Citizens should be wary, the first president explained, of “those overgrown military establishments which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.”
An earlier version of this essay was posted March 17, 2016, with material from a first draft in 2005.
While he considered a respectable army essential to national well-being, Washington believed that an overgrown military in the New World would replicate the errors of the Old one. Unfortunately, this concern – considered superfluous in 1796 – has been largely ignored for more than two centuries, a period that has seen the United States transform itself from a revolutionary experiment into a rogue superpower.
As Andrew J. Bacevich argued in The New American Militarism more than twenty years ago, the roots of the change go deep and can’t be blamed on a single political party or administration. Yet the problem was intensified by disorientation following the Vietnam War, as well as illusions about the invulnerability provided by technology and the extreme right argument that military power provides the “indispensable foundation” for the nation’s unique role in the world.
Coming from a left-leaning writer, such insights would not be surprising. But Bacevich is a West Point graduate, veteran of Vietnam, and former Bush fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. As such, he watched the evolution of what he described as an “ever-deepening militarization of U.S. policy” that threatened to hollow out democracy and leave the country isolated and bankrupt, both morally and economically. Recent history supports his analysis.
Around the same time, conservative pundit Pat Buchanan made a similar case in Where the Right Went Wrong, a 2004 book on how the far right hijacked the Bush presidency. Calling the post 9/11 Bush Doctrine “democratic imperialism,” this New Right prophet warned that foreign adventurism would “bleed, bankrupt, and isolate this republic. This overthrows the wisdom of the Founding Fathers about what America should be all about. This is an American version of the Brezhnev Doctrine, wherein Moscow asserted the right to intervene to save Communism in any nation where it had once been imposed. Only we Americans now assert the right to intervene anywhere to impose democracy.”
However, while Buchanan considered Ronald Reagan a real conservative who would not have countenanced “regime change” and preventive war unless the evidence of an imminent attack was absolutely solid, Bacevich charged that Reagan nevertheless romanticized the military to boost defense spending, confront the Soviet Union, and set the stage of further militarization. More than anyone else, he charged, Reagan “conjured up the myths that nurtured and sustain present-day American militarism” and made military might “the preferred measure for gauging the nation’s strength.”
On the other hand, the shift was underway even before Reagan. Bacevich sees Jimmy Carter’s failures – including his pleas to end the U.S. addiction to imported oil and urge a turn toward self-sufficiency, as well as a disastrous covert mission to rescue U.S. hostages in Iran – as inadvertent persuasions. They convinced people that a weak military was intolerable and thus played into the agenda of the emerging new right movement.
After Reagan, Bill Clinton aided the project by backing military enhancements like “smart weapons” and “flexible power projection capabilities,” as well as intervening “with great frequency in more places for more varied purposes than any of his predecessors.”
Although modern right-wing nationalism can be traced back to 1960s attacks on the New Left and counterculture by Norman Podhoretz and others, it didn’t gain much traction until the Reagan years. The argument begins with the assertion that “evil” will prevail if those who confront it flinch from duty. It’s an existential threat, many often claim.The primary example before 9/11 was appeasement of Hitler by Britain and France, combined with U.S. isolationism before World War II. The only effective response is military power, not vague and unrealistic international negotiations. By this logic, the United States has no choice but to assert global leadership. And the mission is open-ended. There’s no room for pessimism or doubt; in fact, such thinking close to treasonous.
At home, right-wing nationalists defined a set of related threats, among them sexual license, vulgarity (that is, until Trump!), lack of standards, and the decline in respect for authority. In response, they felt compelled to challenge and discredit 1960s legacies such as multiculturalism, affirmative action, feminism, and gay rights, while promoting “traditional values” and so-called beleaguered institutions, notably marriage and the nuclear family. Some extended the list to most of Roosevelt’s New Deal.
Furthermore, the movement claimed that the crisis was permanent and dire, and the only antidote a heroic form of leadership Bacevich defined as a “weird homegrown variant of the Fuehrer Principle.” He held back from using the word fascist. But as Willhelm Reich explained in The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933/1946), identification with a “Fuehrer” forms the psychological basis of national narcissism. In pre-war Germany, “The structure of the fascist proved to be characterized by metaphysical thinking, piety, and the belief in the abstract ethical ideas and the Divine mission of the ‘Fuehrer’,” Reich explained. “These traits rested on a basis of a strong authoritarian fixation to a Fuehrer-ideal of the nation.”
In the United States, other factors assisting the rise of a fascist-leaning militarism included Hollywood and evangelical religion. The entertainment industry’s early contributions included a series of influential films that etched a romanticized vision of the military into popular consciousness. Bacevich focused on three: An Officer and a Gentleman (1982), which suggested that becoming an officer was the way to move from a dead-end existence to status and respectability, “up where we belong;” the Rambo series (1982-88), which argued that soldiers aren’t given the respect they deserve at home and should be set loose to win battles abroad by any means; and Top Gun (1986), a feature-length recruitment poster that made combat look clean, technologically sophisticated, and cool.
Since then Hollywood’s war narrative has become slightly more complex, but no less rose-colored. Dozen of major war films and TV series have been released in recent decades, many looking back at World War II as a violent crucible that nevertheless reflected noble national ideals. Others support arguments about the dangers of a half-hearted response to evil and how political considerations threaten essential missions.
As far as religion is concerned, Bacevich began a chapter titled “Onward” with the bold statement that the United States remained, “as it has always been, a deeply, even incorrigibly, Christian nation.” At the time up to 100 million people defined themselves as evangelicals, he claimed, and tended to be conservative and vote Republican. The number may have dropped slightly since, but about 24 percent of Americans still embrace the evangelical label. It’s not a majority, but a crucial bloc.
The trouble is that evangelical Christians also celebrate the military as a bastion of the values needed to stop the current slide toward perdition, which provides religious sanction to militarization. This links up nicely with authoritarian logic, offering support for the idea of striking the first blow. Books like The Church and the Sword and One Nation Under God replace the “just war” idea with a “crusader theory of warfare.” As Hal Lindsey, author of The Late Great Planet Earth, argued, “The Bible supports building a powerful military force. And the Bible is telling the U.S. to be strong again.”
With evangelicals leading the charge, both within the military chaplaincy and the GOP, “Conservative Christians have conferred a presumptive moral palatability on any occasion on which the United States resorts to force,” Bacevich concluded. “They have fostered among the legions of believing Americans a predisposition to see U.S. military power as inherently good, perhaps even a necessary adjunct to the accomplishment of Christ’s saving mission. In doing so, they have nurtured the preconditions that have enabled American infatuation with military power to flourish.”
So far, Trump’s current conflict with Iran is
one of the least popular in American history
. Most previous U.S. wars enjoyed high initial public approval. World War II reportedly had up to 97 percent backing. Even the 2001 Afghanistan invasion initially saw major support. In contrast, the new Iran conflict began with only 40 percent approval and dropped in the first month. Opposition to “endless wars” and Trump’s royalist ambitions is growing.
Bacevich has also proposed that the world is already in the midst of World War IV, and defined it bluntly as a battle to guarantee U.S. citizens “ever-increasing affluence.” It began, he claimed, when Jimmy Carter declared in January 1980 that, “An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.” This was called the Carter Doctrine.
Once this "Doctrine" became a widely accepted assumption, Reagan ramped up the military’s ability to actually wage the new world war, thus cocking the trigger that George W. Bush ultimately pulled. What allowed the crusade to proceed, Bacevich added, was a combination of self-induced historical amnesia and a momentum for militarization that had been building since the “national trauma” induced by defeat in Vietnam.
And the country may be stuck with this “misbegotten crusade,” Bacevich predicted. But at least he offered a set of alternative principles that might help mitigate the effects. They include restricting military actions to those that truly reflect what the U.S. Constitution calls “common defense.” This could force Congress to exercise oversight and renounce preventive war, relegate force to a last resort, limit U.S. dependence on foreign resources, reorganize the military around defense rather than power projection, base the military budget on what other nations spend (rather than a fixed percent of GDP), and increase funding for diplomacy to better communicate with the rest of the world. Considering where things stand, a tall order but worth keeping in mind.
He finished with three ideas for reforming the military itself. Favoring the idea of “citizen soldiers,” Bacevich suggests that the current all-volunteer force should better “mirror society” rather than becoming increasingly “professionalized.” Specifically, he calls for shorter enlistments, more generous signing bonuses, flexible retirement options, and free college education for anyone who serves. If the military is rooted among the people, problems that develop in any future interventions are more likely to be identified early and corrected. At least that's the hope.
Bacevich also called for a reexamination of the role of the National Guard, along with its expansion. “We need more citizen-soldiers protecting Americans at home even if that means fewer professional soldiers available to assume responsibility for situations abroad.” At least that sounds better than the current para-military drift of ICE. And finally, he urged an end to the current painful and dangerous separation between the military profession and the rest of society. As a former military man, he views war as part of the human condition. But he wants to bind the profession to the “outside world” rather allowing it to keep the world at bay.
