What Price America's Exported Freedom: An Interview with Andrew Bacevich

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What Price America's Exported Freedom: An Interview with Andrew Bacevich

by John Kendall Hawkins

John Hawkins: In the Introduction to your book, The Limits of Power, you make a prescient statement about the direction of American Foreign Policy:

Can you say where we are today with that dysfunction compared to when the book was published in 2008?

Andrew Bacevich: Well, I mean, things have gotten worse. When I wrote that book the story was about the economic consequences of the Iraq war. Today, the story has shifted, as we confront the challenges of what I'll just call Trump populism. That undermines the stability of American democracy. That and the refusal on the part of Americans to. reckon with the negative consequences of our post-Cold War and, more specifically,. Post-9/11 compulsion to go to war, to use force.

One of the things that baffles me, disturbs me is how quickly my countrymen have. forgotten, erased the Afghanistan war, which was, of course, the longest war in our history, and it ended a complete, total and abject failure. My sense of what's going on in the country is that the Ukraine war has provided an excuse for Americans to forget about Afghanistan, in particular the American foreign policy establishment. Mainstream media just erased Afghanistan and now focus on the horrors of Ukraine. Understandable in some senses, because there are horrors in Ukraine. But I think it is remarkably short-sighted, because it means we're not going to learn anything from a failed 20 year long war.

Hawkins: We, the People have essentially been at war with Russia since Hiroshima -- 77 years -- cold and almost hot a few times. To reach a Pax Americana envisioned by the PNAC lot it seems inevitable that we have to sort things out -- once and for all -- with Russia and China. How will this end?

Bacevich: Well, I don't know, and I certainly hope not. We have to take into account very deep seated Russophobia. It probably dates all the way back to the Bolshevik Revolution. It certainly was deepened by the experience of the Cold War. You know, in a sense, I just said a minute ago, we Americans have forgotten the Afghanistan war. On the other hand, we haven't forgotten the Cold War, or at least we haven't forgotten who we blame for the Cold War, which tends to be the Russians. All that gets in the way of. thinking clearly about the Ukraine war, about the state of global relations, about, you know, about Russia.

And I think the other piece that comes into focus is this notion that Russia and China are like on the same team. So Russia has become the near-term or immediate or particularly visible adversary. But hovering in the background is China, as we see it.

And therefore, in some senses, I think. As we get indirectly drawn into the Ukraine war, we're being drawn further into an emerging, antagonistic relationship with China, which I think is unnecessary and will prove to be tragic if it simply continues. I'm not an apologist for China any more than I'm an apologist for Russia. But it does seem to me that the well-being of my country and the well-being of the globe requires an emphatic near-term effort to get serious about climate change. And that can only happen in an effective way if the United States and the People's Republic collaborate. So if the Ukraine war sort of derails efforts, that are already belated efforts, to take on climate change, if the Ukraine war sort of creates an opening to a "new Cold War," pitting the United States against China, I think that's going to be beyond tragic. It could be almost fatal to the well-being of the planet.

Hawkins: Ex-RAND war planner Daniel Ellsberg has said that his latest book, The Doomsday Machine, contains Nixon-era nuclear attack plan information far more important than the Pentagon Papers. One thing he notes, among many scary bits -- including calling his viewing of Dr. Strangelove "essentially a documentary" -- is that the US pre-emptive nuke posture -- willingness to first strike -- keeps the world on hair trigger. He discovered that the US has in place a policy whereby if they strike Russia, they intend to take out China, too, even if the latter was not a direct adversary at the time. This is frightening given the current posturing over Ukraine. Any thoughts on this?

Bacevich: Well, I have no idea what current nuclear war plans look like. And I would hope that people more measured, in the sense that we don't necessarily have to go attack everybody simultaneously. I think what happened in the early days of the Cold War as we went from a position of nuclear scarcity to nuclear plenty -- when there were literally tens of thousands of weapons -- war planners at the time.were slow, to put it mildly, in reflecting on the implications of going from 'we just got a few bombs' to 'now we got tens of thousands.' And so the early planning, which I think basically said, 'Okay, let's make enough bombs now and identify 50 cities in the Soviet Union that we're going to attack if World War Three happens. That ended up going to 100 cities to 500 cities, to cities that also included the People's Republic of China. Because you remember, however foolishly at that time, the image of our adversary was a monolithic image -- that the red Chinese and the Soviets were really part of a single, unified entity, that was the enemy. And the planners, I think, were just remarkably slow. I think of the way bureaucratic politics work. Start along a certain track and momentum builds and everybody shows up to work in the morning and they just keep doing what they did yesterday. I think that's probably what happened. All right.

Hawkins: There's a proposition that in going up against Russia and China we're actually going up in ideology when we're going up against an ideology rather than a nation-state problem. Differences in economic difference -- you know, free trade and capitalism versus state-protected markets and spicy totalitarianism.

Bacevich: In many respects, our thinking in that regard aligns with the thinking of the Chinese. They want an open world economically. They want a world in which there is trade, in which investment happens. I mean, they want that because they want to continue to grow economically and indeed, they want to surpass us economically. They've demonstrated a remarkable aptitude to use the market to produce economic progress.

Hawkins: You wrote a LA Times piece way back when, titled, "The battle for truth over Saudi Arabia's ties to 9/11," that questions how we responded to the Kingdom and essentially let it off easy --compared to Iraq and Afghanistan, which had no suicide pilots attacking the homeland. They never apologized. Some believe we should have gone into SA, etc. Many years later, our political and military "partnership" with the corrupt Sharia-driven nation seems to have dragged down in the realpolitik of our hand-clasping with the nation. The Khashoggi incident seems like a reminder of what we're dealing with underneath the facade. Any response? What's the future of that relationship?

Bacevich: Well, it's an amoral relationship. And, of course. American political leaders habitually posture, claiming that US policies are informed by moral values. And I suppose they are sometimes. But not when there are large scale economic and or security concerns at stake. There's a great reluctance, I think. And in Washington, this posturing is bipartisan, transpartisan. It's the newspapers and the failure to acknowledge the great void that exists between the United States and Saudi Arabia when it comes to basic values.

Why? Why, why? Why are we so afraid of acknowledging the truth? Well, oil is one answer. You know, the continuing conviction, which I think is suspect, that somehow or other our security, prosperity, well-being is dependent upon access to Persian Gulf oil and also the whole Israeli dimension of the puzzle. So this relationship gets underwritten and tolerated from one administration to the next. And it's one of those contradictions. I think every nation has those contradictions. Just most nations don't pose as moral exemplars to the extent that we do.

Hawkins: Recently, I read that the costs of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan amounted to some $6T. Some would argue that $6T is a price not worth seeking world domination for. And when it's a miserable 20 year failure, you ache at the loss of those funds and how they might have rebuilt America -- student loan forgiveness, health care, infrastructure, educational revamping for the new age we're in, etc. What is the matter with what Ike called the Military Industrial Complex (MIC)? What are they defending, if so much is wasted for nothing?

Bacevich: The estimates are somewhere like 6 to 8 trillion. Yeah, that's a huge sum of money. These are estimates. Nobody knows. The Afghanistan war was probably closer to something like 2 trillion. But your point remains the same. These are enormous, enormous sums of money. And if you ask, what the hell did we get in return? What are the benefits? The answer's zero. I suppose some would say, well, there was no recurrence of 911. I would say that's true. And probably credit the Transportation Security Agency rather than anything that the US forces were doing in fighting wars on the other side of the planet.

How did this happen? Well, first of all, I think we have to appreciate the extent to which the post-9-11 wars have been a bipartisan project. We have a nominal two party system where each party is challenging the other and demanding accountability, but that doesn't apply to war. We have a one party system, basically, and it's a war party. and it's got Democrats and Republicans. And so there's been remarkably little accountability going back to the immediate aftermath of the 911 attacks. It's also something of a regrettable tradition that when it comes to wars, nobody bothers to count the dollars. So, you know, the point you made is that all this money could have been better spent on X, Y and Z. Absolutely true. Ostensibly, it's our obligation to keep sending more money. It's striking that the present Congress is authorizing a budget for the Pentagon larger than what Biden asked for. Biden's not exactly a dove. I mean, there's almost no interest in political accountability as it relates to American military expenditures.

Hawkins: In his memoir, Beautiful Things, Hunter Biden said that having a Biden on the board of Ukraine's Burisma gas was "a big f*ck You to Putin" Be that as it may, what does having a sober Cofer Black on the board say to Putin? Will he be America's Mercenary Man in Ukraine?

Bacevich: Yeah. I don't know enough about him to comment.

Hawkins: No worries. Well, how about the general question of mercenaries being introduced in Ukraine. I've been reading that the Wagner soldiers of fortune from, of all unlikely places, Russia, are now a force in the war. And we read about a so-called international force, a sort of foreign legion that NATO-esque people want to bring into Ukraine as a sort of indirect way of confronting Russia.

Bacevich: There is a pretty well developed theme in contemporary warfare to create a space for mercenaries. We ourselves have done that on a fairly large scale in our post-9-11 wars. And, you know, we can say it's a recent thing. You could also say it's something that's been going on for a couple of millennia. I find it troubling when we do it, because I think it's a way of forgetting to come to terms with the deficiencies of the military system that we have proposed. We have chosen to embrace the all-volunteer force.

Right. Well, what it really amounts to is, as a matter of policy, we have decided that the American people will play no role in the conduct of our wars; that they're going to be parcelled out to volunteers. And certainly some of them are patriots and serve for patriotic reasons, but basically we rely on economic incentives to keep the force filled. And we have found that that's not sufficient in terms of producing warm bodies to go fight. And so then people say, well, good, we'll go out into the marketplace and we'll hire the bodies with private security firms that are paid to perform all kinds of functions -- many not directly related to combat. But basically we're hiring civilians to do things that soldiers used to do in prior conflicts. And that's a way of concealing the costs of the war, and the American people can feel good -- they cheer for the troops but don't really have to pay much attention to the specifics of how these wars are being orchestrated.

Hawkins: It kind of reminds me of my reading of Ed Snowden's memoir, Permanent Record, a couple of years ago. He spent a whole chapter talking about the private contractor phenomenon, the poaching of public servants with top security, and the escape from public scrutiny and accountability.

Bacevich: I have not studied this in any great detail, but my sense is that the contracting phenomenon really became a big thing back in the Reagan era. The argument was that relying on contractors, as opposed to civil servants, gives the government a lot more flexibility. Because you could just simply not renew a contract. Therefore, you can shed employees. Whereas when you were relying on civil servants or the military, you can't make people go away. You're stuck with them. Therefore, you stuck with the costs.

So it began as a conservative perspective, a mechanism that would allow the government to be more efficient and to avoid wasting money. I think that was the initial idea. That's not the way it's worked out in practice. The way it's worked out in practice is simply they're not saving money. They're costing money. It's a way, basically, to expand payrolls and ostensibly expand capacity, whether to collect intelligence or to conduct military operations in a way that kind of works around the traditional institutions that were charged with performing those functions. Right. Now, there's no pretense of trying to save money or do things more economically. It's probably costing the taxpayer even more money than would otherwise be the case.

Hawkins: Recently, I read and reviewed two works, one, 2034, a novel by ex-NATO chief James Stavridis, and the other, an Army War College Report on how climate change will affect the military's ability to fulfill its mission to serve and protect the nation as its get drawn into ever-increasing requirements for domestic disaster relief. The Report, commissioned by Gen. Mark Milley, suggests a hopeless situation ahead, and even suggests that, even though things might get real bad, new opportunities may open -- competition for oil extraction in the Arctic for instance (and more tension there with the Russians, of course), and a chance to extract water from the air to help fulfill our dwindling water requirements. Similarly, though Stavridis's, novel ends like Fail Safe -- badly - as two cities are nuked, he, too, sees a silver lining in the competition for new oil wealth in the Arctic, plus, it turns out that 2034 is the first of a trilogy. In the third book Stavridis tell us it about "when climate change comes home to roost." Are our MIC leaders living in a fantasy world? How do we change such thinking?

Bacevich: I met Admiral Stavridis. He's a nice guy. He's a smart guy. But, I mean, I'm not intimately connected with the people who inhabit that world. I think the one thing I would say is. When you're in that world, you become a prisoner of a set of assumptions related to national security, related to international politics, and perhaps the primary assumption is one of competitiveness. It's Us against Them. I mean, the talk of peace and harmony is talk. But if you're on the inside, you know that really it's us against the Chinese. It's us against whoever else we're talking about. And therefore, the idea that. let's say, with regard to the climate crisis or other environmental issues, there's the idea that cooperation no longer permits competition to continue. Cooperation demands collaboration between countries and people. I think that's very, very hard to accept if you're a colonel working in the Pentagon, or some colonel working in the U.K. Ministry of Defense, or some colonel working in, you know, with the People's Liberation Army in China.

Hawkins: The General Milley-commissioned report suggests that mission drift will occur as a result of impending and relentless climate and environmental catastrophes that lead to political structural failure, such as what happened in New Orleans with Katrina - but on a national scale. Military forces will be called into play and this could lead to what amounts to a soft coup. And I was reading a one think tank report -- Global Trends 2040 - that suggested democracy would end altogether, with all of the climate change disasters heading our way, and that we wouldn't see a return to democracy until about 2040 at the earliest"

Bacevich:. You know, we Americans have taken it for granted that our very large and powerful military is committed to the preservation of the constitutional order. And I think one of the things we're beginning to appreciate is that, whereas, at a superficial level, that's certainly true -- If you ask General Milley, do you support the Constitution, he would say, of course I do -- but at a deeper level, I think we begin to see evidence that senior military officers may not fully appreciate what that really means. And Milley himself is the perfect example. He allowed himself to be manipulated by President Trump in the infamous episode that occurred in Lafayette Park, across from the White House. And he allowed himself to be used by the president in ways that absolutely undermined the prevailing system of civil-military relations. Now, Milley wasn't trying to do bad things. He allowed himself to be used for a bad thing. And I think that sort of raises the question about the awareness, the political intelligence within the senior ranks of the military. Do they really understand the role that they play in ensuring the survival of the constitutional order? You know, 10, 20 years ago, I would have said, don't worry about it. It's not an issue. Now I think it is an issue.

Hawkins::While it may seem like conspiracy theory to consider that the US allowed Russia to make its incursion into Ukraine as so as to, if nothing else, shore up its NATO alliances weakened by Trump's obnoxious attack on member states -- GDP expenditures toward defense and calling data obsolete -- still, there's something about the timing of the events that suggests a mighty struggle ahead between the US and its proxies against Russia and China.

Bacevich: Well, I don't think there's a conspiracy. I think that this war was an avoidable war. I think the United States and others should have taken more seriously the security interests of the Russians as defined by Putin. That doesn't mean give in, doesn't mean, you know, do whatever Putin wants. But I think there was an opportunity for serious negotiations that might have underlined that might have offered a way to avoid the war. But the truth is, we were not interested in any negotiations. And, you know, maybe it was either. I don't know. I don't know the guy. Yeah.

Hawkins: Former Singaporean ambassador Kishore Mahbubani has written an excellent book whose title announces its agenda: Has China Won? In it, among other things, he describes a realignment of the world hegemony from West to East, with a rising China (in cooperation with a partnership with Russia) to, among other things, replace the global reserve currency. Again, the book title is rhetorical. How do you respond to the proposition without necessarily having read the book?

Bacevich: I'm not an economist, and quite frankly, I'm baffled that the dollar continues to be the reserve currency, given the profligacy of the US government and our either inability or refusal to. Manage our own fiscal affairs. So in a way, I don't get it. There's lots of smart people who seem to say that the dollar's position is secure. Again, I'm not getting it.

Hawkins: You have a new book out: After the Apocalypse. You write - "Rancor, pestilence, want, and fury: These are the Four Horsemen comprising our own homemade Apocalypse" Can you say something about it?

Bacevich: Well, the book idea came as I was experiencing the pandemic, and its related secondary implications - the enormous economic recession. The inability of the United States to police its borders. The. Unprecedented environmental catastrophes, I think exemplified, for example, by the wildfires on the Pacific Coast. It really did seem to me that we were living through apocalyptic times. I was struck by the inability of the government to respond effectively. So, I wrote the book in a period of four months. So it is not a product of deep scholarship, but an effort to call attention to. Apocalyptic times. And to suggest that, if nothing else, the challenges the United States is facing rendered obsolete the national prevailing national security paradigm basically in place since the end of World War Two. And I described that paradigm as one that identified the principal threats to American security and well-being as being things out there, up there in Europe, out there in East Asia, out there in the Persian Gulf. And under the terms of that paradigm, the appropriate response to those dangers was to raise up powerful military forces and be prepared to use them to fight out there. Right. And it seemed to me by the time we got to about 2020 that the principal concerns are actually here. Here at home.

Hawkins: Well, in that particular sense, you sound you sound like Trump in his America First movement.

Bacevich: Except that, I don't know how serious he actually was about anything he said. Even if he was serious, the ineptitude of his administration didn't result in him doing anything effective about it. To pretend that building a wall is going to solve our problems with undocumented migrants. Well, dumb idea.

So anyway, the purpose of my book was to suggest an alternative national security paradigm centered on the proposition that the primary obligation is to provide for the safety and well-being of Americans where they live. And if you begin with that proposition, then suddenly developments within the Western Hemisphere become more important than developments out there in Ukraine. And if you take that point of view, then the most important countries to us aren't the United Kingdom or our NATO allies or Japan, but the countries that matter most to us are Canada and Mexico, our neighbors in this hemisphere, with whom we share a wide range of common interests that tend to get treated as an afterthought.

Hawkins: And what's the solution to that?

Bacevich: Well, it ain't military. And certainly it's not to ignore the rest of the world. This is not a proposition for isolationism. It is a suggestion that the reliance on military power that has been at the center of our policies for a long time has not worked. You know, it's circled back to the amount of money, the trillions of dollars spent post-9-11 in Iraq and Afghanistan. What does that do for anybody? All right. So there needs to be an alternative approach, right?