Bacevich’s New Book: The Age of Illusion
Andrew Bacevich, Professor Emeritus of International Relations and History at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, recently published book, The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory (Metropolitan Books, 2020), argues that the United States’ botched handling of the Cold War’s aftermath gave rise to Donald Trump.
In a January 14, 2020 story in BU Today entitled “Andrew Bacevich on Winning the Cold War, Then Blowing the Cole Peace,” journalist Rich Barlow reviews the new book.
From the text of the article:
Bacevich argues that the country’s intelligentsia and leadership shared a consensus built on four misguided precepts after the Wall and Soviet Union both fell: globalization and capitalism would enrich the world; an expensive US military could enforce global stability; expansive freedom untethered from self-restraint would reform our domestic culture; and the American presidency was inflated like a political Macy’s balloon to become the all-important center of government, contrary to the Founding Fathers’ intent.
Bacevich writes that the detritus of this consensus—economic inequality, endless wars, spiritual emptiness and accompanying social problems—helped Donald Trump win the White House.
You can read the full article here.
Andrew Bacevich’s essays and reviews have appeared in a variety of scholarly and general interest publications including The Wilson Quarterly, The National Interest, Foreign Affairs,Foreign Policy, The Nation, and The New Republic. His op-eds have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Boston Globe, and Los Angeles Times, among other newspapers. In 2004, Bacevich was a Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. You can read more about him here.