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Andrew Bacevich
Andrew J. Bacevich, a professor of history and international relations at Boston University, is the author of America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History, which has just been published by Random House. He is also editor of the book, The Short American Century (Harvard Univ. Press), and author of several others, including: Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country (American Empire Project); Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (American Empire Project), and The Long War: A New History of U.S. National Security Policy Since World War II.
Articles by this author
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Views Thursday, June 22, 2017 'There Will Be Hell to Pay': Writing History in the Trump Era Forgive me for complaining, but recent decades have not been easy ones for my peeps. I am from birth a member of the WHAM tribe, that once proud, but now embattled conglomeration of white, heterosexual American males. We have long been -- there’s no denying it -- a privileged group. When the... Read more |
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Views Monday, May 08, 2017 What Obsessing About You-Know-Who Causes Us To Miss Donald Trump's election has elicited impassioned affirmations of a renewed commitment to unvarnished truth-telling from the prestige media. The common theme: you know you can’t trust him , but trust us to keep dogging him on your behalf. The New York Times has even unveiled a portentous new... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, March 21, 2017 Words Not to Die For By way of explaining his eight failed marriages, the American bandleader Artie Shaw once remarked , “I am an incurable optimist.” In reality, Artie was an incurable narcissist. Utterly devoid of self-awareness, he never looked back, only forward. So, too, with the incurable optimists who manage... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, March 07, 2017 The Shameful Selling of Ryan Owens “Sentimentality,” wrote James Baldwin in 1949, “is the mark of dishonesty.” With his pronounced antipathy for fakery and cant, Baldwin denounced the “ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion” as an exercise in manipulation. Sentimentality condescends. It masks indifference. Those... Read more |
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Views Thursday, February 23, 2017 Arrogance and Conceit at the Altar of American Greatness Apart from being a police officer, firefighter, or soldier engaged in one of this nation’s endless wars, writing a column for a major American newspaper has got to be one of the toughest and most unforgiving jobs there is. The pay may be decent (at least if your gig is with one of the major papers... Read more |
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Views Monday, January 09, 2017 How We Got Here: American History After "the End of History" The fall of the Berlin Wall in October 1989 abruptly ended one historical era and inaugurated another. So, too, did the outcome of last year’s U.S. presidential election. What are we to make of the interval between those two watershed moments? Answering that question is essential to understanding... Read more |
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Views Monday, January 02, 2017 On Loving Another Country Say what you will about Israeli political leaders, you can always count on them for one thing: They will do whatever they believe necessary to ensure the security and wellbeing of the Jewish State. Love is a sentiment at odds with cold calculation. The same cannot be said of American political... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, November 29, 2016 Donald Trump and the Swamp of Endless War President-elect Donald Trump’s message for the nation’s senior military leadership is ambiguously unambiguous. Here is he on 60 Minutes just days after winning the election. Trump: "We have some great generals. We have great generals." Lesley Stahl: "You said you knew more than the generals about... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, October 04, 2016 What We Talk About When We Don’t Want to Talk About Nuclear War You may have missed it. Perhaps you dozed off. Or wandered into the kitchen to grab a snack. Or by that point in the proceedings were checking out Seinfeld reruns. During the latter part of the much hyped but excruciating-to-watch first presidential debate, NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt posed... Read more |
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Views Friday, August 05, 2016 Afghanistan: The Campaign's Forgotten War Although hardly news, it bears repeating that the Afghanistan War stands as the longest in all of United States history. By election day, it will have entered its 16th year. Our next president will surely inherit the war there, just as Barack Obama inherited it from George W. Bush. Here is a... Read more |