Andrew J. Bacevich thinks our political system is busted. In \u201cThe Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism,\u201d\u009d he argues that the country\u2019s founding principle \u201d\u201d freedom \u201d\u201d has become confused with appetite, turning America\u2019s traditional quest for liberty into an obsession with consumption, the never-ending search for more. To accommodate this hunger, pandering politicians have created an informal empire of supply, maintaining it through constant brush-fire wars. Yet the foreign-policy apparatus meant to manage that empire has grown hideously bloated and has led the nation into one disaster after another. The latest is Iraq: in Bacevich\u2019s mind, the crystallization of all that\u2019s gone wrong with the American system.<\/p>\n
In the dog days of the George W. Bush era, as the fighting drags on in Afghanistan and Iraq and global food, energy and economic crises mount, this argument has huge intuitive appeal, and indeed Bacevich\u2019s book has climbed the best-seller lists. The nation does seem to be in serious trouble. Figuring out how it got that way is important, and a root-and-branch rethink may be necessary to set things right.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s just what Bacevich aims to provide. Hailing from what might be called the ultratraditionalist school of American foreign policy, Bacevich, who teaches history and international relations at Boston University, sees himself as a modern Jeremiah, railing at a fat and self-indulgent country that\u2019s lost its way. By his reckoning, things started going sideways at the end of World War II, when the United States first emerged as \u201cthe strongest, the richest and . . . the freest nation in all the world.\u201d\u009d As American power expanded abroad, liberty grew at home. But the country\u2019s expectations soon exceeded its ability to satisfy them. At that point, Americans faced a choice: \u201ccurb their appetites and learn to live within their means, or deploy . . . United States power in hopes of obliging others to accommodate\u201d\u009d them. You can guess which one Bacevich thinks Americans went for.<\/p>\n
As its citizens were growing soft, the United States government was mutating as well. Responding to the shocks of the Communist revolution in China, the Soviets\u2019 atom bomb and the onset of the Korean War, Washington created a vast new permanent security apparatus, consisting of the Pentagon, the F.B.I., the C.I.A. (along with the smaller intelligence agencies) and the National Security Council. These bodies, and a compliant Congress, enabled a huge expansion in executive power.<\/p>\n