'The Great Divide' of American Foreign Policy

Dr. Andrew Bacevich is a professor of history and international relations at Brown University. Bacevich is one of the most articulate anti-war conservatives working in the academy today (see his masterful book, The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War). In a recent article written for the independent Roman Catholic journal Commonweal entitled The Great Divide: The Crisis of U.S. Military Policy, Bacevich argues that American foreign policy needs to reverse course by rejecting the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive war and returning to the just war tradition; adopting a policy of containment vis a via Islamic jihadism; and re-establish a citizen-soldier tradition to counteract militarism. Not applicable to your life as an Erskine student? Think again - the massive federal debt our generation is already enslaved to will only become worse if our government continues its current military policies.

According to Bacevich, the "post-Vietnam" era of U.S. military policy has been defined by three main themes. First, we have the "Great Divorce" between civilians and the military inaugurated by Nixon's ending the draft in the wake of the turbulent failures of Vietnam. This lead, writes Bacevich, to "a new professional military with an ethos that emphasized the differences between soldiers and civilians. Out of differences came distance: after Vietnam, members of the officer corps saw themselves as standing apart from (or perhaps even above) the rest of society. More than a few members of the public endorsed that view." In other words, here we have the seeds of American militarism.

Second, Bacevich discusses what he calls the "Great Reconstitution." Begun by Reagan, the military received new funding, an upgrade in technology with the goal of total superiority, and renewed praise as a means to resolve conflicts.

Third, we have the age of "Great Expectations." This era, inaugurated by President George H.W. Bush, would culminate in our present troubles in Iraq:

During the 1990s, the first two narrative threads combined to produce a third. This was the theme of “Great Expectations,” which found members of the political elite looking for new ways to tap the potential of this technologically sophisticated, highly professional military. Armed force accrued positive connotations: hitherto employed to wreak mayhem, it now became an instrument for fixing things. One result was the discovery of new missions like peacemaking, peacekeeping, and “humanitarian intervention.” Another result was to remove any lingering reluctance about employing military force abroad.

During his single term as president, George H. W. Bush made substantial headway in dismantling the inhibitions implied by the Vietnam Syndrome. Bill Clinton completed the task: during his eight years in the Oval Office, armed intervention became so frequent that it almost ceased to be newsworthy. Yet George W. Bush did most to promote the theme of Great Expectations. After 9/11, the forty-third president committed the United States to a policy of preventive war, the so-called Bush Doctrine. As part of his “Freedom Agenda,” he also vowed to use American power to liberate the greater Middle East, end tyranny, and vanquish evil from the face of the earth.

Tacitly affirming the Great Divorce, Bush committed the nation to these breathtaking goals without calling on Americans themselves to play a role or make any sacrifices. Bush intended to remake the world without mobilizing the country. The people would remain spectators.

Responsibility for implementing the Freedom Agenda, therefore, fell almost entirely on the shoulders of the all-volunteer force. As commander-in-chief, Bush did not even press Congress to expand the size of the force. Apparently, he assumed that the Great Reconstitution had made the standing army unstoppable. Even as he embarked on an open-ended global war, the president did not question that assumption.

This proved to be a serious miscalculation, as events in Iraq and Afghanistan have shown. The indisputable lesson of those two wars is this: The United States lacks sufficient military power to achieve the objectives outlined in Bush’s Freedom Agenda. Means and ends are wildly out of whack. We have too much war and too few warriors. No amount of technology can close that gap.

To put it another way: the Great Expectations of the 1990s are exhausting the military created by the Great Reconstitution of the 1980s. Meanwhile, abiding by the Great Divorce of the 1970s, the American people content themselves with cheering from the sidelines.

(Emphasis mine.)

These are serious problems. But understanding how we got to the point we are at is the first step in beginning to solve them. While Obama represents the largest potential for change, sadly the foreign policy consensus roughly represented by Clinton, McCain, and Obama does not seem willing to break with the aggressive, interventionist foreign policy represented by Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II. (Can you see Hillary or McCain adopting a policy of containment? I think not.) Write to your senators and representatives, send them articles by writers like Bacevich, and tell them you want a more just, humane, and constitutional foreign policy.