The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (American Empire Project) by Andrew Bacevich Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (American Empire Project)
Book Review: Uncomfortable truths
Summary: 5 Stars
Andrew Bacevich, a military man and generally conservative, has spoken real truth to power and that makes many of us uncomfortable. He is hopeful that we can change but that would require us to really look at ourselves and our country. He places current policies in a historical context without partisanship. This book is extremely informative.Book Review: An Essential Book
Summary: 5 Stars
If you can read but one book this year on American foreign policy, it should be Andrew J. Bacevich's The Limits of Power. Dr. Bacevich advances the impassioned and powerful argument that the error, incompetence, and futility of American foreign policy is grounded in the profligacy of the American people--in an incessant, insatiable demand for "freedom" redefined as "more", concomitant with an unwillingness to pay for it and an inability to recognize limits of resources, of power, or of the predictability of human events. To feed their demands, Americans require cheap and abundant energy, historically supplied by oil, and an endless flow of goods, for which we will borrow when we cannot produce enough.
Ensuring the supply of goods has lured us into national and individual debt. Ensuring the supply of oil has led us into an expensive and unsustainable imperial role in the world and an effort to control the sources of energy through the application of military power, accompanied by and frequently justified by an effort to re-mold the world in our own image. Internally, the effort has resulted in an abdication of Congressional responsibility, a concentration of power in executive hands, and an erosion of civil rights. We are no longer a republic in the sense our founders used the word. We cannot expect elected leaders to rescue us, for our leadership is determined by and constrained by our demands and our historic and continuing unwillingness to recognize limits.
All of this may sound like a cry emanating from a leftist screed worthy of the 1960's, but Dr. Bacevich is a conservative, lamenting the country we have lost, for all its serious faults and limitations, and well-nigh despairing of regaining it. His philosophy is grounded in that of Reinhold Niebuhr, whom he quotes frequently. His main text ends with the bleak observation that "Clinging doggedly to the conviction that the rules to which other nations must submit don't apply, Americans appear determined to affirm Niebuhr's axiom of willful self-destruction." His introduction, however, apparently written later, holds out a small hope. It is that the debate that must follow the Iraq war and its accompanying economic, military, and political crises will lead Americans into "ending their condition of dependency and abandoning their imperial delusions" and ultimately persuade them "to reexamine exactly what freedom entails,"
Book Review: WOW!!!!!
Summary: 5 Stars
After reading all of the negative reviews from people who haven't even read the book truly demonstrates the depth of despair to which we have been reduced. Adrew Bacevich is a brave and brilliant American. He should be read and heard so that we can end our downward spiral and become the great America we once were. The message is not Republican vs. Democrat, nor even conservative vs. liberal. The message is that Congress has become a body that is only concerned with getting re-elected and has abrigated all of its reponsibilities to the Executive branch creating a defacto imperialist state. This is pointed out in the change in Congress after the 2006 elections, yet nothing changed at all. The President has run roughshod over the Constitution and neither the Legislative Branch nor the Judicial Branch has seen fit to bring our government into balance. This is Dr. Bacevich's argument. Maybe if some of the naysayers would take the time to read the book, they would see that truly conservative ideas are in jeapordy as much as they perceive the growth of liberalism. Please read the meterial before you bare your ignorance of what is really going on. Book Review: 224 Pages of Weezly Liberal TRIPE
Summary: 1 Stars
Every time America has a new economic rival, all the liberals come out of the woodwork (and I include Bacevich as a liberal because his bitterness at his son's death in Iraq has made him, philosophically, one) to proclaim the eminent death of America.
Don't get me wrong, greed is never good, and there are American excesses. But I remember when Japan was the country that was going to overtake the world, before their bubble burst. Now China is the new Japan, and their bubble is getting precariously large.
Now what does that have to do with Iraq and American military adventurism? Well, the liberals always use American involvement in a war
as the jumping-off point for these woe-is-me, insipid books.
The truth is, American lies between two oceans, is blessed with abundant natural resources, and a population of highly creative people answering the call to national dilemmas, and over the next 50 years will do as well or better as any other nation on earth.
Anyone should know that an author sitting down with the precious Bill Moyers, who while pursing his lips, tisks-tisks over the fall of the capitalist tyrant, is up to no good.
Book Review: How to Decide whether to buy this book
Summary: 5 Stars
After reading all the one star reviews, I decided to buy the book. Not one of them could counter the arguments mentioned in the better reviews and all seemed to suggest the author was somehow Un-American for pointing out the problems ahead for the United States because we are weighed down by a massive 10 Trillion dollar Debt, an Imperial Presidency that seeks only more power, and rewards to those who pay to keep them in power, and the massive greed and consumerism that has the nations credit cards maxed out. Those are real problems that require real Americans to solve them. Waiting for the collapse, which seems to be the rightwing solution, may be the only proof the problems can no longer be ignored, but the rightwing nutball chorus deriding the author for suggesting we Americans should be better than that, was all the impetus I needed to buy this book.
Knowledge from such an author is preferable to pretending the nation is not on the edge of the precipice, and repeating the mantra of the Moron from Mad magazine, " What, Me Worry ?" That has become the mantra of the Conservative Right so long as the Whitehouse contains another Bush equivalent. "God Help America", is far closer to reality.