In an effort to start
making sense of what is an indisputably confusing situation, we asked some of
the most thoughtful people we know the question: How will America change
as a result of the economic downturn? Here's Andrew J. Bacevich, a professor at Boston University and the author of The
Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism.
We can now finally chuck overboard all of the bloated
and self-congratulatory language of the post-Cold War era: the claims made of a
Sole Superpower serving as the Indispensable Nation during a Unipolar Moment at
the End of History. Each and every one of these notions was pernicious from the
moment it was uttered. Events have now decisively demonstrated each to be
absurdly false.
When it comes to statecraft, the chief lessons of the
Bush era are these: Arrogance and hubris have revealed the very real limits of
American global leadership; recklessness and ineptitude have revealed the limits
of American military power; a foolish and self-indulgent unwillingness to live
within our means has now made clear the limits--and the fragility--of American
prosperity. We may choose to ignore these lessons--neoconservatives will insist
upon it--but the consequences of doing so will be
severe.
A season of reckoning is upon us. To say that is not to
imply that the United
States is now condemned to an irreversible
downward spiral. It's not. It is, however, time for us to clean up our act and
to put our own house in order. When it comes to foreign policy, that means
restoring a balance between our commitments and the means that we have at hand
to meet those commitments.
And that means, above all, revisiting and revising the
deeply defective notion of open-ended "global war"--World War IV!--as the proper
response to the threat posed by violent Islamic radicalism. We need a new
framework for national security strategy, one that junks the global war on
terror in favor of an alternative that is affordable, sustainable, and relevant
to the variety of challenges that we face. Realism and modesty must become our
watchwords.
One might think that a presidential campaign would
provide the occasion to debate strategic alternatives. Unfortunately, there is
precious little evidence that the current campaign is going to produce such a
result. In that regard, the final lesson of the Bush era has been to demonstrate
just how vapid and unimaginative our politics have
become.
--Andrew J. Bacevich