I have long been an admirer of Andrew Bacevich. He brings a refreshing combination of scholarship, passion and wit to the discussion of U.S. foreign policy. All three qualities are on display in The Limits of Power.

I find myself agreeing with most of Bacevich's conclusions, while arriving there by a different road. Every theory critical of recent U.S. foreign policy includes an overt or implicit theory of when things went wrong. If you think that U.S. foreign policy took a wrong turn with the election of George W. Bush, then you are likely to focus on the theories and motives of the neoconservatives and other contemporary elites, and to be moderately optimistic about the chances that a different team with different ideas will change course. If, on the other hand, you agree with Gore Vidal and William Appleman Williams that the U.S. took a wrong turn after the replacement of the Articles of Confederation by the Federal Constitution of 1787 and the Whiskey Rebellion, then you are likely to see Bush as simply one more in a string of tyrants waging unnecessary wars like the Civil War--Lincoln's unnecessary folly, according to many libertarians--or World War I, Wilson's folly--or World War II--Roosevelt's folly, according to Charles Beard and Patrick Buchanan.

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Professor Smith writes in his post: "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."

The problem here is one of verb tense. What I try to argue is that empire (or at least an expansionist foreign policy) once /paid. /Indeed, if we cite the Louisiana Purchase as the beginning of serious American expansionism, then it paid quite nicely for at least the next century-and-a-half. By the time I was born after World War II, the United States had become the most powerful, the richest, and (for the white majority), the freest nation on earth. Americans liked to attribute the nation's success to Providence or their own virtues, but that was nonsense. We acquired power because we sought power. Many (by no means all) Americans then reaped the benefits of power.

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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.

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I thank Michael Hollerich and David Shorr for their comments and offer the following by way of a brief response to some of the points they raised.

Despite its present woes, the United States remains the most powerful actor in the international system. It will therefore attempt to exercise "global leadership" because that's what great powers do. Yet based on the historical record, I just don't see why at this juncture we should expect the United States to begin demonstrating (in David's phrase) "benevolent exceptionalism." Although others will read the narrative of the American past differently, I see little in that record to suggest that the United States will now suddenly manifest any particular tendency toward altruism. The best we can hope for is a bit less emphasis on ideology and a bit more emphasis on pragmatism, which may foster a greater awareness of those "points of concurrence" to which Niebuhr referred. During his first term, President Bush disdained "points of concurrence" -- it was our way or the highway. Obama and his advisers are unlikely to repeat that mistake.

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Andrew's book is an important corrective for the hubris that has, time and again, led American foreign policy astray. His dissection of the national security ideology that inflates American power and virtue should prompt any member of the permanent policy elite to reflect, and squirm. That said, I think the indictment is too sweeping. I have a similar qualm to Michael's: is there really no such thing as benevolent exceptionalism? Is America's role as an indispensable backbone of the international order (p. 2) truly dispensable?

According to Andrew, the high-minded global roles the United States has assigned itself have been delusions at best, or pretensions at worst. But it's one thing to face up to the presumption and sanctimony of American exceptionalism, and another to claim that US power is only a force for good when good is achieved as a side benefit of a dispassionate calculation. Which leads to some of the most interesting questions for current foreign policy: the relationship between national interests and the international greater good, the nature of interdependence, and the meaning of pragmatism.

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First, I want to thank Andrew for the outstanding contribution he's made to discussions of foreign policy over the past decade. I've read all of his books and a number of articles, and it's easy to see why he's carved out a place for himself as a highly respected commentator with a distinct voice and point of view. His dual careers as a professional soldier and now an accomplished academic carry authority in their own right. His personal sacrifices - readers should note the dedication of The New American Militarism to his brother-in-law, the late George Blough, and of The Limits of Power to his son Andrew - give that authority even more credibility, especially in the world of the armchair theoreticians, where the moralizing can be easy and cost-free, to them anyway. On top of all that, he seems to have moved some distance - not without incurring a measure of rancor - from the conservative think tanks and publications that first sponsored his work.

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Of the many compelling points made by Andrew Bacevich in 'The Limits of Power,' none, perhaps, is as relevant today as the pervasive and corrosive influence of the national security establishment--strategic analysts, retired officers, academics, advisers, and pundits who occupy senior positions in the think-tanks, policy centers, defense contractors, and graduate programs that comprise Washington's military-intellectual complex. These are the people, Bacevich, notes, who concoct the arguments for ever-increasing military spending, who devise the over-inflated estimates of enemy strength to justify
such spending, who advocate risky military interventions abroad--and who impugn the loyalty of any who might question their reasoning.

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I'm grateful for the opportunity to discuss my book as part of the TPM Café Book Club. The Limits of Power first appeared in bookstores in August. (The paperback comes out in May 2009). A month later the economy began to tank, in some respects vindicating the book's basic message: it's past time for Americans to get their house in order. The solution to the predicament we face - which is cultural and political as much as economic and military -- lies here at home, not in Central Asia or the Persian Gulf. A refusal to face that fundamental fact will exacerbate already-existing tendencies toward debt and dependency.

How far the new president will take us toward such a reorientation of priorities ranks as one of the major questions of the day. On the campaign trail, Barak Obama famously promised to "change the way Washington works." His election reflected - and greatly reinforced -- widespread expectations that he would do just that. An imperial president having made a hash of things, Americans now looked to a president-as-messiah to set things right again.

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This week at Cafe we have Andrew Bacevich with us to book club blog on his latest book The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism. The book examines the citizenry's complicity in the current economic, political, and military crisis. Bacevich is a professor of International Relations and History at Boston University and a retired army colonel. His previous books include American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U. S. Diplomacy (2002), The Imperial Tense: Problems and Prospects of American Empire (2003) (editor), The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (2005), and The Long War: A New History of US National Security Policy since World War II (2007) (editor).

Joining him are Michael Hollerich, professor at the University of St. Thomas; Michael Klare, professor at Hampshire College; Michael Lind, a Whitehead Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation; Nathan Newman, the policy director for the Progressive Legislative Action Network; David Shorr, a program officer in policy analysis and dialogue at the Stanley Foundation; and Tony Smith, a professor at Tufts University.