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Idealism is a set of goals; ideology is a set of rules.  Idealism is a guide to how you act; ideology is a set of rules on how you and everybody else must act.  Idealism takes into account reality; ideology creates its own “reality”.  “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”  This is attributed to Karl Rove or Dick Cheney.  They ignore to our detriment Newton’s third law of motion:  “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.”  If you create your own reality, then others will create their own reality.  Overwhelming force meets roadside bomb.
The Alworth Center for the Study of Peace and Justice had two recent speakers who addressed these issues.  Robert J. Art, author of “A Grand Strategy for America”, cautiously leaned toward ideology.  Andrew J. Bacevich, author of “The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism” and “Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War”, is fed up with the “Imperial Presidency” and the “Wise Men” who are getting us deeper and deeper into problems,  thus creating even more problems.

Art states that we must strike a balance between isolationism and being the world’s policeman. Isolationism often means withdrawing from most of the world’s affairs.  This is rather difficult given how intertwined the world economy has become.  We have already seen how often being the world’s policeman causes more problems than it solves.

Art says we have six
important interests:

1) Protect the homeland and
prevent the spread of weapons
of mass destruction

2) Keep deep peace among
Eurasian great powers

3) Assure assets (oil) for market

4) International economic
openness

5) Democracy’s spread and
observance of human rights

6) Avert severe climate change

To support these interests, Art gives eight grand strategies, including dominion, isolationism, and selective engagement.  Dominion just won’t work; it will get us into deeper and deeper military involvement.  The U.S. has tried it on various scales for over a century, and our politicians still haven’t learned.  Isolationism has many aspects, but if the U.S. isolates itself from the rest of the world, will the rest of the world help if the U.S. needs help?

Art prefers selective engagement.  Selective engagement is based on fundamental goals, it concentrates on those “regions of most consequence to the United States”, “it maintains a forward-based defense posture”, “it prescribes a set of judicious rules for when to wage wars”, and “it calls for American leadership.”

But the devil is in the details.  It seems to me that this selective engagement has been going on for decades.  President after president, Republican or Democrat, has had a set of fundamental goals, has thought that region after region was consequential, has had “defensive” forces all over the world, has thought his rules for war were correct, and of course, has insisted on being first among “equals”.

In both “The Limits of Power” and “Washington Rules”, Bacevich examines the consequences of strategies like Art proposes.  We have moved to an imperial presidency where the President not only does his best to ignore Congress in “power projection” but ignores the military and diplomatic departments and huddles with his “Wise Men”.  Kennedy did it in the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Bush did it with Afghanistan and Iraq.  Obama is doing it with drones in Pakistan and Afghanistan.  And often the President doesn’t understand that he, the unelected “leader of the free world” is being manipulated by his “Wise Men”–McNamara, Cheney, and so on.  Bacevich writes about Kennedy’s team, “With the certainty of men unacquainted with the actual use of power, they did not doubt their ability to compel war to do their bidding.”  This could apply to just about every inner circle since.

Bacevich sees U.S. leaders having a credo backed up by a “sacred trinity”.

Credo: “The United States—and the United States alone—to lead, save, liberate, and ultimately transform the world.”

Sacred trinity: “an abiding conviction that the minimum essentials of international peace and order require the United States to maintain a global military presence, to configure its forces for global power projection, and to counter existing or anticipated threats by relying on a policy of global interventionism”.

Bacevich suggests an alternate credo: “America’s purpose is to be America, striving to fulfill the aspirations expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as reinterpreted with the passage of time and in light of hard-earned experience.”

He proposes a new trinity:

“First, the purpose of the U.S. military is not to combat evil or remake the world, but to defend the United States and its most vital interests.”

“Second, the primary duty station of the American soldier is in America.”

“Third, consistent with the Just War tradition, the United States should employ force only as a last resort and only in self-defense.”

Bacevich quotes Reinhold Niebuhr frequently:

“[H]e warned that what he called ‘our dreams of managing history’–born of a peculiar combination of arrogance and narcissism–posed a potentially mortal threat to the United States.”  “The Irony of American History”, 1952

Niebuhr predates Pete Seeger who said it more simply, “When will they ever learn, when will they ever learn.”