Andrew Bacevich's 'Age Of Illusions' Argues The Cold War 'Gave Definition To American Life'
In his latest book, military analyst Andrew Bacevich surveys the period between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the election of Donald Trump.
Within the pages of “The Age Of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory,” the professor emeritus of history and international relations at Boston University writes that the Cold War defined American life and citizens’ sense of purpose.
“Our purpose was to defend freedom and resist communism,” he says. “And therefore, when the Cold War ended, Americans were left kind of wondering, ‘What are we all about now?’ ”
A graduate of the U.S. Military Academy and Princeton University, Bacevich is president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His 23-year career in the U.S. Army included service in the Vietnam War — and his son, Andrew, also served in the Army and died in Iraq in 2007.
Winning the Cold War, Bacevich says, led average Americans and policymakers to believe “the future was ours to define.” Instead, he found it led to folly and delusion.
American leaders in 1989 had a “simplistic” view of the Cold War and concluded that the fall of the Berlin Wall was a “wonderful,” future-defining event, he says. The post-Cold War presidencies of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama are defined by the belief that the Cold War positioned the U.S. to determine the future, he says.
Bacevich finds the problem with these presidents was not with the leaders themselves, but with “the ideas that shaped their presidencies.”
These presidents believed globalization would make everyone rich, he says, when it instead creates wealth disparity.
The belief in American military supremacy — that the U.S. could address and eliminate threats expeditiously — also erupted at the end of the Cold War, he says. But in reality, he says this pattern of interventionism led the U.S. to take part in “terribly wasteful, misguided and mis-managed wars.”
He also argues the end of the Cold War
