I was reading the Foreign Policy excerpt of your book, about the huge imbalance between the civil and the military arms of the US government. For example, the Pentagon has more lawyers than the State Department has diplomats.

It also has more band members than the State Department has diplomats. That’s become so clichéd I decided to use lawyers instead.

Also, while people are talking about cutting social security, the Pentagon exceeds its budget by $300bn.

Yes, and has repeatedly failed to account, every year, for hundreds of billions of dollars – sometimes even more than a trillion dollars in expenditures.

These are important points, but ones at which a lot of people just shrug their shoulders…

I was surprised, in the past, that when I sat down to drinks with friends and talked about this, it failed to resonate. Now I’m out hitting the talk shows and there does seem to be something of a response, but I think that’s largely symptomatic of the economic condition the country is now mired in.

I was wondering what made you feel outraged enough about the situation to write a book about it. Was it your experience as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal in Asia and the Middle East?

What compelled me to write about this process of foreign policy militarisation was seeing the enormous amount of military resources that the US has established overseas, sometimes, literally, in my backyard. For example, when I was in Korea, I had an apartment not far from the main army base in Itaewon in Seoul. Then I went to Japan, where the US also has an enormous presence. Before that I was in Hong Kong, and every now and then the ships would come in for liberty call. It was a slow process. My tenure overseas coincided with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Before that, I had accepted the Cold War orthodoxy, that these military commitments on the part of the US were necessary in order to contain the Soviet bear. After it imploded, it took me several years of reporting about arms sales to allies, about joint development programmes, of seeing these incredibly intrusive bases, for me to understand the paradox of maintaining these huge deployments in the absence of a clear threat. It gradually became clear to me that this was not only a craving for dominion, but dominion for its own sake.

Then, when I went to the Middle East, I encountered a somewhat different iteration of it. But it was obvious that to the average person anywhere in the world, if they were going to meet an American, it was increasingly likely that they would be wearing a military uniform. To Americans that’s not necessarily disturbing, because we’re blessed with an incredibly professional, highly educated, highly trained, highly motivated military, which we don’t see as a threat. But if you’re Korean or Japanese, or if you’re European, chances are you have a different perception of what a military bureaucracy is capable of doing. So I knew that we were sending a potentially negative signal in not just maintaining our Cold War military bureaucracies, but intensifying them worldwide. That’s really what informed my decision to proceed with this book.

I should also point out that I grew up near Camp Pendleton, which is the largest US marine base in the world, and most of my friends were the children of active duty marine officers. So I grew up with an enormous amount of respect for them and what they were doing. I never bought into this notion that there is something malign or pernicious about the military. It’s more about the way civilians in Washington are abusing the military and its people, like these kids now doing their third or fourth tours in Afghanistan and Iraq.