STATE VS. DEFENSE (reviewed on June 15, 2011)

The perils of an expanding American hegemony by military means rather than diplomacy, as skillfully tracked by an American journalist.

In this timely, pointed study, Glain (Mullahs, Merchants and Militants: The Economic Collapse of the Muslim World, 2004, etc.) challenges the efficacy and wisdom of continuing an enormous, costly U.S. defense buildup abroad in the face of the flimsiest excuse for an enemy and where statesmanship would better be served. Since after World War II, American leaders, much like republican Rome, writes the author, “realized their founders’ dread by succumbing to the sirens of militarism and the costs of their rapture.” During the same timer period, the hawks have held sway over national leaders. Examples include: General MacArthur’s hyperbolic pronouncements of communist incursions, which neutralized the restraint preached by George Marshall; the co-opting of George Kennan’s theory of containment by Dean Acheson and others in forging the Truman Doctrine; the pernicious fear-mongering of Senator Joseph McCarthy that effectively cowed the Department of State. The Soviet threat (and communist China) would keep alarmists and neoconservatives frothing at the mouth through wars in Korea and Vietnam, fed by defense contractors, RAND Corporation analysts and nuclear-bomb fears—despite ample evidence that the Soviet Union was “sclerotic” and incapable of posing a serious existential threat to the U.S. The myth of Soviet superiority was barked by the White House, swallowed by the press, cheered by the Pentagon and carried the country through the pitiful collapse of the Soviet Union. However, our “enemy deprivation syndrome” was later filled by the Islamist terrorist threat. Desert Shield and consummate generals such as Colin Powell brought the “romance with the military” to primetime. The momentum of militarization has become unstoppable, Glain writes gloomily. In crisp, authoritative writing, the author sets down some scathing portraits, from MacArthur to Rumsfeld, and in a powerful conclusion, exposes the disequilibrium between the U.S. civilian versus military resources throughout the world and the continued “appeasement” by President Obama to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

A work of smoldering focus and marshaled evidence that just might have found its publishing moment.

State vs. Defense: The Battle To Define America’s Empire. Crown. Aug. 2011. 496p.

Since the early years of the Cold War, the U.S. State and Defense Departments have been locked in a bitter fight over making foreign policy—a battle in which Defense has dominated to the extent that the national security budget is now 20 percent of the total federal budget (i.e., rather than there being a greater percentage for diplomacy or foreign aid). So writes journalist Glain (Wall Street Journal;Mullahs, Merchants, and Militants: The Economic Collapse of the Arab World) in his fascinating account of the making of modern foreign policy. This is not a comprehensive Cold War history, but it skillfully investigates each presidential administration since Truman’s to show how militarists—often wealthy corporation heads and elected officials—have created the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned against. Readers will be familiar with many of the militarists and diplomatists who fill these pages but will likely be angered about the extent to which the former went to distort the truth about the former Soviet Union and, later, Asian and Muslim nations’ strength and intentions toward the United States. VERDICT: This frank and absorbing interpretation offers a well-constructed framework for viewing foreign policy; it will interest general readers, scholars, and appointed and elected officials.

State vs. Defense: The Battle to Define America’s Empire. By Stephen Glain. New York: Crown Publishers, 2011. 496 pp. $26.00, hardcover.

Reviewed by Colonel Blaine D. Holt for American Foreign Policy Interests.

The shifting Yins and Yangs inside government agencies manifest themselves across structural and political lines drawn by the founders at the dawn of the ‘‘American Experiment.’’ Crafted with complex checks and balances, the original blue print was deliberately cumbersome, designed to deter the worst European excesses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Fast forward two hundred years, and the various enclaves of self-interest within the government have hardened into polarized camps with overlapping interests and unpredictable memberships, all fiercely competing for diminishing resources. The dichotomies, big government versus small, liberal versus conservative, isolationist versus globalist, China hands versus China lobby, garrison versus expeditionary, Democrat versus Republican, and more, are dissected in Stephen Glain’s capstone contradiction; State vs. Defense: The Battle to Define America’s Empire.

This thoughtful and well-researched volume covering 60 years of government tensions in the ‘‘no-man’s land’’ between militarism and diplomacy is set to ignite passions on all sides. The author is unabashed about drawing conclusions on the momentous events that arguably altered the twentieth century, such as how America’s near misses with nuclear holocaust occurred and whether or not the cold war was necessary. Only a minority of readers will accept or refute this work in its entirety, but almost all will see a basis for serious discussion on the potential militarization of U.S. foreign policy in the context of an updated view of Eisenhower’s infamous military–industrial complex. In an age of broken economies, austerity, and constrained resources, Glain’s timing is uncanny in producing a work that just may serve as a catalyst in rethinking our national security and strategy.

Stephen Glain is an accomplished journalist and prolific writer whose previous work, Mullahs, Merchants, and Militants: The Economic Collapse of the Arab World, was well received for its rich vignettes of today’s Arab world set against an historical backdrop of greatness to decline. With over twenty years of experience as a foreign correspondent in both Asia and the Middle East, he has written for a roster of prestigious publications such as Smithsonian, The Nation, Newsweek, and Institutional Investor, all while penning a weekly column for the Abu Dhabi National. With State vs. Defense, Stephen Glain adds a new focus to his broad repertoire, moving nimbly from traditional reportage, to scholarly historical research, analysis, and synthesis.

From the outset, the book suggests that World War II (WWII), with its unequivocal victories born of sacrifice and aggression, gave rise to a group of leaders oriented toward military solutions as primary options. The same group arrayed across all government offices and elected posts, Glain writes, gave birth to the original military–industrial complex, which the author contends, still dominates U.S. decision making. Indeed, in bringing the post-WWII construct into the twenty-first century, Glain leaves little doubt in his acerbic and stark appraisal: ‘‘Only now, with the specter of bankruptcy looming over the national accounts, are some in Washington daring to contest the bill for, if not the value of, unchecked global hegemony.’’ Further, he paints America today as a country that has ‘‘not evolved much beyond its regard for diplomacy as a mistress who, for the sake of irregular service, is kept on a miserly retainer.’’ Overall, Glain sees the sons and daughters of the post-war period, not as the benign stewards of a durable ‘‘Pax Americana,’’ but as relentless militarists, garnering the lion’s share of budgets, while dictating the terms of foreign policy.

To illustrate his points, Glain sets his stage elegantly with a pantheon of U.S. giants such as Kennan, Marshall, Nitze, MacArthur, Dulles, and countless others, all central to the post-WWII policy transition. While the reader can take issue with the author’s conclusions, the casting is impeccable. These are the individuals whose names adorn airports, schools, think tanks, and war ships, along with the more mundane streets and boulevards, all as a testament to their service and influence. In State vs. Defense, however, agendas trump service, and influence is rarely benign and never, ever neutral. As the reader moves into the developing arguments of the book, the author’s talent for clarity and historical precision comes alive. He uses George Kennan’s ‘‘long telegram’’ as a genesis of sorts, a foundation document (unintended by its author) for a new class of foreign policy makers dedicated to using U.S. military supremacy as a key part of transitioning to a peacetime economy. The more traditional diplomats were clearly on the defensive as even the language of statecraft changed. The Kennan prescription for ‘‘containment’’ was the necessary fuel to Secretary of Defense James Forrestal’s arguments identifying the Soviet Union as the next big adversary and a future nuclear exchange as a real possibility.

Glain advances his readers steadily and carefully through each phase of the ensuing cold war, alongwith the frictions between an ever more fractious Defense Department, and their increasingly isolated cousins in the traditional diplomatic corps. With deft prose interpreting his first-rate historical research, Glain traces a path through the Berlin blockade, the ‘‘red scare’’ at home, the Korean War, the domino theory, and the perceived need to check the, seemingly, monolithic expansion of the supposed USSR–Sino expansion in Asia. The painstaking detail Glain uses to track each new threat against the growth and expansion of the now massive military–industrial complex is impressive. Indeed, the reader is left with a stunning view of just how powerful the group has been in bringing the entire beltway, up to presidential level, into the convenient ‘‘democracy versus communism’’ paradigm. Some of the vignettes the author uses to define his views on militarism are chilling, although in the end most tend to underscore the sound judgment of the particular commander-in-chief. For example, Chinese attacks on the Quemoy and Matsu islands in the Taiwan straits in 1958 came with the sternest advice from President Eisenhower’s inner circle. His closest experts favored nuclear retaliation along with a U.S. expeditionary force on the ground. President Eisenhower rebuffed that course of action, having a clear vision of the potentially disastrous results of such an escalation, with few benefits for the United States. When he addressed the nation on September 11, 1958 one line of the speech was surely not lost on any one of the three organs of American foreign policy—the National Security Council, the Department of Defense, or the Department of State: ‘‘ . . . negotiation and conciliation should never be abandoned in favor of force and strife’’ (President D. Dwight Eisenhower, September 11, 1958 speech on the Taiwan Straits crisis).

Glain’s heroes of diplomacy and advocates for militarism’s constant struggle with each other over this 60-year account is enriched with the added benefit of the research he brings from declassified Soviet and Chinese documents. The reader should not assume which element of government has Yins and which has Yangs; Glain is very descriptive about officials at State and other agencies where the ‘‘strong hammer’’ is the preferable course, more than satiating General LeMay’s call for more bombers in the 1950s and 1960s. Similarly, he champions leaders in uniform from Generals Marshall to Powell who have urged restraint at expending military energy when diplomatic options remained unexplored.

As stated, there are few who will accept all of Mr. Glain’s conclusions wholesale. While George Kennan may not have supported how the national security apparatus digested and acted on  the long telegram or the ‘‘Mr. X’’ article in Foreign Affairs, the Soviets were anything but a benign threat, as those who can still remember the lights going out in Eastern Europe or the rape of Berlin before the Americans arrived at the Brandenburg gate. It would be hard to say that U.S. wealth and military might, born out free market capitalism by the international system it forged was not a factor in keeping the Soviets on the defensive, ending in a culmination that Mikhail Gorbachev ultimately recognized. In terms of China, State vs. Defense draws the lines as China hands (the experts from State Department of the day) to the China lobby (those in support of Chiang Kai Shek and the Kuomintang). It is possible that responsiveness to Mao’s early overtures could have yielded better outcomes, but the risks in doing so cannot be overstated. Most historical accounts credit Stalin and Mao with the deaths of millions during their reigns—hardly fertile diplomatic ground.

Glain touches on the resource woes of the foreign assistance community, but could have delved more into our history with assistance through military means, USAID, or the UN and its efficacy. Former USAID administrator Andrew Natsios, mentioned in State vs. Defense, comes to some sobering realities on the complexities of government-led development in his paper, ‘‘The Clash of the Counter-bureaucracy and Development."  Finally, Glain harshly judges Admiral Mullen, General Petraeus, and General McChrystal as the ‘‘nearly insubordinate troika’’ of hawks during the early days of the Obama administration, favoring ‘‘enlarged, open-ended commitments’’ in Afghanistan. While their roles and records will be debated for generations it would have been encouraging to read a caveat that America’s top military officers are charged to provide the best military options once policy is established. Such an explanation would reaffirm the author’s thorough understanding of the fundamentally subordinate position occupied by the military under the constitution.

State vs. Defense: The Battle to Define America’s Empire, is an important book and deserves to be widely read and discussed. Amid a global backdrop of economic chaos, transnational terror, famine, revolution, and nuclear proliferation, America’s foreign policy and national security choices could not be more important or hold more consequence. Will the Yins and Yangs clash again as they always have, or will they find the sense of urgency to reform policy in a sweeping manner? Taking stock of the history Stephen Glain examines could be essential to redefining our national security strategy, foreign engagement goals, and how we will resource our government to deliver on its constitutional mandate to ‘‘provide for the common defense.’’

Colonel Blaine D. Holt is a Military Fellow, United States Air Force, Council on Foreign Relations. The views expressed here are his own.


The Politics of American Militarism

The Atlantic Monthly  2011-9-2

Most Americans would be shocked to learn that something like 95 percent of the foreign affairs budget of the federal government is devoted to the military. National security accounts for about twenty percent of the entire federal budget, but the public seems to have an altogether different perspective: According to a CNN/Opinion Research poll conducted in March of this year, Americans think foreign affairs make up forty percent of the budget, with thirty percent of the budget devoted to the military and the remaining ten percent devoted to foreign aid. Despite the high numbers given the military, the militarism built into the federal budget seems to spark very little concern.

It's no surprise that the average Americans doesn't realize how little we really spend on foreign assistance, or even how much we spent on the military. Foreign aid is a little under one percent of the federal budget, but the public discourse focuses on it so much it's easy to assume it takes up far more of our resources than it does. Similarly, the stupendous cost of the military--with its millions of employees and soldiers, 761 foreign bases, and thousands of U.S.-based facilities--simply doesn't compute with the public. Further, the military has a built-in constituency: supporting the soldiers is a patriotic duty; advocating on behalf civilians in foreign policy, like the State Department's Foreign Service Officers, is at best enabling limp-wristed decadence.

It is precisely that imbalance between the military and civilian parts of America's foreign policy that is the subject of Stephen Glain's new book State vs. Defense: The Battle to Define America's Empire. "American militarism," he writes, "is unique for its civilian provenance." It didn't come at the point of a gun, or with the military formally declaring its control of the government. This militarism is no conspiracy, but is rather a natural consequence of "a uniquely American impulse to choose force over statesmanship."

Glain certainly makes for a compelling argument. The history he charts, which begins in 1947 and ends with the George W. Bush presidency, is extensive and well sourced. The popular perception that Bush was uniquely wrong to abdicate his foreign policy decisions to the military is simply not borne out by our own history. From almost the moment World War II ended, the military has exercised an outsized influence on foreign policy.

At the same time, the State Department is no hapless victim. While I understand Glain's desire to explain American militarism, he does not emphasize enough that the State Department's terrible leadership is as much to blame for the controlling prominence of the Defense Department as anything else. This happened almost regardless of the party in the White House. In the early 1960s, for example, Secretary of State Dean Rusk deliberately sought to remove Foreign Service Officers who rejected the Domino Theory, the idea that a wave of monolithic communism was sweeping across Southeast Asia. Rusk held on to provably false ideas of Maoist China as "a colonial Russian government" (which he proclaimed in 1951 and never rejected), and steadily removed the State Department officials and employees who used their deep knowledge of Asian politics to reject the anti-communist hyperventilation that had gripped Washington.

In many ways, the process Glain describes reminds me of how, post-2001, the Bush administration deliberately ignored its own regional experts when crafting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. While Glain is certainly correct to note that this is a systemic problem, the State Department isn't exactly a good alternative to the military's overpowering presence in foreign policy. Even so, the military's gradual assumption of normally civilian roles in foreign policy has had disastrous consequences, and Glain deserves tremendous credit for arguing it so forcefully.

During the long run-up in 2002 to the invasion of Iraq, the State Department assembled the Future of Iraq Project, which assembled hundreds of experts and expatriates to plan how to handle the collapse of Iraq's government and society. The militarists in the Bush Whitehouse chose instead to hand responsibility for Iraqi reconstruction to the Department of Defense. When Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, who ran the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, requested members of the Future of Iraq Project help him plan, Secretary Rumsfeld rejected it. The Iraqis would greet American might with roses, Dick Cheney famously said. There was no need for civilians to plan for much.

In Afghanistan, too, it was remarkable to see the government's long rejection of expertise in favor of militarism. Even today, the think tanks with the most access and media presence get that way through ablind advocacy of militarism, and in many cases an explicit rejection of knowledge. Advocating for a less intrusive or proactive military presence is simply not part of the discourse.

In 2003, the Pentagon looked at Afghanistan and decided it needed to be developed. Rather than reaching out to the civilians who are good at such things--not just NGOs but USAID and the State Department--they instead chose to create unique militarized reconstruction teams called Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs).

PRTs inspired a wave of opposition from traditional relief groups. Since they were originally created, relief agencies have reacted strongly against the use of the military to perform non-military tasks.  Soon after, the Taliban did too: In 2004, the relief group Doctors Without Borders dramatically halted all its operations after five of its workers were slaughtered. In a statement, the group blamed not only intransigence on the part of the government in Kabul, but also the deliberate blurring of lines between military and relief work. They're not alone: Oxfam have become outspoken critics of the militarization of aid, as have scholars who focus on the topic. Even today, when they have re-established their presence in Afghanistan, Doctors Without Borders goes to elaborate lengths to highlight their refusal to participate in any military-funded activity.

The shift in military policy that fomented this militarization is remarkable, and is the consequence of the militarization of foreign policy Glain charts.

State vs. Defense is part of a growing body of literature on the military's evolving role in foreign policy decision-making. One of the best explorations about this is Washington Post reporter Dana Priest's 2004 book, The Mission. While well conceived and written (I loved it, in fact), Priest really only covers the 1990s and the first year or two of the Bush administration. Earlier this year, Wall Street Journal reporter Nathan Hodge wrote another book about the militarization of foreign policy, Armed Humanitarians. While I alsoliked that book, he too focused on very recent history.

Glain, in contrast, is much more comprehensive. By examining the impulse to default to the military as an artifact of American politics, rather than a recent evolution driven by confusion in the post-Cold War world, Glain brings much-needed insight into how, for the rest of the world, we really are a nation of soldiers (even if very few of us ever wear a uniform). It is only by understanding that history that we will have any hope of ever changing it.

-- Reviewed by Johsua Foust.



State Versus Defense: The Battle to Define America's Empire

Reviewed by Peter Van Buren for The Huffington Post, 2011-11-7

Stephen Glain's new book, State vs. Defense: The Battle to Define America's Empire, is a brilliant, sober, sad and important biography of the Department of State since World War II. The choice of word here--biography--is significant, in that instead of a simple history of State, Glain traces its decline in old age as America's foreign policy is increasingly made and carried out by the Pentagon. This does not bode well for America. Mini review: Be afraid.

McCarthy: Beginning of the End

Though not casual reading, State vs. Defense: The Battle to Define America's Empire's detailed text will gift the reader with a thorough history of America's overseas activities since the end of the Second World War. Told largely through tales of bureaucratic infighting between State and Defense, with Congress often coming on stage at critical moments to drive a dagger into State's corps(e), it is not a pretty story. Author Glain, for example, chronicles the rise of the national security state post-war, but leaves it to McCarthy to devastate the State Department at a time when its prescience might have altered relations in East Asia forever, possibly preventing the Korean War:

The damage done to the State Department by McCarthy's attacks [and the destruction of State's China hands like Service, Davis and Vincent] was irreparable. Those who did pursue diplomatic careers would find a culture of caution that impaired lateral thinking. (McCarthy's) real legacy is the diminution of the Department of State into the intellectually inert and politically impotent agency that it is today. p.76

Limping into Vietnam, Glain shows how State never reached Presidents Johnson and Nixon, and instead allowed itself to be a forgotten extension of the military because it could never break free from its own bureaucratic in-the-box conception of international relations:

A 1972 RAND study scolded US diplomats for not doing enough to prevent the militarization of Washington's pacification efforts in Vietnam. "The State Department," the study said, "did not often deviate from its concept of normal diplomatic dealings with Saigon, not even when the government was falling apart. Similarly, State... made little effort to assert control over our military on political grounds... State's concept of institution building in Vietnam turned largely on encouragement of American democratic forms, a kind of mirror-imagining which proved hard to apply to the conditions of Vietnam. p. 233

Jesse Helms and George W. Finish the Job

Despite the sparring between State and Defense over what to do in the Balkans in the 1990's, which showed some hope for diplomacy, it was the one-two punch of Jesse Helms' decimating State's budget from his perch on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, followed by the almost complete militarization of everything after 9/11, that effectively ended State as a significant Washington player.

No one outside of official Washington can appreciate how much 9/11 altered the way the US Government thinks about itself. The shock of an attack on the US changed the posture of the government from one of at times satisfied with passivity in its more distant foreign affairs to one demanding constant action.

The shock was because 9/11 was not supposed to happen, again. Everything about the US government was as of 9/10 still configured around the mistakes made concerning Pearl Harbor. My favorite CIA Station Chief kept, framed, in his guest toilet, a copy of a cable sent by the US Embassy in Tokyo on December 7, 1941 (the attack took place December 8 Japan time) claiming war was far off. He maintained that from that December morning forward the purpose of the U.S. government was to make sure Pearl Harbor never happened again. Then it did.

On 9/12, every part of the U.S. government, with a special emphasis on those who worked abroad (State, CIA, DOD, et al), was to shift was a passive mode of listening and reporting to an action mode. The President would probably have preferred that each Federal worker go out and strangle a terrorist personally, but if that was not possible everyone was to find a way to go to war. The intelligence agencies, whose 1960s and 70s comical attempts at assassinations and dirty tricks were so well documented in the Church Hearings, suddenly saw the sharp, sudden end of the debate on whether they were to conduct clandestine or sort of clandestine ops or not. State froze like a deer in the headlights, and almost lost the one action-oriented bureau in the agency, the visa office, to the new Department of Homeland Security.

George W. Bush administration is particularly singled out by Glain as having forced the air out of State. Reminding readers how the early days of Iraq occupation were run not by skilled Arabists from the State Department, but by recent college grads from the Bush campaigns, Glain writes:

American militarism came about the same way that free societies succumb to authoritarian rule: with a leadership that rewards sycophants and the like-minded, co-opts the ambitious and punishes those in dissent. p. 381

In 1950 State had 7710 diplomats abroad. In 2001, they had only 7158. The world had changed around the Department (personnel figures from Career Diplomacy, by Harry Kopp and Charles Gillespie, Second Edition).

Rise of the Combatant Commands

Roughly the last quarter of Glain's book covers the post-9/11 period. His key contention is that the vacuum in foreign relations has been largely filled by the military combatant commanders, the men who head CENTCOM, SOCOM and the rest:

The combatant commands are already the putative epicenters for security, diplomatic, humanitarian and commercial affairs in their regions. Local leaders receive them as powerful heads of state, with motorcades, honor guards and ceremonial feats. Their radiance obscures everything in its midst, including the authority of US ambassadors. p. 350

Glain's point is worth quoting at length:

This yawning asymmetry is fueled by more than budgets and resources [though the Pentagon-State spending ration is 12:1, p. 405], however. Unlike ambassadors, whose responsibility is confined to a single country or city-state, the writ of a combatant commander is hemispheric in scope. His authority covers some of the world's most strategic resources and waterways and he has some of the most talented people in the federal government working for him.While his civilian counterpart is mired in such parochial concerns as bilateral trade disputes and visa matters, a combatant commander's horizon is unlimited. "When we spoke, we had more clout," according to Anthony Zinni. "There's a mismatch in our stature. Ambassadors don't have regional perspectives. You see the interdependence and interaction in the region when you have regional responsibility. If you're in a given country, you don't see beyond its borders because that is not your mission." p. 351

With stature as defacto leaders abroad, the combatant commanders also stripped State of its already meager resources. In particular, Glain focuses on the non-battle to move foreign military assistance money out of State's hands, and dump it into the Pentagon's coffers:

Section 1206 funding: for the first time since president Kennedy signed the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, the US military would fund such activity directly from its own accounts, bypassing the State Department. Conspicuously absent from the debate over Section 1206 was Condoleezza Rice, America's secretary of state. To no avail, Senator Patrick Leahy, implored Rice not to relinquish such vital funding authority as requested by the Pentagon... Legislative aides involved in the debate were staggered by Rice's passivity. p. 399Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's mantric utterance of the "3Ds"--defense, diplomacy and development--suggests at least passive acceptance of such a lopsided collusion. p. 404

The End

In 1940, the U.S. place in the world was simple. Diplomacy was Euro-centric, and the State Department was a collection of gentlemen committed to proper discourse. As World War II broke out, State had just 840 diplomats stationed abroad. The world that emerged from that war still played the old game, albeit with some different players. State participated in the overall mad growth of the U.S. government, and by 1950 had 7710 diplomats assigned outside the U.S. New countries emerged, power shifted, colonies disappeared, and State blithely sat back and reported on it all. Millions of pages of reports on everything under the sun were written, likely billions of pages. You can see contemporary reports on WikiLeaks, or delve into the historical pile, where State is currently declassifying and publishing things from the Carter administration.

Glain offers no prescription for a Department of State resurgence, ending his biography with the institution at near death. State vs. Defense: The Battle to Define America's Empire concludes with a depressing coda, warning America what the almost complete militarization of its foreign affairs really means:

US relations with the world, and increasingly America's security policy at home, have become thoroughly and all but irreparably militarized. The culprits are not the nation's military leaders... but civilian elites who have seen to it that the nation is engaged in a self-perpetuating cycle of low grade conflict... They have convinced a plurality of citizens that their best guarantee of security is not peace but war. p. 407

Despite the fanatic growth in size of government under the Bush administration, State remained a sidelined player. With 7158 employees stationed abroad in 2001, by 2010 the number had only grown to 8199, diplomats supplemented by civil servants and others on "excursion" tours abroad.

History can be quite naughty, and State may yet be handed another chance at transformation before slipping away to become not much more than America's concierge abroad, arranging hotel rooms for Congressional delegations and aiding tourists with lost passports. But that is unlikely, leaving the military as America's representative abroad. Be afraid.