And, if we're going to engage in alternative history, let's assume for a moment that today's neocons were around in the early days of the Republic and wielded the kind of influence they do now. It's more than likely that the fledgling United States would have gotten itself into lots of destructive scrapes with the major powers of Europe and arguably might not have survived its infancy.
But what if the United States did survive in that form? If the new nation had cast itself as a Spartan militaristic society rather than a civilian-led democracy it might never have become the appealing model of a relatively free and prosperous society that attracted immigrants from all over the world.
Instead of "the shining city on a hill," the United States might have been known as an ugly wart upon the civilized world, picking unnecessary fights and oppressing everyone within reach. Instead of a country striving for liberty and justice for all, it would have been known as the place where might makes right.
The threat to the Republic that President Dwight Eisenhower identified in 1961 as "the military-industrial complex" would have come to dominate the nation much earlier with all the attendant sacrifices of freedom and diversion of capital. Guns would have always won out over butter.
Indeed, it's possible that the hatred that many people around the world feel toward the United States today for its violent interventions around the globe would have been how the nation would have been viewed since its founding, assuming the neocons were in charge from the start.
But Boot's pseudo-historical frame attributing every bad thing that has happened in the world for the past two centuries to the supposedly inadequate size of the U.S. military is dishonest in another way. It ignores the fact that the United States has been far from a pacifist nation.
Beyond engaging in genocide against the Native Americans and wresting much of the West from Mexico, the United States has intervened militarily scores of times, especially in Latin America and the Caribbean, but also in far-flung places from the Philippines to Africa and the Middle East.
Yet, for Boot, like many neocons, only more military spending and more military interventions will do. He tells us there should be no "peace dividend" from finally extricating the nation from the Iraq quagmire or from eventually ending the Afghan War.
Only more weapons and more warfare, whatever the cost to the nation's depleted treasury and its tattered principles.
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