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

	Views Tuesday, June 23, 2020 Racism, Yes, But What About Militarism and Materialism? In the wake of the police killing of George Floyd, Americans are finally—or is it once again?—confronting the racism that afflicts this country and extends into just about every corner of our national life. Something fundamental just might be happening. Yet to state the obvious, we’ve been here... Read more
	Views Sunday, June 14, 2020 Rename the Army Posts—These 10 Soldiers Deserve the Honor The United States must be the only nation in the world that names military posts after traitors. The police killing of George Floyd has brought renewed attention to this absurd practice, in which U.S. Army and Army National Guard installations across the South bear the names of secessionist... Read more
	Views Monday, May 25, 2020 US Public Remain the Tacit Accomplice in America's Dead End Wars Not least among the victims claimed by the coronavirus pandemic was a poetry recital that was to have occurred in March at a theater in downtown Boston. I had been invited to read aloud a poem, and I chose “On a Soldier Fallen in the Philippines,” written in 1899 by William Vaughn Moody (1869-1910... Read more
	Views Tuesday, May 05, 2020 A Greatest Generation We Are Not The 75th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s surrender in May 1945 ought to prompt thoughtful reflection. For Americans, V-E Day, as it was then commonly called, marked the beginning of “our times.” The Covid-19 pandemic may signal that our times are now coming to an end. Tom Engelhardt, editor and... Read more
	Views Thursday, March 26, 2020 Judgment Day for the National Security State Americans are facing “A Spring Unlike Any Before.” So warned a front-page headline in the March 13th New York Times. That headline, however hyperbolic, was all too apt. The coming of spring has always promised relief from the discomforts of winter. Yet, far too often, it also brings its own... Read more
	Views Monday, February 24, 2020 Going Off-Script in the Age of Trump The impeachment of the president of the United States! Surely such a mega-historic event would reverberate for weeks or months, leaving in its wake no end of consequences, large and small. Wouldn’t it? Shouldn’t it? Truth to tell, the word historic does get tossed around rather loosely these days... Read more
	Views Tuesday, January 07, 2020 A Report Card on the Failed American Project of the Last Three Decades Thirty years ago this month, President George H.W. Bush appeared before a joint session of Congress to deliver his first State of the Union Address, the first post-Cold War observance of this annual ritual. Just weeks before, the Berlin Wall had fallen. That event, the president declared , “marks... Read more
	Views Thursday, October 31, 2019 Why Those "Endless Wars" Must Never End Let us stipulate at the outset that Donald Trump is a vulgar and dishonest fraud without a principled bone in his corpulent frame. Yet history is nothing if not a tale overflowing with irony. Despite his massive shortcomings, President Trump appears intent on recalibrating America's role in the... Read more
	Views Tuesday, October 08, 2019 The Real Cover-Up: Putting Donald Trump’s Impeachment in Context There is blood in the water and frenzied sharks are closing in for the kill. Or so they think. From the time of Donald Trump's election, American elites have hungered for this moment. At long last, they have the 45th president of the United States cornered. In typically ham-handed fashion, Trump... Read more
	Views Tuesday, September 10, 2019 Trump’s Afghanistan 'Peace' Will Be Vietnam All Over Again: A Mess America Leaves Behind When the conflict that the Vietnamese refer to as the American War ended in April 1975, I was a U.S. Army captain attending a course at Fort Knox, Kentucky. In those days, the student body at any of our Army’s myriad schools typically included officers from the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN... Read more