I am being summoned to dinner so I have to run.

This has been most lively — thank you very much. Please take a look at the book — I think you’ll be pleased with the quality and the diversity of the views expressed.

Andrew Bacevich

I’d don’t know that many/most hate war today. I’d argue that many/most don’t have strong opinions on the matter since they don’t have a skin in the game.

Well, if the elites have been clever then the non-elites have made themselves morally culpable. I do not detect any large-scale grassroots movement in favor of reviving the citizen-soldier tradition as a way to impose democratic restraint on those in Washington that have a hankering for war.

Nixon may have been a diabolical figure, but in ending the draft he was giving us what we wanted. It doesn’t do to blame everything on faraway elites. The American people are deeply complicit.

Bingo yet again!

A bit too much moral equivalency there for my taste. We’ll just have to disagree.

That’s argument that Walter LaFeber makes in his contribution to the book. His argument comes down to this: people like Luce and presidents from FDR all the way to Obama have been proclaiming that they foresee the future and that American power will bring that future into existence. Yet (LaFeber continues) the reality is that the US is continually caught by surprise by what actually comes down the pike. Just in our own time: 9/11, the aftermath of invading Iraq, the Great Recession, the Arab Spring. So his argument is that the American Century trope has always been bogus.

The best way to make wars “visible” is to fight them with citizen-soldiers. We have opted instead for a professional army, detached from American society — another part of my blame-it-on-the-60s hypothesis.

I’m a blame-it-on-the-60s kind of guy. I’m being only half-facetious. The Vietnam War coincided with and spurred several changes that in retrospect suggest that the American Century was even then living on borrowed time. Among those indicators: the trade balance going from black to red and the growing reliance on imported oil.

No, I mean what I said. The war was a just cause. It does not follow that every action taken by the US was ethically or morally justifiable.

The book contains two essays — one by Emily Rosenberg and one by Akira Iriye — that touch on the question of consumerism. Professor Iriye situates it as part of a larger phenomenon of transnationalism. In his eyes, what the American Century produced was a massive increase in interaction of all types — economic, cultural, intellectual, etc — in which the US played an important role, both changing the world and being changed as a consequence.

Professor Rosenberg traces the expansion and export of the American consumer lifestyle, noting that in our own day it has become a nearly universal phenomenon, yet is increasingly unaffordable for most Americans and visiting dire consequences on the planet.

I don’t think you’re off course. WWII was a just war. It was a necessary war. It was also a war that enhanced the security and well-being of Americans (and New Zealanders). The same cannot be said about our more recent wars.

That’s why I wrote “should.” It doesn’t and won’t. You misread me entirely if you think I’m hopeful.

Bingo again. That’s why Carter’s so-called Malaise Speech is such an important document — important for what he said and important for how the nation responded.

Of course, now that I’ve tipped my hat to Carter, let me also note that he’s the guy who promulgated the Carter Doctrine, which provided the rationale for what has become a never-ending set of wars and skirmishes, all intended in one way or the other to impose our will on the Greater Middle East.

Bingo.

There is no “real Iranian threat.” A friend of mine once remarked that he never imagined that he’d see the day when Iran would represent the Big Enemy. When you think about it, Iranian power shouldn’t strike fear into the hearts of a people who managed to survive the challenges posed by Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union.

I don’t mean that Iran wishes us well. I just mean Iran should not keep us awake at night. I worry more about the erosion of order and the weakness of institutions in Mexico.

My own view is that we should use force only as a last resort and only for the most important of interests. A democracy should entertain a very lively debate about how to define those interests.

Recall, however, the once robust tradition that wished to express American Exceptionalism not by forcing our values down the throats of others but by demonstrating the merit of those values in the way that we conduct our affairs — to be all that we profess to be. That tradition contains considerable value today.

All I can say is that lo these many years later I still have a vivid memory of that particular issue — all the little black and white photos of one week’s dead. It made an impression on me at least.

The dawning of the day when the US dollar is no longer the reserve currency will be the day when the end of the American Century becomes official. Period. Full stop.

Not exactly, but we’ve made the problem all the more difficult to address. Ill-advised military adventures have both driven us deeper into debt and allowed us to postpone the inevitable day of reckoning.