Michael C. Desch: Idealism, Not Economics, Drives American Militarism
[Michael C. Desch is a professor of political science and fellow of the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. His most recent book is Power and Military Effectiveness: The Fallacy of Democratic Triumphalism.]
President Eisenhower famously warned his fellow Americans about the pernicious influence of what he termed “the military-industrial complex.” This was, to be sure, an important speech for many reasons, not the least of which were its prescience about the challenges that U.S. preeminence would pose for our domestic liberties and the prudent counsel of restraint he proffered to protect them. But, ironically, its most famous line was wide of the mark in identifying the roots of America’s subsequent global overreach.
Eisenhower cautioned that the country needed to be careful in how it used its growing might. Recognizing the dark side of such unrivaled power, the retiring president warned against America’s “recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties.” He pointed to the need to strike a balance—to become a military superpower while not undermining our free-market economy and the liberty of our citizens.
The danger, in the old soldier’s view, was that we would give in to “the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.”
But the speech’s central contention—that the root of the imbalance between our capabilities and interests on the one hand, and our aspirations on the other, lay in an unholy alliance between militarism and capitalism—strikes me from the perspective of half a century later as misguided, and not only because its most oft-quoted phrase has become a staple of the anti-American Left. It was, after all, not generals and plutocrats who impelled us upon that imperial trajectory that Ike so presciently warned against. To understand what drove us to become a quasi-imperial power, we have to look to the role of our liberal political culture.
Read entire article at American Conservative
President Eisenhower famously warned his fellow Americans about the pernicious influence of what he termed “the military-industrial complex.” This was, to be sure, an important speech for many reasons, not the least of which were its prescience about the challenges that U.S. preeminence would pose for our domestic liberties and the prudent counsel of restraint he proffered to protect them. But, ironically, its most famous line was wide of the mark in identifying the roots of America’s subsequent global overreach.
Eisenhower cautioned that the country needed to be careful in how it used its growing might. Recognizing the dark side of such unrivaled power, the retiring president warned against America’s “recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties.” He pointed to the need to strike a balance—to become a military superpower while not undermining our free-market economy and the liberty of our citizens.
The danger, in the old soldier’s view, was that we would give in to “the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.”
But the speech’s central contention—that the root of the imbalance between our capabilities and interests on the one hand, and our aspirations on the other, lay in an unholy alliance between militarism and capitalism—strikes me from the perspective of half a century later as misguided, and not only because its most oft-quoted phrase has become a staple of the anti-American Left. It was, after all, not generals and plutocrats who impelled us upon that imperial trajectory that Ike so presciently warned against. To understand what drove us to become a quasi-imperial power, we have to look to the role of our liberal political culture.