President Trump’s decision to order a drone strike that killed Qassem Suleimani, the head of Iran’s Quds Force, has rekindled debates in Washington about the role of the U.S. in the Middle East. Many Republicans have called for more aggressive action against Iran, while the Democratic Presidential candidates have generally pleaded for restraint and a foreign policy that avoids future wars in the region. But Democrats have tended to get the U.S. embroiled in military conflicts, too, which has led to critiques by Bernie Sanders and others that the Party needs to reorient its foreign-policy views.

To talk about these issues, I spoke by phone on Friday with Andrew J. Bacevich, who served in the U.S. Army for more than two decades before becoming one of the most outspoken voices criticizing American foreign policy, particularly during the Iraq War, in which his son was killed. He is now the president of the Quincy Institute, a Washington think tank that was founded in November, 2019, and advocates for a less militarized approach to foreign policy. He is the author of the new book “The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory.” Senator Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas, an Army veteran and one of the most extreme hawks in Congress, recently suggested that the Quincy Institute’s isolationism was tied to anti-Semitism; Bacevich called the claim “absurd.” During my conversation with Bacevich, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the historical overlap between isolationism and anti-Semitism, how American foreign policy changed after the Cold War, and how the foreign-policy establishment might react if Bernie Sanders became the Democratic Presidential nominee.

Why did you want to describe this moment in world affairs as being the result of America’s Cold War victory?

Well, as someone who has observed the direction of U.S. foreign policy since the end of the Cold War and came to view that as misguided, coupled with my own Catholic, conservative outlook on matters related to political economy and culture, I just came to the conclusion that this period of time, which began on a note of euphoria, ended with a divided nation electing as President somebody who is utterly unfit for the office. It seemed to me that there’s a story there.

What is it, specifically, that you think the Cold War and its victory did to the United States?

I was born in 1947, basically when the Cold War began. Even though I served in Vietnam, it’d be more accurate to say that I was a Cold Warrior. That is to say, I served in the Army at a time when preventing World War Three was the focal point of our purpose. I certainly came to believe, as I think many other Americans did, that the Cold War defined international relations, and, indeed, the Cold War defined contemporary history.

I did not think that the Cold War would never end. The political establishment didn’t think that the Cold War would never end, and when it did end, really abruptly, I think that the political establishment succumbed to a bout of hubris. We need to be mindful of the famous Francis Fukuyama article that came out in 1989, “The End of History?,” and the impact that that article had in Washington circles. People did come to believe that the end of the Cold War marked a transformative moment that left the United States in a position to preside over the history that was going to follow the end of history. It’s led to arrogance, to misjudgments, to the embrace of ideas like globalization, like the notion that we were the indispensable nation, that produced deeply unfortunate consequences.

How would you distinguish between the five Presidents we have had since the end of the Cold War? Do you think they all succumbed to a similar hubris?

I think they were all really creatures of a postwar consensus. I think that, in the way we talk about Presidents, when we talk about the process of electing a President, we assume somehow that the President is the supreme master of the universe, somebody who is directing the fate of humankind. That notion is very much an expression of post–Cold War hubris. But what I tried to argue in the book is that the President really is a creature of his time, and that the President’s ability to bring change is actually limited by circumstances. And so, without for a second denying that there are very important differences between Clinton and George W. Bush and Barack Obama as the post–Cold War Presidents, I do try to make the case that their similarities outweigh their differences. And the similarities come from their efforts to implement the post–Cold War consensus. Bill Clinton was the principal promoter of globalization. He said that we now know an unleashed corporate capitalism has the capacity to create wealth on an unprecedented scale, in which he insisted all would share. And I think that that notion had a very powerful effect.

It was in December, 1989—that’s, like, what, six weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall—that the elder Bush ordered the U.S. intervention in Panama, Operation Just Cause. As a military episode, it was very brief. But I think that was the template of how we could put American military power to work. In contrast to the Cold War, when the principal—not sole, but the principal—rationale for American military power was to prevent war, the idea was to contain the Soviet Union, to deter the Warsaw Pact. And every President thereafter did his own experimenting with how to use American military power to do good things abroad from [his] perspective. Even Barack Obama, who, when he ran for the Presidency, promised to get out of Iraq and to win the good war in Afghanistan, became a significant interventionist, whether we’re overthrowing the regime in Libya or embarking on a policy of assassination that, of course, Donald Trump has now himself embraced.

You said that the principal rationale during the Cold War was to “prevent war.” But, from Korea to Vietnam and overthrowing or helping overthrow regimes everywhere from Congo to Iran and sending military advisers to Latin America to support dictatorships, I’m not sure that I understand the purpose of the Cold War.

I’m not going to deny any of that, nor am I trying to suggest that U.S. policy during the Cold War was wise. I mean, I could write another book that would talk about the folly of the U.S. military policy in the Cold War, and, of course, that book would center on Vietnam but would certainly not be limited to Vietnam. Americans have forgotten the folly in Korea. So we made a ton of mistakes.

Nonetheless, never in peacetime in our history had we maintained a large military establishment until the Cold War. Its primary purpose was to avert war. It’s not my story that matters here, but I spent two tours in West Germany. We had a very large army and a very large air force situated in West Germany, for close to forty years, in order to deter the Warsaw Pact. After the Korean War, we maintained substantial forces in South Korea, and we continue to maintain substantial forces in Japan. The purpose of those forces was not to allow us to project power but to prevent the outbreak of hostilities.