Bacevich again: “The institution nominally referred to as the Department of Defense didn’t actually do defense; it specialized in power projection. In 2001, the Pentagon was prepared for any number of contingencies in the Balkans or Northeast Asia or the Persian Gulf. It was just not prepared to address threats to the nation’s eastern seaboard. Well-trained and equipped U.S. forces stood ready to defen Seoul or Riyadh; Manhattan was left to fend for itself.”

He doesn’t think this is an accident, but an expression of a basic “principle of national security policy” that assumes that American interests are best defended by “asserting control over the imperial periphery” which takes “precedence over guarding the nation’s own perimeter.”