Andrew Bacevich: America’s Defining Problem In 2021 Isn’t China: It’s America

By Andrew Bacevich, The American Conservative, 1/4/21 Excerpt:

…Post-Cold War expectations of a unipolar international order cultivated by the U.S. policy elite have assumed that the universal embrace of democratic liberalism is an inevitability. This is what being “on the right side of history”—a hallucinatory incantation that pervades contemporary American political speech—signifies.

To the extent that China demonstrates the feasibility of creating a stable, prosperous, and flourishing society while flouting liberal democratic precepts, then claims that history has a single right side become untenable. “If universal democratization is not the ultimate endpoint of history,” Hanania pointedly asks, “how can the American role in the world be justified?”

The answer is that it can’t.

The real danger for American elites, then, “is not that the U.S. may become less able to accomplish geopolitical objectives,” although failures on that score, especially since 9/11, are legion. Instead, the danger is that the American people—the ones whose sons and daughters wage war pursuant to geopolitical flights of fancy concocted in Washington—might themselves “begin to question the logic of U.S. global hegemony.”

For elites, then, the ultimate danger is that ordinary citizens might cease to defer. Should the American people embrace an alternative conception of history’s purpose, one not keyed to the pursuit of militarized global primacy, then the authority of national security elites will crumble. With that, hitherto hidden possibilities just might present themselves…

Read full article here.

3 thoughts on “Andrew Bacevich: America’s Defining Problem In 2021 Isn’t China: It’s America”

    1. It’s one of Bacevich’s best. Note how it was posted right before the Capitol Hill riot. Rather appropriate in terms of the larger issues he’s talking about.

  1. This article has one merit: US is under the control of the American imperialists.
    However, this article has at least three major fallacies:
    1. The author naively thinks the only imperialists on Earth are American imperialists.
    2. The author erroneously thinks the American imperialists were playing “the world policeman”. In fact, the American imperialists were acting as the world mafia boss in the pass seven decades.
    3. The author obliviously ignores the harm suffered by the majority of American, which was inflicted by the Chinese imperialists and the American imperialists together, for the American imperialists have been collaborating with the Chinese imperialists for five decades.
    4. The author intellectually lazily and irresponsibly to assume that once the American imperialists are stopped, then, the American people will live happily together with the Chinese imperialists forever.
    If the American people still have to live in a state of either-or that either we have to choose to continue to allow the Chinese imperialists to dominate us, or we have to allow the American imperialists to dominate us, we have will nobody but ourselves to blame.

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