As a devout midwestern Catholic in the first two decades of the Cold War, Andrew Bacevich imbibed the Manichean mythology of American good and Soviet evil. After graduating from West Point, Bacevich became a seasoned and learned warrior in the holy cause: combat service in the Vietnam War, duty in Germany and the Persian Gulf, teaching at his alma mater while completing a doctorate in history at Princeton. Shortly after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, having served for 23 years as a professional soldier and officer in the U.S. Army, Bacevich retired at the rank of colonel. The American Century could not have had a more courageous and scholarly member of its legions.

Yet all along Bacevich was growing wary of the faith, and in the elegant, wise, and sardonic memoir that opens Washington Rules, he recounts how he slowly and painfully realized that "orthodoxy might be a sham." The inept and butcherous prosecution of the Vietnam War had triggered his initial suspicions; but, as Bacevich tells it, he was too ambitious to let his doubts mature into sustained intellectual and moral reflection: "Climbing the ladder of career success required curbing maverick tendencies." (Pursued out of the same careerism, graduate study was "a complete waste of time"—a claim that's belied, I should note, by the historical erudition of his work.) But then he saw the shabby state of the former East Germany after the fall of Communism: the ragtag remnants of the fabled Red Army (Russian soldiers were peddling their shoddily-made medals, watches, and uniforms), a physical infrastructure that had clearly not recovered from World War II. Like General Smedley Butler—a decorated Marine Corps veteran who had confessed in War Is a Racket (1935) to being "a high class thug for Big Business"—Bacevich began to wonder how he'd fallen for the hype of the Evil Empire.

Now a professor of history and international relations at Boston University, Bacevich has become one of the most incisive critics of U.S. imperial folly. (His articles, it's worth noting, have appeared across the spectrum, from New Left Review to The American Conservative.) In an indispensable historical trilogy—American Empire (2002), The New American Militarism (2005), and The Limits to Power (2008)—Bacevich narrated the steady expansion and corruption of our national hubris, from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama. In Washington Rules, a kind of capstone to the trilogy, he traces the origins of this madness to the end of World War II. Since the early years of the Cold War, a Beltway-Wall Street axis—"Washington," in Bacevich's shorthand—has constructed and expanded a constellation of institutions that comprise the imperial state. Headquartered in the Imperial City, it embraces the upper reaches of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the Federal government; the tentacles of the national security establishment; the clerical archipelago of think tanks and policy wonkery, from Cato and American Enterprise to Heritage, Brookings, and RAND; the pecuniary-industrial complex of finance capital, defense contracting, and high-tech manufacturers; the imperial mandarins at the Council of Foreign Relations and the Kennedy School of Government; and what C. Wright Mills once called the "cultural apparatus": The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, the major television networks, all serving as the imperial Ministry of Truth.

Not all Americans have genuflected before the Washington rules, and Bacevich points to a thin but resilient lineage of apostates and heretics. He rounds up the usual suspects: Randolph Bourne, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Christopher Lasch. (I missed A. J. Muste, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, and Daniel Berrigan.) I'm surprised by the absence of Reinhold Niebuhr, whom Bacevich has taken as a spiritual preceptor in some of his recent work. Nor is there any mention of William Appleman Williams—like Bacevich, a military veteran, diplomatic historian, and public intellectual. But the most compelling witnesses against the American Century are those who once labored in its service. George Kennan, who coined the term "containment," came to bitterly excoriate the insatiability of American powerlust and consumerism. David Shoup, Marine general, Medal of Honor recipient, and member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, joined the protests against the Vietnam War.

The two most unforgettable dissenting insiders are Eisenhower and William J. Fulbright. We all know of Eisenhower's warning, in his 1961 farewell address, about the "military-industrial complex." What most of us don't know is Ike's earlier warning, given shortly after the start of his presidency. Call it the "Cross of Iron" speech, and it's far more absorbing and morally substantial than any of Obama's fulsome homilies. Every gun, warship, and rocket signifies, Eisenhower asserted, "a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed." Such a way of life, he rued, is "humanity hanging from a cross of iron." Fulbright, the learned and cantankerous Democratic senator from Arkansas, was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during the 1960s. A meticulous and unwavering critic of the Johnson administration's Vietnam policies, Fulbright routinely exposed their moral and strategic inanity in his hearings, speeches, and essays. Despite the dated quality of its immediate concerns, his 1966 remonstrance, The Arrogance of Power, has lost none of its urgency. Surveying the poverty and desolation of American cities and rural communities, Fulbright declared it "unnatural and unhealthy for a nation to be engaged in global crusades … while neglecting the needs of its own people." Adding that a "great nation is peculiarly susceptible to the idea that its power is a sign of God's favor, conferring upon it a special responsibility for other nations—to make them richer and happier and wiser, to remake them, that is, in its own shining image," Fulbright warned that any nation setting out on "self-appointed missions to police the world" will bring "misery to their intended beneficiaries and destruction upon themselves."

To counter the Washington rules, Bacevich urges Americans to revisit "the anti-imperial origins of the Republic." "The proper aim of American statecraft," he asserts, is to "permit Americans to avail themselves of the right of self-determination as they seek to create at home a 'more perfect union.'" Echoing Eisenhower and Fulbright, he reminds us that "fixing Iraq or Afghanistan ends up taking precedence over fixing Cleveland and Detroit." Well aware that isolationism is impossible, he sketches an alternative credo, redolent of Niebuhr and the Abraham Lincoln of the Second Inaugural Address: we cannot know God's purposes, we cannot master history, and we should try to change only what we know best, and even then fitfully: ourselves. The military, he insists, is for defense and nothing else; American soldiers should be stationed here, which would require the withdrawal and dismantling of the base system; and force should be employed only as a last resort, in accordance with "just war" criteria.

Bacevich's counsel is so eminently wise that my skepticism may seem churlish. But his account of the American Empire and its rules is open to several objections. As Bacevich surely knows, what Williams once called "the contours of American history" have always been violently expansive. The American drive for global dominion was not a fall from republican grace that occurred in 1947. And precisely because our imperial present is deeply rooted in our liberal republican past, I cannot agree with Bacevich that we can appeal to an anti-imperialist heritage. To be sure, King and Fulbright and Williams have an ancestry as well—most illustriously, the Anti-Imperialist League that emerged after the Spanish-American War, graced by the imperishable examples of Mark Twain, Jane Addams, and William James. Still, venerable as their dissenting tradition may be, their failure is evident; American history is not on Bacevich's side. From Puritan divines to frontier trappers to today's suburban shoppers, Americans have repeatedly affirmed what Williams dubbed "empire as a way of life." In short, "Washington" rules because Americans want it to rule.

Proposing alternatives to the consensus may seem "a fanciful exercise," Bacevich writes. But "before the movement comes the conviction—an awareness of things amiss combined with a broad vision of how to make them right." His modest prescriptions might ensure our safety and prosperity, he suggests, perhaps even fulfilling "the mission that Americans persist in believing God or Providence has bestowed upon the United States." Yet isn't the notion of divine anointment precisely one of the "things amiss"? The covenant theology of American anointment is exactly what we need to renounce.

Williams posed the question squarely: "Is the idea and reality of America possible without empire?" If one says yes, Williams wrote, one is "a pioneer on the ultimate American frontier." The creation of a post-imperial America is the most urgent—and potentially most liberating—adventure for Americans in the 21st century. What will Americans make of their country if they lose their conviction of an exalted destiny? Resistance to the waning of the white American imperium will surely be widespread and adamant—witness the descent of the Right into nativist and fundamentalist lunacy. But relinquishing empire as a way of life, giving up the delusion that the world will fall apart without the ordering of our money and armaments, presents a moment of possibility: we could embrace the decline of our global supremacy with a joyful sense of emancipation. If we are weaker and poorer, we'll also be freer to arrange our common life by wiser and saner standards—perhaps by standards that reflect our professed belief that the poor are blessed, and that the meek, not the strong, will inherit the earth. If that unlikely but not impossible reformation transpires, Andrew Bacevich will be among those who deserve our thanks for their service.

Eugene McCarraher is completing The Enchantments of Mammon: Corporate Capitalism and the American Moral Imagination.

Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.