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Limits of Power

Our friend and contributing editor Andrew Bacevich has a powerful editorial in today’s L.A. Times. After demonstrating that Gates continues to hold to the Rumsfeldian view that we are in a long war, and must change the way others live or face the much worse possibility of changing the way we live, Bacevich concludes: Rumsfeld […]

Our friend and contributing editor Andrew Bacevich has a powerful editorial in today’s L.A. Times. After demonstrating that Gates continues to hold to the Rumsfeldian view that we are in a long war, and must change the way others live or face the much worse possibility of changing the way we live, Bacevich concludes:

Rumsfeld got it exactly backward. Although we do face a choice, it’s not the one that he described. The actual choice is this one: We can either persist in our efforts to change the way they live — in which case the war of no exits will surely lead to bankruptcy and exhaustion. Or we can recognize the folly of generational war and choose instead to put our own house in order: curbing our appetites, paying our bills and ending our self-destructive dependency on foreign oil and foreign credit.
Salvation does not lie abroad. It’s here at home.

Bacevich’s piece made me think of a David Brooks editorial from a little over a year ago, “The Iraq Syndrome R.I.P.

This is not a country looking to come home again. The Iraq syndrome is over before it even had a chance to begin.

The U.S. has no material need to reconsider its dominant role in the world. The U.S. military still has no serious rivals, even after the strains of Iraq. The economy is humming along nicely.

The U.S. has no cultural need to retrench…

Brooks had a lot of reasons to think this way a year ago. And Robert Kagan’s recent piece in World Affairs argued along similar lines. But Bacevich’s piece is a sign that the consensus Brooks described is not invincible. Though anti-war opinion has subsided somewhat, there are signs that our economy is fragile, that there is a debate brewing about what our military should and should not be, and that the generation of young thinkers now coming to Washington are much less invested in the “unipolar moment” than their immediate predecessors. Bacevich’s forthcoming book promises a strong argument that there are in fact, limits to American power. I have a feeling that people are ready to hear it.

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