Book review of The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory by Andrew J. Bacevich - The Washington Post
▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/they-wanted-to-remake-the-world-instead-we-got-president-trump/2020/01/10/00b84096-32fc-11ea-91fd-82d4e04a3fac_story.html
The Cold War mind-set, in Bacevich’s telling, came with certain disciplining features. Because the Soviet Union was always out there, doing its own thing, American statesmen could not be as reckless as they might otherwise have been, and American citizens were forced to live up to some modicum of their own oft-stated virtues. But the Cold War also constituted a “tragedy of towering proportions,” Bacevich writes, 40-plus years of “folly and waste,” all to create the greatest buildup of lethal force in human history . The proper response, when it came to an end, would have been “reflection, remorse, repentance, even restitution.” Instead, an “intoxicated #elite” rushed ahead into the 21st century, giddy with its own power and wealth, sure that it could now, at last, remake the world in America’s image.
What emerged from this enthusiasm, Bacevich argues, was a dreary new post-Cold War consensus, built around a commitment to neoliberal economics at home and abroad, backed by American military supremacy and an increasingly powerful White House. Technology was supposed to bring it all together, as smart bombs and drones replaced messy human warfare. And everyone was supposed to win: America, the world, the poor, the rich, the cause of human freedom. Bacevich likens the late 1990s to the moment when Dorothy and her “Wizard of Oz” companions arrive at the yellow brick road, convinced that their troubles have come to an end. We all know how well that turned out.