Lonesome Dove. - Review - book reviews

National Review, Jan 25, 1999 by John Hillen

Mr. Hillen, an NR contributing editor, is a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the author of Future Visions for U.S. Defense Policy (CSIS).

Fortress America: The American Military and the Consequences of Peace, by William Greider (Public Affairs, 202 pp., $22)

It is hard to see how a conservative could find much to admire in any of William Greider's books, but one can appreciate his comforting predictability. Greider, the dean of Rolling Stone's crew of aging gadflies, long ago found his shtick and he sticks to it in this most recent effort.

Greider writes books on big subjects and complex systems-democracy and capitalism, the Federal Reserve, the global economy, the U.S. military. We learn that the American people are deeply vested in each of these, but cannot possibly understand all of their intricacies. Greider aims not only to "explain" these systems, but to indict them as manipulative, self-serving, secretive, and ultimately bad for your average Joe and America in general. Greider is a liberal populist and an intelligent writer, an erudite Michael Moore without the camera.

His newest offering is an occasionally on-target diatribe against the U.S. defense industry sandwiched between some reasonable reflections on the state of national-security policy and the American role in the world's strategic affairs. As in his previous books, Greider describes his subject clearly, if in a rather paranoid and conspiratorial way.

He is thoughtful in analyzing the Defense Department's identity crisis: what it wants to be now that the Cold War is over. Over the past five years, the White House has seen fit to cut the defense budget drastically while trying to act as global emperor. The result is an underfunded, worn-down, and worn-out military trying simultaneously to carry out three different tasks. These are, in the words of official Pentagon strategic documents, to "shape" the present security environment, "respond" to possible threats from Iraq, North Korea, et al., and "prepare" for a very different military future. The Clinton administration has chosen to be merely fair at all three while seeking to be the world's "indispensable power" on the cheap. On the whole, it is a policy that is strategically and economically unsustainable.

Greider's prescriptions vis-a-vis America's post-Cold War military posture are less convincing-think Marin County hot tub circa 1971. He sees a grand conspiracy between an international economic order on which U.S. prosperity depends and an imperial military overstretched in maintaining that order. Greider offers a way out of what national-security analysts call "the defense train wreck." Cut the size of our armed forces and their budgets, disarm to a certain degree, do more through the United Nations, etc.

At least give him credit for being an honest isolationist. Most of Greider's liberal compatriots have undergone an ornithological miracle, transforming themselves from Cold War doves to New World Order hawks, never seeing a post-Cold War intervention they don't want to undertake. Implementing Greider's disarmament plan would derail their schemes and force the U.S. to make something like Britain's 1970 East of Suez decision, dividing the world into the part it can influence and the part it must ignore. That prospect horrifies the new-breed liberal. For his part, Greider is right that ultimately defense spending and military posture are "about national vision and the limits of empire." By way of "vision," however, the best he can himself offer is fluffy thoughts that "Americans might move to higher ground and dream of a common humanity" and that "in this new age, we [the world] are all riding in the same boat." America ought to take its chances with its own rusting sword rather than rely on the promise of a communal plow.