In 1970, domestic production of crude oil peaked, with an average of nearly 10 million native-born barrels entering the world market every day. Domestic production then steadily declined through the rest of the century — in part because Europe, which had depended on American oil during World War II, began to look toward the Middle East for imports — and bottomed out at 5 million barrels per day in the final year of Bush II’s presidency. The ’70s also saw the beginning of an increase in US oil imports from abroad, especially the Middle East, making for the American economy’s now notorious dependence on “foreign oil.” The aspirations of the average American depended on that oil’s availability: “an unspoken premise underlying that way of life was that there was more still to come.”

There is a lot of truth in Bacevich’s analysis. The oil-focused military campaign of the 1980s did balloon into an attempt at regional transformation. And while Obama quickly abandoned the transformation part of Bush’s agenda, intense US involvement in the region is outlasting the Middle East’s status as an indispensable source of oil. But Bacevich never asks — much less answers — the question that naturally follows: Why hasn’t the declining importance of Middle East oil produced any changes in US military policy? Nor does he ask why American politicians haven’t spent any time celebrating an impending energy independence that they spent more than a decade demanding. Here the limits of Bacevich’s argument come into view. Identifying oil as the long war’s cause allows him to begin his narrative in 1980. This obscures the ideological roots of a commitment to the Middle East that doesn’t look to be disappearing in the foreseeable future.

The US loves to see itself as a noncolonial power. As the country assumed a global leadership role after World War II, it was eager to be viewed as a new kind of leader, a successor to the European colonial regimes that were rightly disappearing. But in many instances, such as its inheritance of the Vietnam War from France, the US simply perpetuated colonial wars. America’s quest for Middle East oil was as predatory as the British Empire’s. During the wind-down of World War II, the US sought an oil concession in Iran, which was England’s largest source of overseas oil, and it sought to keep British oil companies out of Saudi Arabia, which the US considered its own. All the while, the US declared that its entire rationale was “anticolonial.”

[...] even on the narrow terms of maintaining an “American way of life,” American policy abroad has been disastrous, and Bacevich’s is now one of many volumes arguing that the US would have been better off had it abandoned its quest for world hegemony long ago. The paradox of American power is its luxury. The US enjoys, geographically as well as militarily, a form of superiority and safety that has never been truly threatened. Hegemony is now a choice, and the US has indulged that choice extravagantly. Trillions have been spent on mishaps and catastrophes: even Dwight Eisenhower acknowledged that “every gun that is made . . . signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

What would happen if the US were to abandon this rationale — if, for a moment, the dissident counterestablishment occupied the halls of power and began setting policy? The essential prescriptions have been set out by Christopher Layne in his book The Peace of Illusions (2006). Like Bacevich, Layne is a conservative — he is the Robert M. Gates Chair in National Security at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University — and a descendant of the Wisconsin School. For Layne, the US’s indispensability is a big problem for the world, and a big problem for the US. Abandoning it begins to set more sensible terms for the world order. Under Layne’s more or less realist rubric, the US could begin by leaving NATO and allowing the European Union to take responsibility for its own interests. It would then terminate its security treaty with Japan and withdraw from South Korea, similarly allowing those countries the ability to set the terms of their own foreign policy.

It was always folly for the US to attempt to secure Middle East oil — even an embargo by a single country would simply mean increased production by another, and in any case the US hegemony over Saudi Arabia has increased, not diminished, the possibility of instability there. But now that the US no longer depends on that oil, its continuing military presence in the region is not only indefensible but dangerous, increasing the threat of Islamist terrorism that it exists to tamp down. It should withdraw entirely, as it should encourage the withdrawal of Israel’s forces and citizens from the settlements, to help foster the creation of a Palestinian state.

The fact that these sensible prescriptions strike the foreign policy establishment as totally insane stems from a persistent belief in America’s exclusive prerogative to reorganize and remake the world, which the members of that establishment euphemistically refer to as the country’s “credibility.” Politicians defend this prerogative just in case someone comes up with a new and better idea for remaking the world somewhere down the line. Solving this problem can’t just be a matter of the US realizing its “true” interests. The country would have to learn to give up the colonial mandate that it took up decades ago, well after the colonial era was already passing into history.