Can We End the American Empire Before It Ends Us?

In politics, as in medicine, a cure based on a false diagnosis is almost always worthless, often worsening the condition that is supposed to be healed. The United States, today, suffers from a plethora of public ills. Most of them can be traced to the militarism and imperialism that have led to the near-collapse of our Constitutional system of checks and balances and destroyed our reputation in the world. Unfortunately, none of the remedies proposed so far by American politicians or analysts addresses the root causes of the problem.

According to a 2007 NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, some 78 percent of Americans believe their country to be headed in the wrong direction. Only 22 percent think the Bush administration’s policies make sense, the lowest number on this question since October 1992, when George H. W. Bush was running for a second term -- and lost. What people don’t agree on are the reasons for their doubts and, above all, what the remedy -- or remedies -- ought to be.
The range of opinions on this is immense. Even though large numbers of voters vaguely suspect that the failings of the political system itself led the country into its current crisis, most evidently expect the system to perform a course correction more or less automatically. According to the New York Times, by the end of March 2007, at least 280,000 American citizens had already contributed some $113.6 million to the presidential campaigns of Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, Mitt Romney, Rudolph Giuliani, or John McCain.
If these people actually believe a presidential election a year-and-a-half from now will significantly alter how the country is run, they have almost surely wasted their money. As Andrew Bacevich, author of The New American Militarism, puts it: “None of the Democrats vying to replace President Bush is doing so with the promise of reviving the system of check and balances. . . .

The aim of the party out of power is not to cut the presidency down to size but to seize it, not to reduce the prerogatives of the executive branch but to regain them.” [Let me add a note. The author of these remarks is a West Point graduate, a retired Army colonel, and a professor of International Relations at Boston University. On May 15, we read in the New York Times’s casualty lists that his son, First Lieutenant Andrew Bacevich, twenty-seven, of the First Cavalry Division, was killed in Iraq. To say that he is bitter is an understatement.] MORE