The introduction to Andrew J. Bacevich’s “Washington Rules” opens with a provocative statement: “Worldly ambition inhibits true learning. Ask me. I know. A young man in a hurry is nearly uneducable: He knows what he wants and where he’s headed; when it comes to looking back or entertaining heretical thoughts, he has neither the time nor the inclination. All that counts is that he is going somewhere. Only as ambition wanes does education become a possibility.”
Bacevich, a retired Army colonel and now a professor of history, maintains his eyes were first opened when he visited Eastern Germany shortly after the fall of Berlin Wall and came to witnessed the impoverished living conditions and the pathetically equipped Soviet Army.
He describes the United States as following a “credo” articulated by publisher Henry Luce as “The American Century” which calls for “the United States – and the United States alone – to lead, save, liberate, and ultimately transform the world.” Luce “exhorted his fellow citizens to ‘accept wholeheartedly our duty to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit.’”
Becevich maintains the post Second World War result has been a “sacred trinity: an abiding conviction that the minimum essentials of international peace and order require the United States to maintain a global military presence, to configure its forces for global power projection, and to counter existing or anticipated threats by relying on a policy of global interventionism.”
He maintains “Americans can ill afford to indulge any longer in dreams of saving the world, much less remaking it in our own image. The curtain is now falling on the American Century.”
At the end of his introductory chapter Bacevich observes “The persistence of these rules has also provided an excuse to avoid serious self-engagement” and “…has allowed Washington to postpone or ignore problems demanding attention here at home. Fixing Iraq or Afghanistan ends up taking precedence over fixing Cleveland and Detroit.”
