I'll be honest, I won't read the book: I got burned by Paul Kennedy back in the nineties and tend to give the declinist viewpoint a wide berth. There are only some many reading hours in the day.
The Danger Room review is pretty good, and I wanted to try to address some of what I saw as Mr. Sigger's excellent point about the book:
1. Sigger writes of Bacevich: "First, that the success of presidential administrations depended on their attention on pleasing the American public's desire for goods and cheap energy."
I’m tracking, and the Soviet's failed because they didn't produce enough consumer goods. My main gripe about Paul Kennedy is that he spent more time discussing pig iron production than he did Hitler. True, IR theorists need a personality independent theory, but come on: personalities give great clues. In addition, I'm leery of targeting one aspect of the political economy and giving it too much weight. Dollars to donuts, we will have wars in whenever this "post-oil" era arises. Keep in mind the “era of big oil” is barely less than a hundred years old, and we’ve had plenty of wars before that. Finally, you've got to look at how wars are marketed (and jus ad bellum arguments have a huge amount of marketing pro and con behind them). Structural Realist still take the nationalists, in the sense of a strict Morgenthau construction, view of International Relations. I get the impression SR guys think the world is similar to a mercantilist 18th Century Europe with an expanded chessboard and a few nukes thrown in for variety.
It is not.
2. Sigger continues: “Bacevich believes that Paul Wolfowitz, in particular, went against decades of reliance on National Security Council directive 68 in advocating a policy of "anticipatory self-defense" that led to an invasion of Iraq in 2003.”
Arguing the ends and outs of preventive versus preemptive wars will give you grey hair. I would recommend War and Decision, however, for a good look at the ins and out of intra-governmental decision making.
3. Sigger writes: “Bacevich is concerned that we've learned the wrong lessons from the Iraq war - that people believe we need to reconfigure the military to fight "small wars," empower generals over civilian defense officials, and reconnect soldiering to citizenship through a draft.”
Other than that bill languishing in Congress, I can’t think of anyone arguing for a national (military) draft, so I’m not sure where Bacevich gets that from. I am a small wars guy, by temperament, but that’s a longer argument than this critique. If you get over to Change.gov, you’ll see there’s not a lot of support for the Big War folks in the incoming Administration. It looks like a recipe for small footprints and global strike. Punitive wars. Keeping SECDEF Gates onboard would go a long way towards ending the argument (some definitions: I see Big Wars as China and above and Small Wars as Iraq and below).
As far as “the generals” go, I think we need to pith that particular meme. Surprisingly little note has been given to the fact the President Bush choose to ignore the Joint Chiefs of Staff, fire Secretary Rumsfeld and Surge: to good effect in light of the declining violence in increased GoI capabilities. I’m a big believer in civilian control of the military; it is one of the factors that make this country exceptional.
4. Sigger concludes: “…within the last ten pages of the book, Bacevich unloads with this statement: "Nuclear weapons are unusable." In two pages, he tries to make a point that nuclear weapons do not play a legitimate role in international politics.”
Except.
And here is where I argue the Structural Realist do not give enough weight to personalities in their models. Not having read the book, I cannot say that Dr. Bacevich is making the argument, but underlying much of what Structural Realist argue for is the Balance of Power: a Concert of Europe on a grand stage. And the proliferation of nukes plays a part in that.
An eminence grise such as Kenneth Waltz has argued for the proliferation of nuclear weapons and so has Mearsheimer of the Israeli Lobby fame.
Look, I think Structural Realist took the wrong lesson from the cold war: namely, that those nuclear weapons led to stabilities between the two superpowers. They are almost dismissive of the bloody edges where we contested and the long term (still feeling it) harm of Soviet (if you need to name them) tyranny. Structuralists are lousy surgeons: they take the fundamentals as they are and attempt to stitch a form of stability over that structure. Nuclear weapons are desired glue towards a more stable world, as I see their views.
I look at that approach as a 3/5ths Compromise: it just kicks the can down the road. And if you have a bunch of loose nukes in that can, well…
Ok, I’m done. I still won’t be reading the book, but thanks to Danger Room for giving me some of the current thought from Dr. Bacevich. I just firmly believe Structural Realists are not keeping up: unmooring power and influence from the state; accounting for increased information flows and memory retention; and finally recognizing that a lone nut can do more damage today, than say two hundred years ago, would go a long way in modifying their views.
Making structure is not a winning formula: maturing agents is.
