Vote all you want. The secret government won’t change.

[Carmen Elsa Irarragorri Wyland]

The people we elect aren’t the ones calling the shots, says Tufts University’s Michael Glennon

The voters that put  Barack Obama in office expected some big changes. From the NAS's warrant less wiretapping to Guantanamo Bay to the Patriot Act, candidate Barack Obama  was a defender of civil liberties and privacy, promising a dramatically different approach from his predecessor.

Nut six years later into his administration, the Obama version of national security looks almost indistinguishable from the one he inherited. Guantanamo Bay remains open. The NSA has, if anything, become more aggressive in monitoring Americans. Drone strikes have escalated. Most recently has been reported that the President who won the Nobel Prize in part for promoting nuclear disarmament is spending up to $1 trillion modernizing and revitalizing America's nuclear weapons.

Why did the face in the Oval office changed but the policies remain the same? Critics tend to focus on Obama himself, a leader who perhaps has shifted with politics to take a harder line. But Tufts University political scientist Michael J. Glennon has a more pessimistic answer: Obama couldn't have changed policies much, even if he had tried.

Though it is a bedrock American principle that citizens can steer their government by electing new officials, Glennon suggests that in practice, much of our government no longer work that way. In a new book: "National Security and Double Government", he catalogs the ways that the defense and national security apparatus is in effect self-governing, with virtually no accountability, transparency, or checks and balances of any kind. He uses the term "double government": There is no one elect, and there is no one behind it, steering huge swaths of policies almost unchecked. Elect officials end up serving as mere cover for the real decisions made by the bureaucracy. 

Glennon cites cites the example of Obama and his team being shocked and angry to discover upon taking office that the military gave them only two options  for the war in Afghanistan: The United States could add more troops or the United States could add a lot more troops. Hemmed in, Obama added 30,000 more troops.

Glennons critique sounds like an outsider's take, even a radical one. In fact, he is the quintessential insider: He was legal counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a consultant to various congressional committees, as well as to the State Department. "National Security and Double Government" comes favorably burbled by former members of Defense Department, State Department, White House, and even the CIA, And he is not conspiracy  theorist: Rather he sees the problem as one of "smart, hard -working, public spirited people acting in good faith who are responding to systemic incentives" -without any meaningful oversight to rein them in.

How exactly has double government taken hold? And what can be done about it?  Glennon speaks with ideas from his office at Tuft's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.