Walter Russell Mead, Power, Terror, Peace, and War: America’s Grand Strategy in a World at Risk (New York: Knopf, 2004) ("'Never apologize, never explain' may be a good motto for heroes in Western adventure sagas, but it doesn't work as well for writers, and especially for writers on American foreign policy. A book like this one needs generous helpings both of apology and of explanation. American foreign policy may be the most complex subject in the world. Economics, political science, history and the philosophy of history, culture, religion, the nature of human natures: American foreign policy is studied in great detail by professionals and scholars, it must ultimately be debated and decided by tens of millions of voters who have neither the time nor perhaps the inclination to immerse themselves in briefing papers, task force reports, and long scholarly tests." Id. at 8. Still, do we not have to make the effort to so inform ourselves. With liberal arts education in retreat, will American be capable of informing themselves even if they wish to do so? “We are probably seeing the beginnings of the breakup of the learned guilds—the doctors, lawyers, and tenured university professors who monopolized the production and distribution of knowledge and certain high-end services in the old economy. Consumers can write their will using cheap software or on the Internet; the fee-for-service model of health care-care delivery is under attack on all fronts. As the economic pressures on higher education grow, the tenure system is coming under increasing pressure.” Id. at 101. "Arabian Fascism like the European Fascism of the twentieth century comes in two forms: secular and religious. Some of the European fascist movements, especially in Portugal, France, and Spain, were linked to parts of the Catholic church. Others, like the Nazis, were anti-Christian and either secular or neo-pagan. In the same way the totalitarian ideologies now tormenting the Muslim world include secular fascisms, like the Ba'ath party of Iraq, and the religious fascisms like that of Osama Bin Laden. Both movements believe in subordinating the rights and conscience of individuals and eliminating the independence of civil society in favor of a totalitarian politics to restore the exaggerated glories of a romanticized past. Both movements recognize no limits on the right of their leaders to command their followers to carry out lawless violence against innocent civilians. In European history, white was often the color of totalitarian movements claiming some kind of alignment with traditional religion--and people often spoke of a White Terror as opposed to the red Terror of the Jacobins and Communists. Extending this language to the Middle East makes it possible to refer to the fascism of groups like Al-Qaeda as White Fascism; the term Black Fascism can be used for the secular fascism of leaders like Saddam Hussein. Both forms of fascism are deadly enemies of freedom and peace, and the United States and its allies should oppose them both, but the core of the present battle in the Middle East is the fight against the White Fascism of the Al-Qaeda fanatics, not the Black Fascism of the radical Ba'athists." Id. at 176.).
Richard Bonin, Arrows of the Night: Ahmad Chalabi's Long Journey to Triumph in Iraq (New York: Doubleday, 2011) (How America got snookered into the War in Iraq. "History will also remember [Chalabi] as the great bluffer of Baghdad. Never has anyone parlayed such a weak hand into such a momentous outcome as he. . . . All he had was guile and his genius, and a single-minded determination to lure the world's last standing superpower into invading Iraq in a war of choice--to send its soldiers to fight and die and to spend upward of a trillion dollars of its national treasure--so that he could go home. . . ." "But for America, what Chalabi maneuvered us into may turn out to have been the biggest foreign policy disaster in a generation: an ill-planned, poorly executed preemptive war that employed torture and gave us the devastating images of Abu Ghraib prison, undermining the region's confidence in both our country's competence and moral authority. Perhaps the greatest irony of all, it fortified an ascendant Oran by eliminating its nemesis next door, Saddam Hussein and his Ba'athist regime." Id. at 261-262.).
Jack Goldsmith, Power and Constraint: The Accountable Presidency after 9/11 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012) (Interesting read, especially the Chapter Five, "Warrior-Lawyers". "Some military officials, too, think lawyers have too much influence over command decisions, 'lawyers are much too involved in the execution of our operations at war,' says Jack Keane, an influential former four-star general who, among his many accomplishments, was on of the intellectual architects of the Surge. 'They manage to embed themselves right in the middle of our operational considerations and this process is fundamentally flawed. General guidance in rules of engagement is fine but the specifics of what we're getting down to not only constrains the leaders who are executing the mission on the ground and in the air, in terms of close combat, but it also, I think, has a limiting effect on operational and tactical commanders in restraining them.' Even General Petraeus, who admires and relies heavily on lawyers, cautions that they can 'constrain the initiative [that is] essential to military success.' Lawyers can be 'surprise, surprise,' overly legalistic,' he says, adding that 'operators sometimes have to remind lawyers that these are binary decisions for our troops and they involve decisions that have to be made in the blink of an eye--either life or death for that individual and potentially for the folks that are at the far end of what it is the individual is about to launch down-range.' Martins too recorded the hazards that lawyering poses to initiative and effective fighting in his influential rules-of-engagement article, and he frequently underlines the point." 'Risk aversion, loss of initiative, and intrusion on the commander's prerogative are undeniable costs of a law-dominated military. But there is another side to the story: a properly run, law-dominated military also garners enormous power from the constraint of law. Just as Martin's infantrymen could not accomplish much without the discipline of rules, neither can the U.S. military more generally. The Department of Defense is in many ways the largest organization on the planet. It requires many laws and directives to function, to ensure weapons and personnel arrive on time, with the right equipment, at the right place, and are employed effectively on the battlefield. It also needs laws and directives to ensure that the commands of the President and Secretary of Defense, and the requirements of statutes and treaties, work their way throughout the bureaucracy to the other side of the world, where Sergeant Schwartz follows and implements them. Accomplishing purposeful and constrained behavior in wartime in a large military organization is very hard to do. But it is more vital than ever. For in an era of global media and instant criticism, what Sergeant Schwartz does on the other side of the world can have devastating effects on the entire war-fighting effort. Law and lawyers, when they work properly, keep these events to a minimum." Id. at 144-145.
Jane Kramer, Lone Patriot: The Short Career of An American Militiaman (New York: Pantheon Books, 2002) (Of course, when it comes to terrorism foreign and domestic policy are not that far apart. "Nothing about hate has changed. The Patriots who inspired Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols to kill 168 people in Oklahoma City in 1995 still have most of the same enemies Osama bin laden had when he organized the murder of 3,061 people in New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania six years later, and if you open their Web site you'll find that most of them still say so. Psychiatrists claim that groups like the Washington State Militia can have, at least in theory, a socializing function, that they can discipline paranoia, and by extension paranoiacs, by focusing on a delusion everyone in the group shares, that they can set perimeters on delusion and thus permit some otherwise dangerously capricious people to live the rest of their lives as useful and harmless citizens. Maybe. John [Pitner], of course, had told me the same thing. I used to wonder if John was right--if apart from his own evident delusion he was actually quite shrewed. The question that haunts me now, in a very changed world, is this: Was it the militia that kept John from terrorism, or simply the fact that he wasn't shrewed enough or smart enough or organized enough or rich enough to do the things he dreamed of?" Id. at 254-255. "In Lone Patriot, Kramer . . . turns to America with an enthralling portrait of the commander-in-chief of an erstwhile Patriot army called the Washington State Militia." "In 1995 Kramer made the first of what would be many trips to Whatcom County, Washington, to talk to John Pitner and some of the veterans of Alpha One, his 'leadership' squad. Through their voices, Pitner's in particular, Kramer tells the story of a movement that surfaced in American in the nineties, as the millennium approached, and has continued--its resolve, if anything, strengthen by the events of the past year [i.e. the al-Qaede attacks of 9/11]--into the new century. Her powerful evocations of Whatcom County could easily describe any number of rural communities in the Pacific Northwest today--a place of refuge to a strange assortment of conspiracy theorists, armed 'constitutionalists,' white supremacists, county secessionists, Freemen, and Christian fanatics, and to the kind of groups that survive on their discontent.").
John Mueller, Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2010) (From the bookjacket: "Ever since the first atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, the prospect of nuclear annihilation has haunted the modern world. And since September 11, 2001, the view that nuclear terrorism is the most serious threat to the security of the United States or, for that matter, of the world has been virtually universal." "But as John Mueller reveals in this eye-opening, compellingly argued, and very reassuring book, our obsession with nuclear weapons is unsupported by history, scientific fact, or logic. Examining the entire atomic era, Mueller boldly contends that nuclear weapons have had little impact on history. Although they have inspired overwrought policies and distorted spending priorities, things generally would have turned out much the same if they had never been invented. For the most part they have proved to be militarily useless, and a key reason so few countries have taken them up is they are a spectacular waste of money and scientific talent. Equally important, Atomic Obsession reveals why current anxieties about terrorists obtaining nuclear weapons are essentially baseless: there are a host of practical and organizational difficulties that make their likelihood of success almost vanishingly small. Mueller . . . goes even further, maintaining that our efforts to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons have produced more suffering and violence than the bombs themselves, and that the proliferation of weapons, while not necessarily desirable, is unlikely to be a major danger or to accelerate.").
John Mueller, Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them (New York: The Free Press, 2006) ("Upon discovering that Weeki Wachee Springs, his Florida roadside water park, had been included on the Department of Homeland Security's list of over 80,000 potential terrorist targets, its marketing and promotion manager, John Athanason, turned reflective. 'I can't imagine bin Laden trying to blow up the mermaids,' he mused, 'but with terrorists, who knows what they're thinking. I don't want to think like a terrorist, but what if the terrorists try to poison the water at Weeki Wachee Springs?' " "Whatever his imaginings, however, he went on to report that his enterprise had quickly and creatively risen to the occasion--or seized the opportunity. They were working to get a chunk of the counterterrorism funds allocated to the region by the well-endowed, anxiety-provoking, ever-watchful Department of Homeland Security." "Which is the greater threat: terrorism, or our reaction against it? The Weeki Wachee experience illustrates the problem. A threat that is real but likely to prove to be of limited scope had been massively, perhaps even fancifully, inflated to produce widespread and unjustified anxiety. This process had then led to wasteful, even self-parodic expenditures and policy overreactions, ones that not only very often do more harm and cost more money than anything the terrorists have accomplished, but play into their hands." Id. at 1. From the bookjacket: "Why have there been no terrorist attacks in the United States since 9/11? It is ridiculously easy for a single person with a bomb-filled backpack, or a single explosives-laden automobile, to launch an attack. So why hasn't it happened? The answer is surely not the Department of Homeland Security, which cannot stop terrorists form entering the country, legally or otherwise. It is surely not the Iraq war, which has stroked the hatred of Muslim extremists around the world and wasted many thousands of lives. Terrorist attacks have been regular events for many years--usually killing handfuls of people, occasionally more than that." "Is it possible that there is a simple explanation for the peaceful American homefront? Is it possible that there are no al-Qaeda terrorists here? Is it possible that the war on terror has been a radical overreaction to a rare event? Consider: 80,000 Arab and Muslim immigrants have been subjected to fingerprinting and registration, and more than 5,000 foreign nationals have been imprisoned--yet there has not been a single conviction for a terrorist crime in America. A handful of plots--some deadly, some intercepted--have plagued Europe and elsewhere, and even so, the death toll has been modest." "We have gone to war in two countries and killed tens of thousands of people. We have launched a massive domestic wiretapping program and created vast databases of information once considered private. Politicians and pundits have berated us about national security and patriotic duty, while encroaching our freedoms and sending thousands of young men off to die." "It is time to consider the hypothesis that dare not speak its name: we have wildly overreacted. Terrorism has been used by murderous groups for decades, yet even including 9/11, the odds of an American being killed by international terrorism are microscopic. In general, international terrorism doesn't do much damage when considered in almost any reasonable context." "The capacity of al-Qaeda or any similar group to do damage in the United States pales in comparison to the capacity other dedicated enemies, particularly international Communism, have possessed in the past. Lashing out at the terrorist threat is frequently an exercise in self-flagellation because it is usually more expensive than the terrorist attack itself and because it gives the terrorists exactly what they are looking for. Much, probably most, of the money and effort expended on counterterrorism since 2001 (and before, for that matter) has been wasted." "The terrorism industry and its allies in the White House and Congress have preyed on our fears and caused enormous damage. It is time to rethink the entire enterprise and spend much smaller amounts on only those things that do matter: intelligence, law enforcement, and disruption of radical groups overseas. Above all, it is time to stop playing into the terrorists' hands, by fear-mongering and helping spread terror itself." Though published in 2006, the arguments--after adjusting some of the numbers and taking into accounts events of the last 6six to seven years--still hold.).
Joseph S. Nye Jr., The Paradox of American Power: Why the World's Only Superpower Can't Go It Alone (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2002) ("Power in the global information age is becoming less tangible and less coercive, particularly among the advanced countries, but most of the world does not consist of postindustrial societies, and that limits the transformation of power. Much of Africa and the Middle East remains locked in preindustrial agricultural societies with weak institutions and authoritarian rulers. Other countries, such as China, India, and Brazil, are industrial economies analogous to parts of the West in the mid-twentieth century. In such a variegated world, all three sources of power--military, economic, and soft--remain relevant, although to different degrees in different relationships. However, if current economic and social trends continue, leadership in the information revolution and soft power will become more important in the mix. . . ." "No country is better endowed than the United States in all three dimensions--military, economic, and soft power. Our greatest mistake in such a world would be to fall into one-dimensional analysis and to believe that investing in military power alone will ensure our strength." Id.at at 11-12. Which is pretty much what G. W. Bush did! UGH! "Other things being equal, the United States is well placed to remain the leading power in world politics well into the twenty-first century or beyond. This prognosis depends upon assumptions that can be spelled out. For example, it assume that the long-term productivity of the American economy will be sustained [oops!], that American society will not decay [oops!], that the United States will maintain its military strength but not become overmiltarized [??], that Americans will not become so unilateral and arrogant in their strength that they squander the nation's considerable fund of soft power [oops!], that there will not be some catastrophic series of events that profoundly transform American attitudes in an isolationist direction [?], and that Americans will define their national interest in a broad and farsighted way that incorporates global interests [oops]. Each of these assumptions can be questioned, but they currently seem more plausible than their alternations [really?] If the assumptions hold, America will continue to be number one, but even so, in this global information age, number one ain't gonna be what it used to be. To succeed in such a world, America must not only maintain its hard power but understand its soft power and how to combine the two in the pursuit of national and global interests." Id. at 171.).
Trita Parsi, A Single Roll of the Dice: Obama's Diplomacy with Iran (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2012) (As Parsi notes, quoting Albert Einstein, "You cannot prevent and prepare for war at the same time." Id. at 1. That pretty much sums up the trouble of America's tormented and dangerous relationship with Iran. Who is responsible for this mess is, in many ways, the central theme of this short, but thoughtful book. "[S]anctions neither complement diplomacy nor provide an alternative to engagement. Rather than being an alternative policy, sanctions have become an alternative to policy. If diplomacy is pursued again, it must succeed for the sake of resolving the conflict, not for the sake of creating an impetus for more sanctions. While sanctions can potentially play a role during specific phases of an engagement policy, a sanctions-centric policy that places diplomacy on the margins is unlikely to succeed. The opposite is more likely to yield results--that is, a policy centered on diplomacy whereby sanctions can be used on the margins as one of many instruments rather than as the bedrock of of the policy." Id. at 235-236.).
Paul R. Pillar, Intelligence and U.S. Foreign Policy: Iraq, 9/11, and Misguided Reform (New York: Columbia U. Press, 2011) ("Bad foreign policy has numerous possible ingredients, but among the more important presumably are the images that policymakers hold of the foreign situations to which their policies are a response. Those images include the policymakers' perception of current reality, their understanding of the forces and dynamics at play, and usually their sense of where the events in question are heading. The whole package is a construct that, whatever its origins, is tied more closely to the decision maker's mind than to the outside world that the decision maker believes it represents. It is accordingly more appropriate to call this construct an image rather than knowledge." "In one sense, there has been plenty of attention to this ingredient in discussions of U.S. policy. . . . But most of the anguish has an extremely narrow focus that overlooks the most important inputs to the images policymakers hold and how images actually shape policy, if they shape it at all. That narrow focus has been on what are termed 'intelligence failures' and on the need to fix or reform intelligence. Narrowing the focus even more, intelligence gets equated with the output of certain elements of the U.S. government that have the word intelligence in their names or that have the gathering of intelligence as their primary mission." "This very constricted form of attention to the causes of misguided policy stems in part from how the making of foreign and security policy is supposed to work. The textbook model of the policy process involves decision makers dispassionately reflecting on the information and analysis available to them--the principal source being an equal dispassionate intelligence service--and then selecting a course of action based on that reflection." "The narrow focus of attention stems at least as much from emotion and public psychology as it does from textbooks. We like to attribute woebegone wars and shocking surprise attacks to the shortcomings of intelligence services because this explanation is easily understandable and because it offers the comforting prospect that by fixing such shortcomings, we can prevent comparable calamities from occurring. It would be far less comforting to conclude that mistaken images underlying failed policies had sources less susceptible to repair, that relevant misperceptions resided more in our own heads or the heads of political leaders we elected than in unelected bureaucracies, or that some of the most important things we did not know were unknowable to anyone on our side, even if we had the most exemplary intelligence service." "These tendencies are especially marked for Americans. . . . If the United States could win world wars, put a man on the moon, and do all the other marvelous and difficult things it has accomplished, then according to reason it should be able to perform just as well the task of determining what is going on in other countries." "The tendency toward exceptionalsims--the idea that the United States is not only good at many things, but also better than anyone else--contributes to this pattern. This tendency obscures inconsistency between how other countries are believed to form their images of the outside world and how America is believed to form its. Many Americans see nothing contradictory in believing that foreigners are prisoners of parochial biases, but that they themselves are not." Id. at 2-3. READ THIS BOOK!! It is relevant not just to how we think--or don't think-- and how we groupthink about foreign policy and national security, but how we think and problem-solve generally. For instance, are not we all often dazzle by the "new"? "The bias toward exaggeration of newness extends beyond the masses to the intelligentsia and chattering classes. Commentaries and thus the commentators who write them get noticed insofar as they are perceived as conveying new thoughts about new issues, new threats, and new strategies needed to meet them. Observations about what has not changed are less likely to sell. The themes of newness in international affairs and of how the United States and its intelligence community must adapt to the new has been repeated so many times that it now sounds very old." Id. at 208.).
Dana Priest & William M. Arkin, Top Secret America: The Rise of The New American Security State (New York: Little, Brown, 2011) ("In practice, most SAR [Suspicious Activity Report] reports--and the names of the people included in them--don't go anywhere; they remain in the uncertain middle and just sit in the database, which feeds into the debate over the privacy implications or retaining so much information on U.S. citizens and residents who have not been charged with anything." "Most of the FBI agents who have doubts about the system won't publicly say so, given that their views are contrary to official policy. But if you asked the question another way, whether more terrorism cases come about as a result of this digital dragnet or from more focused, old-fashioned agent work, the agents responded like Richard A. McFeely, special agent in charge of the FBI's Baltimore division. Talking about the Baltimore suspect in the attempt to bomb the military recruitment center, I asked him whether the new technology had helped crack the case. 'This was good, old-fashioned police work by a lot of different police agencies coming together.' 'Okay, so not so heavy on the technology?' I asked. 'That's correct.' Still, McFeely defended the large database. 'We need it because you never know,' he said. 'And it's that one question mark that is out there.' We need it because you never know is the answer to so many questions about the size, expense, and effectiveness of Top Secret America. But is that really an answer? 'You never know' was the same as saying that all the spending, all the effort, even all the waste was worth it because, well, it might stop one attack. Nowhere else in American life has that kind of logic been an acceptable answer, except perhaps during the cold war, when a first strike by the Soviet Union could have resulted in mutual obliteration." "In every other arena, more rational cost-benefit calculations prevail. . . . " "But if someone is taking pictures of a bridge in some city and a citizen reports it, it will probably end up in the FBI's database . . . If there's no other information connecting any of that to even a whiff of something suspicious, 'that name will lie dormant there' until the same person 'at a later time takes a picture of another bridge across the country or starts taking pictures of the gates at Langley [CIA's headquarters]'. . . Id. at 149-150. From the bookjacketL After 9/11, the United States government embarked on an unparalleled effort to protect America. The result has been calamitous. This new top secret world is so vast that nobody knows how many people it employs or how much taxpayer money is spent on it. Nobody knows how much work is being duplicated or even how to assess the effectiveness of all its programs. Over 850,000 people--an average of more than seventeen thousand per state--now have top secret security clearance, and more than twelve hundred top secret government organizations exists across America to assist with the effort to find and capture terrorists overseas and at home. A private force of nearly two thousand for-profit corporate contractors has made billions of dollars by charging more than the federal government would have spent by doing the worl on its own. Worst of all, after ten years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that a system put in place to keep America safe may in fact be putting us in even greater danger--but we don't know because it's all top seccret." "In Top Secret America . . . Dana Priest and William Arkin lift the curtain on this clandestine universe. From the companies and agencies keeeping track of American citizens, to the military commanders building America's first 'top seccret city,' and a hidden army within the U.S. military more secret than the CIA, this new national security octopus hass become an autonomus, self-sustaining 'fourth branch' of government, one so classified the public never knew it existed--until know.").
Eric Schmitt & Thom Shanker, Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda (New York: Times Books/Henry Holt & Co., 2011) ("There is an old military saying that amateurs do strategy while the pros do logistics. Likewise, the lawyers often are in charge of developments in national security policy, and this was evident during the final years of the Bush administration and the first years of the Obama administration, as the government struggled to cope with the dramatic emergence of the terrorist threat on the Internet. The military, the intelligence community, and law enforcement agencies had battled to near exhaustion over whether threatening sites should be attacked or monitored. To end the interagency battles, what finally emerged, accoring to a four-star officer involved in the negotiations, was a legal document, the Trilateral Memorandum of Agreement, which set up a process to 'deconflict' these dispute among the Pentagon, the Justice Department, and the intelligence community. This agreement put in place a formal, almost judicial system for arbitrating disputes. Under the classified arbitration system, if one of the military's regional combatant commanders proposed attacking an Internet site, the intelligence community and law enforcement agencies could then articulate their views, usually in opposition to taking down the sites. If disagreement remained, the case would be sent to General Alexander at Cyber Command, who would settle the dispute, although the loser could appeal to the National Security Council and even to the president. If it was a terrorist cyberissue, as opposed to a threat from a nation-state, then the National Counterterrorism Center could weigh in before the National Security Council reviewed the dispute. Alexander wrote to Congress in late 2010 to report that after years of vicious feuding about the rules of the road for attacking or monitoring a terror Web site, a formal accord for settling disputes had finally been reached." Id. at 145-146.).
William Shawcross, Justice and the Enemy: Nuremberg, 9/11, and the Trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (New York: PublicAffairs, 2011) ('In 2010 the Obama Administration ordered the targeted killing, by unmanned Predator drone aircraft, of a U.S. citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, then residing in Yemen. This one man--and the decision to try to kill him--showed most graphically how the continuing war against Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups had changed. (The Bush administration was not known ever to have targeted an American citizen for killing. But then it had never confronted a major Al Qaeda operational leader who was a U.S. citizen)." Id. at 157. "The implications of this leaping technology are revolutionary--and frightening. . . ." "The ever-expanding range, intelligence, and firepower of drones raises myriad new questions of law and morality. They bring to the fore once again the Geneva Convention whose interpretation has so dominated the waging of the War on Terror. Dr. Singer has pointed out, 'The prevailing laws of war, the Geneva Conventions, were written in a year [1929] in which people listened to Al Jolson on 78 rpm records and the average house costs 7,400 dollars. Is it too much to ask them to regulate a twenty-first-century technology who is intentionally violating those laws by hiding out in a civilian house?' " "To which the answer is Yes--it is indeed too much to expect Geneva, as written, to cope. The Conventions have been under immense strain in recent decades, particularly since bin Laden declared war on America. The development and proliferation of drones will provide yet another reason to revisit and rewrite them." Id. at 161-162. Also, see Jack Goldsmith, "The Shadow of Nuremberg," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 1/22/2112.).
Jean Edward Smith, Eisenhower in War and Peace (New York: Random House, 2012) (Also see John Lewis Gaddis, "He Made It Look Easy, NYT Book Review, Sunday, 4/22/2012.).
Hal Weitzman, Latin Lessons: How South America Stopped Listening to the United States and Started Prospering (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2012).
Andrew J. Bacevich, ed., The Short American Century: A Postmortem (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2012) (From Chapter 1: Andrew J. Bacevich, 'Life at the Dawn of the American Century': "In short, what did the effort to forge an American Century--satisfying the ambitions expressed by Luce and the appetites of the millions who read his magazine--ultimately yield?" "The essays that follow, offered from a variety of vantage points, reflect on these questions. Surveying a considerable swath of U. S. history--in some cases reaching back well before the publication date of Luce's essays--they are, for the most part, critical rather than celebratory. The aim here is not to prop up American self-esteem. Before history can teach, it must challenge and even discomfit. This collection takes stock of U. S. achievements and failures over several crucial decades. It acknowledges the nation;s penchant for oversized aspirations--for attempting big things in a big way--but also confronts evidence of severe myopia and even blindness. And it assesses the consequences that ensure, both intended and unforeseen, for the United States and for the rest of the world. Taken as a whole, the result serves as a sort of dissenter's guide to the American Century." Id. at 1-14, 14. From Chapter 5: T. J. Jackson Lears, 'Pragmatic Realism versus the American Century': "As the Vietnam War unfolded, any realist worth the name had to challenge the hubris at the heart of the enterprise. This William Fulbright did in The Arrogance of Power (1966). 'America is the most fortunate of nations,' he wrote, implying that our preeminent position in the world was a product of luck rather than divine will. Yet America was losing its perspective on what was within its capability to control and what lay beyond it. Providential ideas reinforced illusions of omnipotence and infallibility. As Fulbright observed, in words that should be embossed in gold over the door to the Oval Office, 'power tends to confuse itself with virtue and a great nation is peculiarly susceptible to the idea that its power is a sign of God's favor, conferring upon it a special responsibility for other nations, to make them richer and happier and wiser, to remake then, that is, in its own shining image.' " Id. at 82-120, 111. From Chapter 8: Walter LaFeber, 'Illusions of an American Century': "[S]ome observers concluded by 2010 that the supposed American Century was over." "Actually, it had never begun, certainly not in Luce's version. Americans like to talk about their 'City on a Hill,' 'Manifest Destiny,' and 'American Century,' but they invariably choose facts that fit their patriotic predispositions and ignore those that do not--a tendency that corrupts some high school history texts as well as foreign policies." Id. at 158-186, 183.).
