Dear CCI Friends,
Innumerable Americans are speaking out today on the near insurmountable issues we as a nation face from 2020 forward. It’s near impossible to keep up with all of them.
One voice of considerable importance has come to my attention recently: that is former West Point graduate, 20-year U.S. military, Colonel during the Vietnam War and prolific author, Andrew Bacevich. He is now the first President of the new think-tank, The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Remember Bacevich’s name. I believe he will be a major voice in the near future. His latest book, The Age of Illusions, has just come out.
Please watch his 12 minute video, Andrew Bacevich On America’s Long-Standing Wars, before reading the following article. After both, let us know what you think.
Sharon Tennison
Center for Citizen Initiatives
Will American exceptionalism survive the pandemic?
By and large, the world’s most powerful and most expensive military establishment is not proving terribly relevant
The Spectator
By Andrew Bacevich
What does a writer do when essentially the entire nation is on lockdown? This one — and probably many others besides — sets out to write a book. Will the coronavirus pandemic substantially change America’s role in the world? I can’t say for sure — but it should. Since the end of the Cold War, authorities in Washington have tended to define that role in terms of acquiring and using military power, behavior justified by the conviction that we Americans are indeed God’s New Chosen People, summoned to do the Lord’s work. Dispatching US troops to liberate the oppressed and spread democracy in such far-off places as Afghanistan and Iraq was an expression of American exceptionalism — the United States doing what history expects it to do.
Will American exceptionalism survive the coronavirus pandemic of 2020? A decade or so ago, I felt certain that the disastrous Iraq war, compounded by the inept government response to Hurricane Katrina and further reinforced by the debacle of the Great Recession, would suffice to demolish any further illusions about American chosenness. Then along came Barack Obama, who, through a combination of finesse and luck, restored a semblance of normalcy. Sure, the several post-9/11 wars continued, but fewer GIs were getting killed and, as unemployment rates dropped, the malls once again filled with shoppers. Dented but afloat, American exceptionalism survived, with Donald Trump arriving on the scene to put his own ‘America First’ gloss on the nation’s privileged place in history. As Trump put it in his triumphal February 2020 State of the Union Address, the United States is not only ‘the most exceptional republic ever to exist in all of human history’ but ‘we are making it greater than ever before’.