Andrew J Bacevich - Twilight of the American Century

I am grateful to the following publications for permitting me to include in this collection materials that originally appeared in their pages.

The Age of Great Expectations and the Great Void: History after the End of History. TomDispatch, January 8, 2017, http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176228.

Always and Everywhere: The New York Times and the Enduring Threat of Isolationism. TomDispatch, October 24, 2013, http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175764.

American Imperium. Harpers Magazine, May 2016, 2938.

Angst in the Church of America the Redeemer. TomDispatch, February 23, 2017, http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176246.

Ballpark Liturgy: Americas New Civic Religion; Cheap Grace at Fenway. TomDispatch, July 28, 2011, http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175423.

Boykinism: Joe McCarthy Would Understand. TomDispatch, September 25, 2012, http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175597.

Breaking Washingtons Rules. The American Conservative, January 2011, 2326.

Bushs Grand Strategy. The American Conservative, November 4, 2002, 1214.

Counterculture Conservatism. The American Conservative, January/ February 2013, 1214.

The Decay of American Politics: An Ode to Ike and Adlai. TomDispatch, August 4, 2016, http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176172.

The Duplicity of the Ideologues. Commonweal, July 11, 2014, 1012.

Election 2016: A Postmortem. Commonweal, January 6, 2017, 1517.

The Elusive American Century. Harpers Magazine, February 2012, 1316.

The End of (Military) History? The United States, Israel, and the Failure of the Western Way of War. TomDispatch, July 29, 2010, http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175278.

Family Man: Christopher Lasch and the Populist Imperative. Review of Hope in a Scattering Time: A Life of Christopher Lasch, by Eric Miller. World Affairs, May/June 2010, 8184.

Fault Lines: Inside Rumsfelds Pentagon. Review of War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism, by Douglas J. Feith, and Wiser in Battle: A Soldiers Story, by Ricardo S. Sanchez. Boston Review, July/August 2008, 2124.

The Folly of Albion. The American Conservative, January 17, 2005, 1113.

The Great Divide. Commonweal, March 28, 2008, 10.

History that Makes Us Stupid. Chronicle of Higher Education, November 6, 2015, 15.

How We Became Israel. The American Conservative, September 2012, 1618.

Kennan Kvetches: The Diplomats Life in Doomsaying. Review of The Kennan Diaries, edited by Frank Costigliola. Harpers Magazine, April 2014, 86110.

Kissing the Specious Present Goodbye: Did History Begin Anew Last November 8th? TomDispatch, June 22, 2017, http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176299.

A Letter to Paul Wolfowitz: Occasioned by the Tenth Anniversary of the Iraq War. Harpers Magazine, March 2013, 4850.

Living Room War. The American Conservative, March 14, 2005, 1113.

The Man in the Black Cape. The American Interest, January/February 2009, 11618.

A Modern Major General. Review of American Soldier, by Tommy Franks with Malcolm McConnell. New Left Review 29 (SeptemberOctober 2004): 12334.

Naming Our Nameless War: How Many Years Will It Be? TomDispatch, May 28, 2013, http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175704.

The New Normal. Commonweal, July 7, 2017, 89.

New Rome, New Jerusalem. Wilson Quarterly 26, no. 3 (2002): 5058.

One Percent Republic. The American Conservative, November/December 2013, 2023.

Permanent War for Permanent Peace: American Grand Strategy since World War II. Historically Speaking 3, no. 2 (2001): 25.

The Real World War IV. Wilson Quarterly 29, no. 1 (2005): 3661.

Review of Known and Unknown: A Memoir, by Donald Rumsfeld. Financial Times, February 11, 201115.

The Revisionist Imperative: Rethinking Twentieth Century Wars. Journal of Military History 76, no. 2 (2012): 33342.

Save Us from Washingtons Visionaries: In (Modest) Praise of a Comforting Mediocrity. TomDispatch, January 29, 2015, http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175949/.

Saving America First: What Responsible Nationalism Looks Like. Foreign Affairs, September/October 2017, 5657.

Schlesinger and the Decline of Liberalism. Review of Schlesigner: The Imperial Historian, by Richard Aldous. Boston Review, October 10, 2017.

Selling Our Souls. Commonweal, August 12, 2011, 1113.

Slouching toward Mar-a-Lago: The Post-Cold-War Consensus Collapses. TomDispatch, August 8, 2017, http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176316.

Tailors to the Emperor. New Left Review 69 (MayJune 2011): 10124.

Thoughts on a Graduation Weekend. Front Porch Republic, May 19, 2014, http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2014/05/thoughts-graduation-weekend/.

Tom Clancy, Military Man. The Baffler, no. 24 (2014): 15760.

Tragedy Renewed: William Appleman Williams. World Affairs, Winter 2009, 6272.

Twilight of the Republic? Commonweal, December 1, 2006, 1016.

The Ugly American Telegram. The New York Times, August 23, 2013.

Under God: Same-Sex Marriage and Foreign Policy. Commonweal, August 14, 2015, 1112.

War and Culture, American Style. The Boston Globe, April 24, 2016, K8.

A War of Ambition. America, February 10, 2014, 1315.

What Happened at Bud Dajo: A Forgotten Massacreand Its Lessons. The Boston Globe, March 12, 2006, C2.

Why Read Clausewitz When Shock and Awe Can Make a Clean Sweep of Things? Review of Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq, by Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor. London Review of Books, June 8, 2006, 35.

I want to express my gratitude to the University of Notre Dame Press for making this volume possible, above all to Steve Wrinn for suggesting the possibility of collecting my recent essays. But Steves colleagues have been nothing short of splendid: responsive and supremely professional. They include Susan Berger, Matt Dowd, Wendy McMillan, and Kathryn Pitts. My thanks to all.

ANDREW J. BACEVICH is professor emeritus of history and international relations at Boston University and is the author of numerous books, including America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History.

(2013)

Dear Paul,

I have been meaning to write to you for some time, and the tenth anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq war provides as good an occasion as any to do so. Distracted by other, more recent eruptions of violence, the country has all but forgotten the war. But I wont and I expect you cant, although our reasons for remembering may differ.

Twenty years ago, you became dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and hired me as a minor staff functionary. I never thanked you properly. I needed that job. Included in the benefits package was the chance to hobnob with luminaries who gathered at SAIS every few weeks to join Zbigniew Brzezinski for an off-the-record discussion of foreign policy. From five years of listening to these insiders pontificate, I drew one conclusion: people said to be smartthe ones with fancy rsums who get their op-eds published in the New York Times and appear on TVreally arent. They excel mostly in recycling bromides. When it came to sustenance, the sandwiches were superior to the chitchat.

You were an exception, however. You had a knack for framing things creatively. No matter how daunting the problem, you contrived a solution. More important, you grasped the big picture. Here, it was apparent, lay your mtier. As Saul Bellow wrote of Philip Gorman, your fictionalized double, in