Response to Samuel Moyn on “Power and Constraint”

Samuel Moyn’s review of Mary Dudziak’s book War Time, like the book it reviews, makes interesting points about “endless war.”  Along the way Moyn says that my book Power and Constraint claims “that Barack Obama, after the trials of George W. Bush, is constrained in this best of all possible national security worlds exactly as much as necessary.”  (emphasis added).  My book argues that the terror presidency has been subject to robust accountability constraints, and that these constraints undergird the remarkable legal and political consensus that currently supports U.S. counterterrorism policies.  But it does not claim that the president is optimally constrained.  “It is hard to know whether the virtues of the modern presidential accountability system outweigh its vices, or whether the particular counterterrorism policies it produced are the best ones, all things considered,” I say in the Introduction.  Chapter 7 analyzes this issue in detail, and disclaims the notion that we have achieved optimal accountability constraints or optimal counterterrorism policies: “To say that the presidential [accountability system] helped generate a consensus about the counterterrorism policies the President can legitimately use does not, unfortunately, mean that it generated the right policies—the ones best designed to prevent terrorist attacks while at the same time preserving other values as much as possible.”  There is much to admire in our constitutional system, but whether the system has achieved optimal counterterrorism constraints and policies depends on facts we do not (and cannot) know, and on contested normative judgments.