i ntroduction 17sole state upholding the established international order. Any rebellion,
coup, or war might shift the prevailing balance of power to American
disadvantage.
More fundamentally, however, Americans have not felt themselves
secure, except during brief interludes such as that in the immediate
aftermath of the Cold War. For more than four decades after World
War II, the threat had a specifi c name—communism—and a specifi c
home—the Soviet Union (sometimes grouped together with the
People’s Republic of China to cover much of the Eurasian land mass in
menacing red, the color of warning, on our maps). Today the danger
has taken on shapeless form. Terrorism claims no home but may strike
nearly anywhere. A populace that sees itself at risk of attack, or endan-
gered by turmoil and violence in faraway places, will be more receptive
to presidential warnings of looming threats to its security.
Layered atop this deep-rooted sense of vulnerability is a more recent
predisposition to celebrate the U.S. military. In response to a loss of
confi dence and public esteem caused by the Vietnam debacle, military
leaders in the late 1970s and 1980s embarked on a campaign to restore
the prestige of the armed forces. Th e glittering triumph of American
arms in the 1991 Gulf War bolstered the public’s confidence in the
nation’s military and what it could accomplish. As Andrew Bacevich
puts it, Americans see military power as the measure of greatness and
harbor “outsized expectations regarding the effi cacy of force.” A t t h e
same time, with the end of conscription, the military has become more
separate from the larger society, refl ecting the decline of the earlier tra-
dition of the citizen-soldier taking up arms at a moment of national
emergency. Bacevich adds that Americans see fi ghting as the task of elite
professionals making use of the most advanced technology.
Possibly the costly conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, in which
enemies with improvised explosive devices (IEDs) infl icted grievous
losses on American forces, will temper this credence in high-tech
warfare. Yet the confi dence that American technology can solve military
problems, even those posed by modern low-intensity warfare against
shadowy insurgents, seems not to have diminished much. Witness the
popular fascination with the pilotless Predator drone as an alternative
to troops on the ground in the deadly cat-and-mouse struggle with the
Taliban and al-Qaeda along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.