Bacevich and Kamm

I've pointed before to Oliver Kamm as the sort of "Atlanticist" eager to see John McCain in the White House, on the basis of him favouring a more interventionist foreign policy. Andrew Bacevich, meanwhile, is more of a stay-at-home conservative type, disadinful of foreign adventures and concerned about the deleterious effects an unwieldy military aparatus has on a free republic.

Here is an interesting instance of the former taking on the latter. A couple of things stick out though. Mr Kamm does his very best to try and chain Bacevich to the thought of historian Charles Beard, an isolationist who regarded American military action abroad as harmful to the republic. The anti-interventionist Beard does indeed feature in Bacevich's writings, but is part of a more general mosaic of 'realist' thought that he is drawing from. In an essay published a little while ago, Bacevich expanded on this:

There is, to be sure, a self-consciously amoral Old World strain of realism, a line running from Metternich to Bismarck in the 19th century and brought to these shores by Henry Kissinger. But there also exists a distinctively American realist tradition that does not disdain moral considerations. This homegrown variant, the handiwork of prominent 20th-century public intellectuals such as the historian Charles Beard, the diplomat George Kennan, the journalist Walter Lippmann, and the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, provides a basis for seriously engaging the moral issues posed by international politics.

It is, in fact, Niebuhr and not Beard who is the most serious influence on Bacevich - the Cold War pastor who saw the world as it was, was unafraid to use power for good, but who was suspicious of America's moral pretensions, anchored, as they were and are, to delusional fantasies of military dominance. Any attempt to paint Bacevich as some kind of ressurected Lindbergh, unmindful of evil and sedulous in the use of power, will come unstuck, just as Kamm's does.

A few other differences between Mr Kamm and Professor Bacevich: one has had extensive experience in the military; one teaches foreign relations at an eminent university; one has published scholarly works on American foreign policy; one has lost a son in the Iraq war; and one has been, consistently, correct in his analysis of that conflict. That person is not, I might add, Mr Kamm.