National security state: the strange powerlessness of the "most powerful man in the world".

• Author: Healy, Gene
• Position: National Security and Double Government - Book review

National Security and Double Government, by Michael J. Glennon, Oxford University Press, 272 pages, $29.91;

IT SEEMS AGES AGO now, but there really was a time when some civil libertarians held out hope for Barack Obama's presidency. If elected, this former constitutional law professor might be "our first president who is a civil libertarian," Jeffrey Rosen enthused in The New York Times in March 2008. On inauguration night in 2009, defense lawyers at Guantanamo Bay actually formed a celebratory conga line, chanting "rule of law, baby!"

They and many other Obama optimists woke up to a hell of a hangover, one that's lasted six years. The president has launched more than six times as many drone strikes as George W. Bush; ordered the remote-control execution of an American citizen; continued and expanded dragnet domestic surveillance programs based on a secret interpretation of the PATRIOT Act; and launched two undeclared wars.

The question Michael Glennon asks at the outset of his important new book, National Security and Double Government, is: "Why does national security policy remain constant even when one President is replaced by another, who as a candidate, repeatedly, forcefully, and eloquently promised fundamental changes in that policy?"

His answer is altogether darker and more radical than you'd reasonably expect from a former Senate Foreign Relations Committee legal counsel and current international law professor at Tuffs. Glennon argues, in essence, that the national security state has become a runaway train and that presidential elections are contests that determine who gets to pretend he's driving.

Glennon takes the book's central metaphor of "double government" from the 19th century British essayist Walter Bagehot, longtime editor of The Economist. In 1867's The English Constitution, Bagehot described how real power in the British government had quietly shifted from one set of institutions, the monarchy and House of Lords, to another: the prime minister, the cabinet, and the House of Commons. By the late 19th century, Britain had become a "concealed republic" with only the outward trappings of a monarchy.

The United States is moving in the opposite direction, Glennon argues. As power has shifted toward the permanent national security and intelligence bureaucracies, we face an "emergent autocracy" in the guise of a democratic republic. We've "moved beyond a mere imperial presidency," he writes, "to a structure of double government in which even the President exercises little substantive control over the overall direction of US national security policy."

We're used to the idea that Congress has ceded most of its formal powers over national security policy to an aggrandizing chief executive. But it's counterintuitive, to say the least, to suggest that government's chief executive isn't really in charge. That's likely why the two standard explanations for otherwise inexplicable policy continuity focus on the president as the main protagonist.

The first such...