The New World Order

Note to self: When teaching Graham Greene's The Quiet American, consider assigning Tony Judt's essay "The New World Order" to give students a sense of how the logic behind US military interventions in Southeast Asia a half century ago compare with the logic behind our global military presence today.

Judt's review essay has made me especially eager to read Andrew Bacevich's book The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced By War, recently published on Oxford University Press.

Judt writes: Bacevich is a graduate of West Point, a Vietnam veteran, and a conservative Catholic who now directs the study of international relations at Boston University. He has thus earned the right to a hearing even in circles typically immune to criticism. What he writes should give them pause. His argument is complex, resting on a close account of changes in the US military since Vietnam, on the militarization of strategic political thinking, and on the role of the military in American culture. But his conclusion is clear. The United States, he writes, is becoming not just a militarized state but a military society: a country where armed power is the measure of national greatness, and war, or planning for war, is the exemplary (and only) common project.

Why does the US Department of Defense currently maintain 725 official US military bases outside the country and 969 at home (not to mention numerous secret bases)? Why does the US spend more on "defense" than all the rest of the world put together? After all, it has no present or likely enemies of the kind who could be intimidated or defeated by "star wars" missile defense or bunker-busting "nukes." And yet this country is obsessed with war: rumors of war, images of war, "preemptive" war, "preventive" war, "surgical" war, "prophylactic" war, "permanent" war. As President Bush explained at a news conference on April 13, 2004, "This country must go on the offense and stay on the offense."

Among democracies, only in America do soldiers and other uniformed servicemen figure ubiquitously in political photo ops and popular movies. Only in America do civilians eagerly buy expensive military service vehicles for suburban shopping runs. In a country no longer supreme in most other fields of human endeavor, war and warriors have become the last, enduring symbols of American dominance and the American way of life. "In war, it seemed," writes Bacevich, "lay America's true comparative advantage."

It sickens me to think how the US wastes so much of its resources on unnecessary military spending that often amounts to little more than subsidies for defense contractors. While taxpayers bailout Boeing, many families of US soldiers live at or below the poverty level. Meanwhile, domestic programs suffer, average Americans lead lives filled with needless anxiety--worrying about health care, how to afford educating themselves and their families--and the world is no safer place. The fact that US spends more on its military than the rest of the world combined is simply obscene. It fills me with fear and loathing to contemplate the degree of paranoia, greed, and general hubris displayed by America's political leaders. I do not want to live in a country where the economy and culture are premised on being at a state of perpetual war.