Like most readers who respond positively to Andrew Bacevich's work, I appreciate The Limits of Power as a jeremiad, a lamentation on personal and collective hubris and sanctimoniousness. Bacevich's perspective is inspired by Judeo-Christian teachings and more concretely by the writings of Reinhold Niebuhr as applied to American foreign policy. By stepping past the comparatively antiseptic concepts of international relations theories (although Bacevich is clearly in the realist tradition), the book has an emotional intensity quite appropriate for these troubled times. Pride is the deadliest of sins--a notion subscribed to by Christians, Muslims, Buddhist, Hindus and Jews--but it bears repeating, as Bacevich has done here, that this warning is especially apt for us.

Almost no one escapes Bacevich's wrath. The foreign policy intellectual elite (whether at Brookings or the AEI, the Council on Foreign Relations or The New York Times), the policy-makers in Washington from The White House to the Congress with special attention to the national security bureaucracy, and the public at-large (seduced by material prosperity to think that they have "freedom") all come up for a reckoning. Nor does he offer much hope for change. Although the book was published before Obama was elected president (and perhaps finished even before he became the Democratic nominee), Bacevich sees a system of thought, action, and interest so solidly in place that (following the prophecies of Niebuhr) only its own eventual self-destruction will fundamentally alter what is now so firmly in place. At times, to be sure, a ray of clear thinking emerges--Eisenhower denouncing the military-industrial complex, or Carter calling the energy crisis the moral equivalent of war--but such warnings are soon lost to business as usual, for it must always be "morning in America," and any suggestion of fundamental change is quickly repressed as positively anti-American.

To make his case, Bacevich focuses on three underpinnings of American imperialism: a political establishment that presumes we are "the last, best hope of earth" (Lincoln), the "indispensable nation" (Albright), and that what is good for us--the expansion of our economic and political ways worldwide--is good for everyone; a public that buys into this self-serving patriotic cant and is rewarded with material wealth; and a military establishment that is woefully inadequate to the tasks it is handed, but remains unaware that its reach far exceeds its grasp.

What is to be done? Bacevich does hold out a dim hope that the public may finally be roused by righteous indignation at this country's role in the world, and I can imagine that he could conclude the current economic meltdown might finally curtail the patriotism that has blinded so many to the reality of our self-induced undoing. But the United States has never had much of a socialist tradition and the conviction that "government is not the solution, it is the problem" has long been widespread at a popular level.

Indeed, as a conservative, Bacevich himself does not imagine a government that can undo the damage that has been done. He denounces the imperial presidency, calls for a more assertive Congress, and proposes the effective dismantlement of much of the security bureaucracy put in place after 1945 (Chapter 2). But could such changes actually handle the terrible bungles made in Washington that he lays out for our indignation? I think instead that President Obama got it right in his inaugural when he said the question is not to choose between small or big government, but how to secure effective government. Bacevich's preference for small government--or more balance between the executive and the legislative branches--does not persuade me. At the very least, we need a criticism of the Congress as dominated by special interests whose reform would require public campaign financing and a multi-party system (which could be created through insisting on a candidate for office winning not a plurality, but a majority, of the votes cast, a procedure that in many cases would require run-off elections). Nor does his implicit argument (harkening back to Lenin and his notion of a "labor aristocracy") convince me that the public subscribes to an imperial foreign policy because it becomes enriched thereby. At least since the time of Reagan, statistics have conclusively shown that the bottom 80 percent of the population has experienced little, no, or negative income growth. Indeed, nearly all the fruits of economic deregulation and openness have benefited no more than the top 1 percent of this country's population. Bacevich's belief (Chapter 1) that empire pays, and that the public appreciates a payoff from it under the name of "freedom," does not persuade me.

Is the situation as bleak as Bacevich presents it? Again and again, Bacevich warns that not to recognize our limits, to believe in our omnipotence, is to deplete our power, to exacerbate our problems (Conclusion, especially). But in fact the economic crisis confronts us has substantially worsened since he completed his book, and self-criticism is becoming the stuff of daily discourse. It is now clear to a large segment of the population that there is no alternative to swift and powerful government intervention, and that in this mess we have no one to blame but ourselves (or better our corporate elite). In foreign policy a new modesty may also be in evidence. Will President Obama really call for us to redeploy massively from Iraq to Afghanistan while relations with Pakistan worsen, as he once indicated he would? Will he truly go forward with inviting Georgia and Ukraine into NATO, as he earlier said he would? Will he fail to seek some meaningful solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, moderate our relations with Iran, or work collaboratively with other powers to constrain North Korea? Will he not recognize that globalization may have helped countries like India and China move hundreds of millions of people out of poverty but that it has benefited very few Americans and has weakened our power position in world politics? Will he fail to call for energy independence as another Manhattan Project and endorse a Bretton Woods II, as many are suggesting? So it would seem if one subscribes to Bacevich's gloomy perspective.

Perhaps such pessimism will prove warranted. But for the moment, I am withholding judgment. While it is unlikely that the Obama administration will move ahead in a way Bacevich and I might like in all these respects, surely it is unreasonable to think that nothing has been learned by our public or our leadership from the defeat in Iraq, nothing from the global economic crisis stemming from twenty-five years of neoliberal thinking summed up as "the Washington consensus." A crisis of the magnitude we are now in could usher in changes as great as those of the Progressive Era with President Wilson and the New Deal under FDR. Is it paradoxical to conclude that had Bacevich seen the crisis as even worse than he described it in a book he presumably completed a year ago, he might have actually been more optimistic about the prospects for change?

In conclusion, let me note that Bacevich's book appears in the series "The American Empire Project" published as a Metropolitan Book by Henry Holt. Noam Chomsky, Chalmers Johnson, and a number of other interesting writers are among the authors who have appeared in this series, one that merits the attention of those looking for basic critiques of American foreign policy. I might also mention that when, some three years ago now, I began to look back over Niebuhr's work, which I greatly admire as does Bacevich, not a single copy of his books was in a major Harvard library. Not much has changed since. Checking just yesterday, I found that The Irony of American History in a 2008 version with an introduction by Bacevich is in the Library's "depository" (meaning it is not expected to be in much demand) as is Moral Man and Immoral Society. Children of Light is on the shelves at a secondary Harvard library some distance from the main campus. I hope that reading Bacevich ignites a new interest in reading Niebuhr.