Andrew Bacevich

The United States has been “at war” for more than a decade. Yet as war has become normalized, a yawning gap has opened between America’s soldiers and the society in whose name they fight. For ordinary citizens, as former secretary of defense Robert Gates has acknowledged, armed conflict has become an “abstraction” and military service “something for other people to do.” In Breach of Trust, bestselling author Andrew Bacevich takes stock of the separation between Americans and their military, tracing its origins to the Vietnam era and exploring its pernicious implications: a nation with an abiding appetite for war waged at enormous expense by a standing army demonstrably unable to achieve victory. Among the collateral casualties are values once considered central to democratic practice, including the principle that responsibility for defending the country should rest with its citizens. Citing figures as diverse as the martyr-theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the marine-turned-anti-warrior Smedley Butler, Breach of Trust summons Americans to restore that principle. Rather than something for “other people” to do, national defense should become the business of “we the people.” Should Americans refuse to shoulder this responsibility, Bacevich warns, the prospect of endless war, waged by a “foreign legion” of professionals and contractor-mercenaries, beckons. So too does bankruptcy—moral as well as fiscal. Andrew J. Bacevich, a professor of history and international relations at Boston University, served for twenty-three years as an officer in the U.S. Army. He is the author of Washington Rules, The Limits of Power, and The New American Militarism, among other books. His writing has appeared in Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, The Nation, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal.

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In 2006 Bacevich warned that U.S. foreign policy was becoming a dangerous mix of utopian ideology and militarism. For this updated edition, the author of Washington Rules and The Limits of Power looks at the last five years and argues that the Obama administration has failed to find alternatives to military engagement.

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Andrew Bacevich diskuterer The Limit of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism.

From the store site: Is the Iraq War the disastrous nadir of a bloated America’s wrongheaded foreign policy system? Andrew Bacevich, a professor of history and foreign relations at Boston University, certainly thinks so. This bestselling book, now in paperback, takes aim at the national problem of consumption at any cost. (sweeks1980)… (mere)