After the Apocalypse

April 5, 2021
In this excoriating call for change, Bacevich (The Age of Illusions), the cofounder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, links the U.S. government’s disastrous response to Covid-19 to faulty national security policies built on the myth of American exceptionalism. He cites the brouhaha over a U.S. Navy captain’s raising of the alarm about the spread of Covid-19 among his crew members as evidence that the military establishment misperceives threats and misallocates resources, and explains how the prioritization of national security over national defense has resulted in such “dubious” actions as the dumping of Agent Orange in Vietnam. Bacevich also describes the 2002 invasion of Iraq as “a classic case of fears... riding roughshod over facts,” and calls on the U.S. to “normaliz” relations with Israel and stop subsidizing the country’s military. Other policy suggestions include withdrawing from NATO “within the next decade” and building a North American Security Zone with Mexico and Canada. Bacevich has covered much of this ground before, and the connections to Covid-19 sometimes seem tenuous, but his arguments are well-informed and stoked by a sense of moral outrage (his son was killed in Iraq in 2007). Readers will agree that U.S. foreign policy needs a massive rethink.

April 15, 2021
The vocal historian and foreign policy expert revisits the past to offer suggestions for current and future U.S. policymakers. With a reputation for knowledgeable, incisive, and provocative readings of history, Bacevich delivers his latest addition to a growing body of thought-provoking work. A well-known critic of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and what he sees as American imperialism, the author, who served in the Army for more than 20 years, continues along those lines of argument while also addressing the added complexities caused by climate change, racial and economic injustice, and the global pandemic. Bacevich works in a historiographical mode. "Apocalypse didn't come out of nowhere," he writes. "It had antecedents, evident in the very way we have packaged the past--what we have chosen to remember and what to discard, what to enshrine and what to ignore." He continues, "a defective approach to policy survives because those charged with thinking about America's role in the world cling to a series of illusions that derive from a conveniently selective historical memory." Building on the theoretical approaches of theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and the French historian Marc Bloch, among other thinkers, Bacevich consistently chips away at the myth of American exceptionalism, "unearthing the substructure of existing U.S. policy, the seldom-examined assumptions and taken-for-granted practices that have sustained the national security apparatus." Moving beyond that myth requires the rejection of the idea of a unified Western monolith of culture or the concept of a "special relationship" in relation to political allies. It also means facing head-on the often grim realities associated with the ways in which a pandemic, climate change, and entrenched racism wreak havoc on American military, culture, and policy. Bacevich covers all of these issues with an admirable amount of context for such a relatively short work. Broad in its scope yet concise, this is an important nonconformist interpretation of American history.

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