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Andrew J. Bacevich

Washington Rules (American Empire Project) Paperback – March 29, 2011

by Andrew Bacevich (Author)

152 ratings

Part of: American Empire Project (33 Books)

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"Tough-minded, bracing, and intelligent . . . the country is lucky to have a fierce, smart peacemonger like Bacevich."―The New York Times Book Review

Hailed as "brilliant" (The Washington Post), Washington Rules is Andrew J. Bacevich's bestselling challenge to the conventional wisdom that American security requires the United States (and us alone) to maintain a permanent armed presence around the globe, to prepare our forces for military operations in far-flung regions, and to be ready to intervene anywhere at any time. Adopted by administrations on both sides of the political spectrum during the past half century, this Washington consensus on national security has become foreign policy gospel when, according to Bacevich, it has outlasted its usefulness.

With vivid, incisive analysis, Bacevich assails and exposes the preconceptions, biases, and habits that underlie this pervasive faith in military might, especially the notion that overwhelming superiority will oblige others to accommodate America's needs and desires―whether for cheap oil, cheap credit, or cheap consumer goods. Instead, Bacevich argues that we must reconsider the principles which shape American policy in the world and acknowledge that fixing Afghanistan should not take precedence over fixing Detroit. As we enter a period when our militarism has become both unaffordable and increasingly dangerous, replacing this Washington consensus is crucial to America's future and may yet offer the key to the country's salvation.

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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Andrew J. Bacevich, a professor of history and international relations at Boston University, retired from the U.S. Army with the rank of colonel. He is the author of Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War and The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism and The New American Militarism. His writing has appeared in Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. He holds a Ph.D. in American Diplomatic History from Princeton University, and taught at West Point and Johns Hopkins University prior to joining the faculty at Boston University in 1998. He is the recipient of a Lannan Award and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Product details

Publisher : Metropolitan Books; Reprint edition (March 29, 2011)
Language : English
Paperback : 304 pages
ISBN-10 : 0805094229
ISBN-13 : 978-0805094220
Item Weight : 9.6 ounces
Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.76 x 8.25 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #652,907 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #235 in Military Policy (Books)
- #1,301 in General Elections & Political Process
- #6,271 in U.S. Political Science

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Frank Gardner

A Tremendous Book Every American Should Read

Reviewed in the United States on June 21, 2016

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Maybe it's because Col. Bacevich identifies many of the same problems I've been talking about since I went to Vietnam with the Army in the late 1960s, listening to the generals and the politicians tell us the problems with the war were not the result of our interventionist strategy itself but of a lack of sufficient troops, lack of support from the public at home, lack of international support, lack of proper counterinsurgency strategy (like the ever-popular "pacification" programs in which villages had to be destroyed to save them), etc. Maybe it's because the generals and politicians have been saying the same things in each of our idiotic interventions ever since. They ignore the stresses on the troops resulting from lack of a clear mission, being plunked down in hellish environments where you can't tell the good guys from the bad guys, while bemoaning the troops' use of drugs and alcohol. Maybe it's because those of us in the service with some intelligence background knew that the Soviet Union was crumbling from within in the mid-1970s. As I said back then, the Soviet Union was a country which was incapable of building a decent automobile -- and then turned to Fiat for help in doing so. We were aware of the paper capabilities of Soviet and Warsaw Pact military units, but equally aware that they had poor morale, as well as their own serious drug and alcohol problems, and that their equipment and technology were often less than reliable. (I spoke with a Soviet agricultural scientist at a national land grant university conference in 1978, who told me the Xerox machine was a huge edge for the U.S. just in research alone -- they had to go to libraries and take handwritten notes, which slowed the research process). Col. Bacevich personally saw what East Germany was like after the Wall came down, but we'd learned what life was like there in the Eastern Bloc in places like the Defense Language Institute. To his credit, once he discovered the truth of our mortal enemy's lack of clothing, he continued to examine, question, and identify the fundamental flaws in our policies of military and political intervention (like the overthrows of elected governments in Iran and Guatemala), our huge expenditures for hardware and intelligence-gathering, all of which began in the period after World War II and of which President Eisenhower warned us as he was leaving office (but did little to prevent when he had the authority). Col. Basevich's book is the clearest exposition of the fundamental problems with what has been a suicidal -- and financially ruinous --tendency to police the world, without understanding anything about our supposed enemies in any part of the world. His prose is lucid and compelling; his style pulls the reader into the narrative, and propels him or her from page to page. I've heard him speak on several occasions on television, and his books are just as intelligent as his speaking style. I've already purchased, and am well into, his "America's War for the Greater Middle East". My only question is, where were people like him when I was pulling what's left of my hair out the past five decades? He's deserving of applause -- and attention.

15 people found this helpful

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Steven Howard Johnson

A Great Though Narrowly Framed History

Reviewed in the United States on February 8, 2017

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Washington Rules illuminates one of America’s waking nightmares – in this case, the penchant of America’s foreign policy elite for picking fights on turf where America cannot really win. Bacevich diagnoses this as the inevitable outcome of a deeply entrenched perpetual motion machine – because we possess a powerful military, we create doctrines that give our military a sacred purpose. Because our military has a sacred purpose, we therefore have an obligation to intervene whenever our trigger finger gets too itchy. And because we have intervened in the past, and expect to intervene again in the future, we must continually reinforce America’s military capabilities. Capabilities drive our doctrine; our doctrine drives our interventions; our interventions drive the expansion of capabilities. We have forgotten the value of peace; we have become addicted to war.
Each chapter in Bacevich’ story unfolds in its own way, but leads to the same ending. For all the wreckage America’s missteps may have caused, the hubris of our foreign policy elite always springs back to life.
Implicit in Bacevich’s book is an acknowledgment that America has absorbed all too well the imperial outlook of the British Empire and its clubby spirit of limitless entitlement.
But his focus on the twists and turns of military doctrine in a wholly American setting misses something important. Yes, we have lived for five centuries in a world of imperial European invasions, but we also live for a very long time in a world of anti-imperial resistance movements. What has been missing from the thinking of our foreign policy elites – an awareness of the dynamic between empire and resistance – is also missing from Washington Rules. While Bacevich recounts the Washington perspective in great detail; he never examines the world's resistance leaders to see if there’s something to be learned from those who dislike empire and prefer resistance.
And there’s a second blind spot in the Bacevich analysis – a lack of attention to soft power. The film "Charlie Wilson’s War" ends with a lament about America’s failure to use soft power in Afghanistan when it might still have made a difference. It's a chronic problem. America’s policy elites have little interest in whether soft power might be the smarter choice; alas, Bacevich neglects this theme as well.

2 people found this helpful

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CuriousOne

Manifest Destiny Update

Reviewed in the United States on January 20, 2015

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I purchased this book in my research into 'Manifest Destiny', and it offers documentation that the mindset has continued up to the present day. Manifest Destiny grew out of the Puritan belief that 'we know best and we can save the world by conquering it'. The Mexican/American War enlarged the boundary to the Pacific, the War against the states that had opted out only became 'free the slaves' halfway through it. The Spanish/American War brought new territory into the US, as did the annihilation of the 'savages' who inhabited every area of the continent. Today, decades after the Cold War ended, the new 'savages' are those handful of Muslim young people who have defied the US's military. No news outlet ever documents the thousands of victims of the US military operations intent upon imposing 'democracy', but they devote everything to the 'enemy'.....No one dare speak out against this continued warfare, as they are always declared 'kooks'.

The key to indoctrination of people is government schools where everyone is carefully given a revised history. The author of this book did not research the 19th Century, as he was a product of government schools, like everyone in the US.....

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Glidd of Glood

An unholy trinity for the land of the God-fearing

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 3, 2010

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Washington Rules is the book that you'd hope that everyone in power would read, especially in the western democracies, and of course in the USA. But they won't, and if they did, they'd ignore it. Especially in the USA. Andrew Bacevich is in no two minds about this, indeed his book even underlines the fact.

Written by a Boston history professor who in a previous existence was a professional American soldier with the rank of colonel, the book examines clearly and succinctly just what the US is up to as it performs its self-appointed role of global policeman and why it feels it necessary to perform this task at all.

Bacevich experienced an epiphany when, still in the army, he visited East Germany when the Wall came down. So this was the mighty foe he had spent his professional existence combating - a nation of run-down factories, crumbling infrastructure and antiquated cars. It dawned on him that the image he had been given of an all-powerful menace which might leap into aggressive action at any given moment, was something less than the truth. It sparked his own education, a desire to understand what were the mechanics behind US actions.

What he came up with, and what the book examines, was that the US has been acting for the entire post-war period under a credo which states that the US, and the US alone, should lead, save, liberate and ultimately transform the world, for such purposes as it sees fit, and in any way that it sees fit. This problematic credo - problematic for the rest of the globe, which hasn't much asked to be led, saved, liberated or transformed - is enacted through what Bacevich describes as a sacred trinity of global military presence, global power projection, and global interventionism. Suddenly, America's actions since WW2 all start to make sense. Taken together, the credo and the trinity make up what Bacevich terms the Washington Rules, which are so sacrosanct that changes of presidents and alternating parties in power have absolutely no effect on them - or how the US conducts itself abroad.

Bacevich must have been wasted in the army. His prose is clear, highly readable and written stylishly. His thesis is similarly well exposed, and easy to follow. As you accompany him through his synopsis of America's involvement in wars from Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf and Afghanistan, all the elements of the jigsaw fall into place. His straw man imaginings of how we would all feel if China decided to act exactly as the US has done - military bases and personnel all around the globe, more military spending than the rest of the world put together, a stockpile of nuclear weapons that vastly exceeds anything that it could reasonably ever find a use for - are chilling. Could this not be how many of the world's inhabitants feel about US intentions?

The fact that the author has devoted a fair chunk of his adult life to toiling in the service of the Washington Rules only makes his narrative more credible.

So where will it all end? Bacevich implies, in bankruptcy. The level of US debt and the cost of servicing that debt, will mean that the prodigious amounts spent on "defence" are unsustainable over time. But the Washington Rules are so ingrained, and benefit the cabal of the powerful to such a degree, that they are unlikely to be abandoned until American society finally implodes and is sucked into a financial maelstrom. The author makes the point that if the Americans only spent their considerable wealth and resources on themselves and fixing their own society and leaving everyone else alone, they would all be a lot richer and happier. It is ironic that a country so increasingly obsessed with God and religion, who feel themselves to be the chosen ones, should be so impervious to the admonition to "remove the plank from your own eye before you attempt to remove the mote of dust from your neighbour's". But they just can't see it.

Does this book tell us what we didn't already know or at least strongly suspect? Not really, if you have any interest in this sort of thing. But Bacevich's contribution is in the clarity of his exposition. It is so limpid, you wonder just how the western world - with the British establishment foremost among it - can be so duped. As for the population of the US itself, with its Tea Parties, it's fundamentalism and its increasing drift to the right, it increasingly looks as if it is in some propaganda-injected stupor from which it might never awake. Don't expect global peace anytime soon.

21 people found this helpful

Rob D

well argued and a clear summary of what we probably already knew,

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 14, 2014

Verified Purchase

Well parented and clearly argued analysis using the knowledge gained in a long military career. Not a new critique of us foreign policy but a worthwhile
Addition nonetheless

Ronald W. Maron

"War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning'.....C. Hedges

Reviewed in Canada on July 19, 2011

Verified Purchase

Mankind is driven into the insanity of war through one of two forces; religion and nationalism that masks itself as religion. It is upon this second premise that the author, Andrew Bacevich, forms the basis of this book. With the advent of the Puritans, Americans saw themselves as exceptionalists. Exceptionalists insomuch that America was viewed as the New Jerusalem, its peoples were solely under the guidance of the divine and that we, as a people, had an obligation to spread the American spirit of freedom as far as we humanly could. While this credo had seen itself through Manifest Destiny, by the end of WWI, the USA, having fought the 'war to end all wars', was well prepared for an extended period of isolationism. WWII put a halt to that. But using this to its advantage, with both the advent and the successful end to this bloody period, the credo was reignited to become even brighter than its initial flickerings.

"Washington Rules" examines closely how this national spirit was been used and abused since that time. From the early workings of the CIA under Allen Dulles through the continuation of G.W.Bush's misadventures in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the American public has been duped into one incursion after another. These wars, according to the author, were stimulated and approved by the public mainly through the the idealism that was brought to US shores back in the 1600s and remain with us today. The author warns, however, that the manipulation of this credo by the government has lead us into war on a permanent basis.

While I agree with the author about these manipulations and can understand, because of his life experiences in the armed services, how they actively play on the national psyche, I do not feel that they, and they alone, are the driving force behind our nation's involvement in other countries and our imperialistic bent. No, this is only the visible portion of the matrix, the one we can see and identify. Eisenhower stated that we should beware the 'military industrial complex'. By that he simply meant that by the 1950s war had become a commodity and, being so, was created, manned and carried out in order to maintain the profits of this complex. This is truly the driving force behind the manipulation and propagandizing of the the American people into going into to countries behind the barrel of a gun, raping them of what resources they have and, in the meantime, convincing the public that it is because of an attack on a ship in the Gulf of Tonkin or a mass of WMDs being aimed at New York City or the threat that a band of covert and purposeless terrorists have on our country is why a new war was necessary in the first place. Through their manipulations anyone speaking our against our agressions are labeled as being traitorous or a left-wing idealogue. All this is done to merely have its people fall in line behind an new and imagined threat and another faceless enemy. Why else would the US set aside nearly half of its monies in these difficult times towards 'defense' purposes? Why else would we have private contractors (mercenaries) kill and maim foreigners while flying the American flag? And, lastly, why is it that the US has moved from a country that treats its citizens fairly to one that favors only the rich/ruling class.

Yes, "We have met the enemy and he is us" and "us" needs to wake up to not only to the eventuality of a permanent war but that we are being tricked into thinking that it is the patriotic thing to do! This country is driven by a select few group of men whose only goal is that of power and money. It is no longer the country in which fairness, equality and empathy are its driving forces. And it hasn't been since even before Eisenhower.

4 people found this helpful

Dr. Harald Hansluwka

unbedingt lesenswert!

Reviewed in Germany on November 13, 2011

Verified Purchase

Correct as the author's diagnosis is, the less convincing his proposed treatment. Any effort to reduce the American empire to "manageable proportions" will encounter the opposition not only of Washington but also of all the poodles who depend on their masters good will. I suspect that B. himhelf entertains serious doubts that his call to the American people find receptive ears.

Ms Oya Bell

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 22, 2017

Verified Purchase

Clean copy, arrived on time.Thank you.

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