“State vs. Defense: The Battle to Define America’s Empire,” by Stephen Glain

During a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in late June, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton pleaded with Congress not to slash civilian aid funds to Afghanistan and Pakistan in a misguided attempt to save money. Military and civilian efforts were mutually reinforcing, she said, and one could not succeed without the other. “And let’s not forget,” Clinton concluded, “an entire year of civilian assistance in Afghanistan costs Americans the same amount as 10 days of military operations.”

Clinton’s appeal for the civilian-military melding popularly known as “smart power” clearly fell on deaf ears. Even before Congress and the White House agreed on broad spending cuts, lawmakers made clear that the State Department was in for major reductions.

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(Crown) - ‘State vs. Defense: The Battle to Define America's Empire’ by Stephen Glain

Historically, America’s diplomats don’t get much respect. When things go wrong, they get blamed; they are rarely credited with success. Their brethren across the Potomac at the Defense Department have nearly always been another story. The Pentagon’s core annual budget has nearly doubled over the past 10 years, to almost $600 billion, not counting off-budget war expenses, and while the recent debt-ceiling deal calls for significant defense cuts, powerful voices — including President Obama’s new defense secretary, Leon Panetta — have already warned that America’s national security is at risk.

For Stephen Glain, a journalist with extensive experience in both the Middle East and Asia, it will come as no surprise if the defense hawks ultimately win out. In “State vs. Defense,” Glain explains how a powerful combination of fire-breathing generals, hawkish intellectuals and calculating or weak presidents and lawmakers enabled the military to reach such an exalted and expensive position, while systematically gutting American diplomacy, in the years since World War II.

From Generals Douglas MacArthur and Curtis LeMay, to Paul Nitze, to George W. Bush and a host of fear-mongers in between, Glain ably illustrates that the secret to their success has been scaring the beejesus out of the American public. “Their impulse is not to reason but to alarm,” he writes of the “militarists,” “and they freely concoct dangers when real ones are unavailable. ”

Using largely archival information, Glain revisits many themes in his 2004 book, “Mullahs, Merchants, and Militants: The Economic Collapse of the Arab World.” He judges the Cold War, the war on terror, and all the small wars fought in their names as largely manufactured reactionism based on purposefully inflated assessments of purported enemies.

In today’s conflicts, Clinton has fought hard for “smart power.” As the number of U.S. forces on the ground in Afghanistan has tripled under the Obama administration, so has the number of U.S. civilians. But that still leaves the civilians there greatly outnumbered: about 1,300 compared to 100,000 military personnel. As the military has grown, it has expanded into many areas previously reserved for civilians because it has the money and the manpower to do so. The Pentagon itself has bemoaned this piling-up of new duties as it undertakes tasks such as vaccinating children in Latin America, digging wells in Africa and trying to build local governance in Afghanistan.