ANDREW BACEVICH on Ukraine, defense spending, and Bidding Farewell to the American Century

Written on February 20th, 2023
The countries, conflicts, and causes change, but has military action and defense spending become the one huge thing that unites both political tribes and parties?  So that when one challenges leaders to be more more respectful of other ways of dealing with conflict and more realistic about our goals and how to achieve them  – decision-makers and the media assign such common sense thinking to the fringe. We talk today with ANDREW BACEVICH, co-founder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, about Ukraine, defense spending, and the ideas in his newest book, ON SHEDDING AN OBSOLETE PAST: Bidding Farewell to the American Century. 

ANDREW BACEVICH-AFTER THE APOCALYPSE – How can “national security” deal with climate change, pandemics, racism, democracy?

Written on June 7th, 2021

When was the last time the US won a war or solved a big problem? ANDREW BACEVICH served in the U.S. Army for 23 years, graduated from both West Point and Princeton, and writes for both The Nation and American Conservative. His lastest book AFTER THE APOCALYPSE: America’s Role in a World Transformed is only 172 pages but asks big, blunt questions. Will the dangers and disasters we have been facing finally move us to abandon a set of beliefs about America, its identity, and its security that have kept us sleepwalking in place – or worse – for decades?

ANDREW BACEVICH-How US Squandered Its Cold War Victory – Paving the Way for Trump

Written on January 23rd, 2020

In his newest book, The Age of Illusions, ANDREW BACEVICH takes us from 1989’s seemingly ultimate victory in the Cold War to the current troubling and chaotic moment. He attempts to explain how we ended up with outsized inequality, permanent war, moral confusion, an increasingly angry and alienated population, and Donald Trump. We also talk about current events including the confrontation with Iran.

www.quincyinst.org

Free Forum Q&A – ANDREW BACEVICH U.S. Army, Colonel, Ret.(after 23 years) who lost his son in Iraq WASHINGTON RULES: America’s Path to Permanent War

Written on June 26th, 2015

WASH RULES-AB

 

 

Originally Aired August 2010

President Obama’s recent decision to add an additional 450 American soldiers to our 3,000 strong train-and-equip mission in Iraq made me reach for a dose of ANDREW BACEVICH, a voice of sanity on issues of war and peace. Bacevich wrote of Obama’s move in an op-ed, Washington in Wonderland: Down the Iraq Rabbit Hole (Again).
In WASHINGTON RULES, the 2010 book we talk about in this interview, Bacevich (in his own words) “..aims to take stock of conventional wisdom in its most influential and enduring form, namely the package of assumptions, habits, and precepts that have defined the tradition of statecraft to which the United States has adhered since the end of World War II — the era of global dominance now drawing to a close. This postwar tradition combines two components, each one so deeply embedded in the American collective consciousness as to have all but disappeared from view.

The first component specifies norms according to which the international order ought to work and charges the United States with responsibility for enforcing those norms. Call this the American Credo — …to lead, save, liberate, and ultimately transform the world.

…With regard to means, that tradition has emphasized activism over example, hard power over soft, and coercion (often styled ‘negotiating from a position of strength”) over suasion. Above all, the exercise of global leadership as prescribed by the credo obliges the United States to maintain military capabilities staggeringly in excess of those required by self-defense.”

Free Forum Q&A- ANDREW BACEVICH, author of BREACH OF TRUST: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country

Written on October 7th, 2013

 

breach-bacevich  

 Aired: 10/06/13

 

 

Aired: 10/06/13

What do you feel when at sporting events or other public gatherings crowds join in a call to “support the troops?” If you’re like me, I always have some misgivings. On the simplest level, the gesture seems pretty meaningless. What am I or anyone else in that crowd actually doing to support the troops? And when they add some clichéd phrases about fighting for our freedoms, a voice in my head always asks, “Yeah, how? Where?” In Iraq, Afghanistan, operating a drone that’s flying over Pakistan or Yemen? 

Today’s guest ANDREW BACEVICH has thought long and hard about such things, and has written a series of fairly short, very readable books that pursue questions that too many ignore or pretend don’t matter. 

The United States has been “at war” for more than a decade. Yet as war has become normalized, a gap has widened 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 his latest book, BREACH OF TRUST, Bacevich takes stock of the separation between Americans and their military, tracing its origins to the Vietnam era and exploring its implications, which include a nation with an appetite for war waged at enormous expense by a volunteer army and a huge number of privatecontractors unable to achieve victory.