The Limits of Power

On the forty-second page of “The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism” authors Andrew Bacevich wrote (emphasis added):

technology converted to military use by talented, highly skilled soldiers) could sustain quantity (a consumer economy based on the availability of cheap credit and cheap oil).

Pledges of benign intent concealed the full implications of Star Wars. To skeptics—nuclear strategists worried that the pursuit of strategic defenses might prove "destabilizing"—Reagan offered categorical assurances. "The defense policy of the United States is based on a simple premise: The United States does not start fights. We will never be an aggressor. We maintain our strength in order to deter and defend against aggression—to preserve freedom and peace." According to Reagan, the employment of U.S. forces for anything but defensive purposes was simply inconceivable. "Every item in our defense program—our ships, our tanks, our planes, our funds for training and spare parts—is intended for one all-importantant purpose: to keep the peace."

Reinhold Niebuhr once observed that "the most significant moral characteristic of a nation is its hypocrisy."²³ In international politics, the chief danger of hypocrisy is that it inhibits self-understanding. The hypocrite ends up fooling mainly himself.

Whether or not, in 1983, Ronald Reagan sincerely believed that "the United States does not start fights" and by its nature could not commit acts of aggression is impossible to say. He would hardly have been the first politician who came to believe what it was expedient for him to believe. What we can say with certainty is that events in our own time, most notably the Iraq War, have refuted Reagan's assurances, with fateful consequences.

Illusions about military power first fostered by Reagan outlived his presidency. Unambiguous global military supremacy became a standing aspiration; for the Pentagon, anything less than unquestioned dominance now qualified as dangerously inadequate. By the 1990s, the conviction that

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(Metropolitan Books, August 2008. Hardcover, 206 pages. ISBN: 0805088156; EAN: 9780805088151.)