolan), and by his contacts with leading Catholic luminaries such as John Paul II and Cardinal Terence Cook.⁶

These shortcomings arise largely as a result of the book’s methodological assumptions. Empiricist, anti-theoretical, personalist and a little too fond of ‘great man theory’ assumptions about the nature of history, Bacevich in a sense writes the history of US militarism through his own eyes. A Vietnam vet, Catholic and public university academic oriented towards a uniquely American audience, Bacevich necessarily produces a book which is circular in showing that, in the end, one can only sustain an argument in American life if one shares its presuppositions. The picture, however, is too big for its frame. American militarism is not purely driven by domestic interests, or the grand ideas of limited men – it is also drawn into the global realities of which it is necessarily part. As Harold James points out, it is ‘the rules of international order which create the politics of empire’.⁷ In our current setting, the rule of internationalism are not Wilsonian – global realities make isolation and the sort of pragmatic solutions such as those proposed by Bacevich unworkable over the longer term. The nation state, and its unchallenged civil religion, itself must be changed. Moreover, a framework adequate to the task is still in formation – but at the very least, a book such as this needs to overcome its simplistic empiricism and engage with contemporary theory (particularly globalisation theory). The book, for instance, hangs on cultural analysis in order to make the key point that:

In explaining the origins of the new American militarism, this account has not sought to assign or to impute blame. None of the protagonists in this story sat down after the none and consciously plotted to propagate diverse attitudes toward military power anymore than Andrew Carnegie or John D. Rockefeller plotted to despoil the 19th century American landscape. The clamour after Vietnam to rebuild the American arsenal and to restore American self-confidence, the celebration of soldierly values, the search for ways to make force more usable: all of these came about because groups of Americans thought that they glimpsed in the realm of military affairs the solution to vexing problems. The soldiers who sought to rehabilitate their profession, the intellectuals who feared that America might share the fate of one, the strategists wrestling with the implications of nuclear weapons, the conservative Christians appalled by the apparent collapse of traditional morality: none of these were acting out of motives that were inherently dishonourable. To the extent that we may find fault with the results of their efforts, the fault is more appropriately attributable to human fallibility than to malicious intent. [p. 207]

Of course this is not true -- the book does depict its protagonists in a poor light, and does try to judge from the perspective of history when in fact the perspective of history is not available. In this case, it was necessary to turn to some other methodology -- but for this, the reader looks in vain. In short, the author participates in all the faults of his protagonists -- using commonsense in place of satisfactory explanations. The fact that the religious element is not properly tied into the overall argument, and depends rather on much of the scaremongering popular amongst the American intellectual elite with regard to the religious right, is a further indicator of the overall lack of a framework. Likewise, the assertion that it was the commitment to ever increasing abundance which bought the American public’s compliance to the culture of militarisation, is shortsighted. These ‘Fables of Abundance’ are well rooted in the American 19th century, just as American militarism is rooted in the 18th century origins to which Bacevich ultimately appeals as a solution to his thematic problem.⁸ The sort of methodology required here not only needs to take into account global realities, but the sort of methodological approach pioneered by Haydn White or even Robert Bellah in order to be able to identify the deep tropes and movements of American life. The advantages are patent. If the first war (1914-1945) was political (ie. around the concept of the nation state), and the second (the Cold War, 1945-1989) was economic, this third phase (or ‘World War IV’ as it is being touted in the US) could be explored in globalisation terms as ‘cultural’. It is a war being fought internally, as well as externally, and explains the centrality of religion in ways which Bacevich does not do convincingly.

As noted at the outset of this review, visitors to America are readily confronted by the degree of militarisation on display. It makes sense that there should be some form of militar_ism_ underpinning its development. Andrew Bacevich’s book rehearses the major players, but does not have the equipment required to turn case studies into cultural analysis, and cultural analysis into a coherent theory. It is an interesting book – we can only assume that because of its contributions, it will give rise to better ones down the track.

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