Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power, by Rachel
Maddow, Crown Publishing Group, 275 pages, $25.

The hardest part of a policy book has to be the last chapter.
Having diagnosed an important problem and traced its evolution, the
author is expected to sketch out a solution at the end. Books about
important, tough problems frequently end with weak closing
chapters. MSNBC host Rachel Maddow’s Drift is no
exception.

Maddow promises a lot but unfortunately can’t deliver. In the
introduction, she puts her thesis starkly: American military policy
“isn’t much related to its stated justifications anymore….We’re
not directing that policy anymore; it just follows its own course.”
Fortunately, though, it “is fixable.”

Don’t get your hopes up on that last part.

Maddow opens by sneering—rightly—at the absurd militarization of
her western Massachussetts town in the Homeland Security era. (In
her tiny town, only seven houses were on public water, but just to
be safe, after 9/11 the government paid to wrap the pump house in
chain-link fence and barbed wire. But they neglected to cut the
grass there, turning it into an overgrown—but Homeland
Secure!—eyesore.) From there on, the chapters are stapled-together
polemics about the foibles and screwups in American defense policy.
They are decent polemics, readably written. They are not,
unfortunately, a coherent explanation for why America has drifted
away from small-R republicanism and toward empire, much less an
explanation for how to turn the tide.

The opening chapter zips too rapidly from Jeffersonian ideology
to the Vietnam War, missing a great deal of the drift. Many crucial
way stations on the path to our present condition predated Vietnam:
Washington developed an ideology to justify occupying the
Philippines, embraced a standing army and a department of “defense,
” and accepted an income tax and other extractive instruments of
war. Don’t those developments warrant mention in a book describing
the unmooring of American military policy? Instead, by the second
chapter, we’re reading about Ronald Reagan, apparently the true
father of America’s zany national security politics.

The first half of the book (no kidding: pages 29 to 156) center
on some of the low points of Reagan and Bush the Elder’s foreign
policies: Team B,
Iran-Contra,
Reagan’s executive power claims—the usual. But Maddow does nothing
to explain how Reagan’s shortcomings constitute the wellspring of
America’s messianic and destructive defense policies. She
definitely does not justify the decision to devote an entire
chapter in a book of 252 pages to the invasion of Grenada.

Unfortunately, the genuine insights sprinkled throughout the
book are not nearly as well developed as the case for Reagan’s
daffiness and Cheney’s sociopathy. It is an interesting
observation, for example, that the “Think Tanks and Very Important
Committees of the permanent national security peanut gallery are
now so mature and entrenched that almost no one thinks they’re
creepy anymore, and national security liberals have simply decided
it’s best to add their own voices to them rather than criticize
them.” But that’s one of several well-crafted sentences that
tantalize the reader only to be cast aside.

And should we really lay so much of the blame for American
militarism on the grave of the Gipper? Part of it, yes. Reagan
enabled the transformation of the Republican foreign policy
establishment from the patrician WASPs who ran things through the
1980s to the more diverse but substantively worse cadre running
things today. But Reagan’s foreign policy itself was far more
restrained than Maddow would have us believe. Was the (admittedly
crazy) Grenada campaign really more of a watershed than, say, Teddy
Roosevelt’s bigoted Progressive imperialism? Or than Woodrow Wilson
throwing Eugene Debs in the hoosegow for opposing the Great War?
Was it worse than FDR’s internment of over 100,000 Japanese and
Japanese-Americans on the basis of their ethnicity?

This reviewer would have been open to the argument, had it been
made. But it was not. The Roosevelt, Wilson, Roosevelt, and Truman
presidencies make only fleeting appearances in the book. Rather
than straightforwardly asking why America is so militaristic and
what we can do to change that, Maddow presents a gallery of
ready-made villains for liberal readers to heckle. This is not
scholarship.

Clinton and Gore’s constitutional and strategic indiscretions
are mostly glossed over. When they are cited, the principals appear
as victims of Republican perfidy who find themselves chain-ganged
into betraying their own better angels. Clinton’s flamboyantly
unconstitutional war in Kosovo goes unmentioned, and the
circumstances of his war over Bosnia are sourced entirely to
Clinton’s biography and the accounts of three Democratic government
officials. Not exactly fair and balanced.

After Clinton, Maddow moves on to chapters on Bush the Younger
and nuclear weapons before wending to a shaky and abrupt close. Her
solutions are delivered in Pentagon-friendly bullet-point format:
institute a war tax; get the CIA out of the military business; get
the executive branch out of the war-starting business; get military
officers out of politics and politics back into the use of the
military; stop treating the National Guard and Reserves as if
they’re active duty; stop using contractors; concede to the
establishment that “the world is a threatening place” but don’t
support their wars; and shrink our nuclear arsenal.

Most of these suggestions are sound, but achieving them would
require identifying the pressures and political phenomena that
created these pathologies, and using that understanding to
determine just how to undo them. For example, wars for Americans
are cheap and low-risk. Our wars rarely are fueled by serious
threats, but by a particular sort of ideology that tells us we need
to use our military to change the world. So if you want to make
American defense policy better, you should probably try to figure
out how to raise the costs of dumb wars to Americans, or else how
to popularize a new ideology that says good Americans resent and
oppose the national security bureaucracy. But Maddow doesn’t do
that. Instead we get a lively but limited guide to American
militarism without a program for fixing the problem.