[We repost this instructive article by Greg Guma first published by GR in March 2016.]
An ever-deepening militarization threatens to hollow out democracy and leave the country isolated and bankrupt, morally and economically.
George Washington could hardly be called naive about the use of military power. Yet, in his presidential farewell address, the general-turned-political leader issued a warning that would be wise to reconsider since the United States began pursuing a foreign policy based on preventive war and a crusade to spread democratic capitalism worldwide. Citizens should be wary, Washington explained, of “those overgrown military establishments which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.”
While he considered a respectable army essential to national well-being, Washington also believed that an overgrown military establishment in the New World would replicate the errors of the Old one. Unfortunately, this concern – considered superfluous in 1796 – has been largely ignored in the two centuries that have seen the United States transform itself from a revolutionary experiment into the world’s only superpower.
As Andrew J. Bacevich has argued inThe New American Militarism,the roots of the change go deep and cannot be traced a single political party or administration. Yet, the problem was intensified by the disorientation that followed the Vietnam War, as well as illusions about the invulnerability provided by technology and a neoconservative argument that military power provides the “indispensable foundation” for the nation’s unique role in the world.
Coming from a left-leaning writer, such a conclusion would not be surprising. But Bacevich is a West Point graduate, veteran of Vietnam, and former Bush fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. As such, he has watched the evolution of what he describes as an “ever-deepening militarization of U.S. policy” that threatens to hollow out democracy and leave the country isolated and bankrupt, both morally and economically.
Conservative pundit Pat Buchanan made a similar case inWhere the Right Went Wrong(2004), his book on how neoconservatives hijacked the Bush presidency. Calling the post 9/11 Bush Doctrine “democratic imperialism,” he warned that it would:
“bleed, bankrupt, and isolate this republic. This overthrows the wisdom of the Founding Fathers about what America should be all about. This is an American version of the Brezhnev Doctrine, wherein Moscow asserted the right to intervene to save Communism in any nation where it had once been imposed. Only we Americans now assert the right to intervene anywhere to impose democracy.”
However, while Buchanan sees Ronald Reagan as a true conservative who would not have countenanced “regime change” and preventive war unless the evidence of an imminent attack was absolutely solid, Bacevich argues that Reagan romanticized the U.S. military in order to boost defense spending and confront the Soviet Union, setting the stage of future militarization. More than anyone else, he writes, Reagan “conjured up the myths that nurtured and sustain present-day American militarism” and made military might “the preferred measure for gauging the nation’s strength.”
On the other hand, the shift was underway before Reagan. Bacevich sees Jimmy Carter’s failures – including entreaties to end the U.S. addiction to imported oil and turn toward self-sufficiency, as well as a disastrous covert mission to rescue U.S. hostages in Iran – as inadvertent persuasions, convincing people that a weak military was intolerable and thus playing into the agenda of the neoconservative movement.
Source: Global Research
