After the Apocalypse: America's Role in a World Transformed (American Empire Project)

by Andrew J. Bacevich

Mine eyes have seen the orgy of the launching of the Sword; He is searching out the hoardings where the stranger’s wealth is stored; He hath loosed his fateful lightnings, and with woe and death has scored; His lust is marching on.

“Power,” John Adams once observed, “always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God’s service when it is violating all His laws.”

During most of the twentieth century, international politics centered on conflicts between liberalism and totalitarianism, between white and non-white, between imperialism and national liberation. In the twenty-first century, it will—or at least should—center on reducing inequality, curbing the further spread of militant fanaticism, and averting a total breakdown of the natural world.

Successive administrations in Washington along with members of both parties in Congress agree that it is incumbent upon the American taxpayer to sustain Israeli military superiority in perpetuity.

So began Operation Ranch Hand, destined to continue from 1962 to 1971—its mordant but unofficial motto “Only You Can Prevent a Forest.” Second only to the nuclear policy of Massive Retaliation, Ranch Hand may well qualify as the ultimate expression of the mindlessness to which the Cold War–inspired perversion of national security gave rise. Relying primarily on specially modified C-123 transport aircraft, the air force proceeded to dump some nineteen million gallons of various herbicides, Agent Orange being the most common, over an estimated six million acres of South Vietnam and Laos.

When I lie awake at night worrying about the planet that my grandchildren will inherit, it’s not terrorism that prevents me from sleeping. Nor is it Iran or North Korea or Russia or even China. It’s the puerile witlessness of a national security apparatus oblivious to real and proximate dangers that, if ignored, will only worsen with time and ultimately jeopardize the American way of life. It’s non-Pentagon-preferred threats typically treated as addenda that demand our attention.

Race subverts America’s self-assigned role as the champion of freedom. It did so in 1776 and it does so still today. “How is it,” the English writer Samuel Johnson wondered as the colonists in British North America pressed their demands for independence, “that the loudest yelps for liberty come from the drivers of slaves?”