After the Apocalypse: America’s Role in a World Transformed

In this excoriating call for change, Bacevich (The Age of Illusions), the cofounder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, links the U.S. government’s disastrous response to Covid-19 to faulty national security policies built on the myth of American exceptionalism. He cites the brouhaha over a U.S. Navy captain’s raising of the alarm about the spread of Covid-19 among his crew members as evidence that the military establishment misperceives threats and misallocates resources, and explains how the prioritization of national security over national defense has resulted in such “dubious” actions as the dumping of Agent Orange in Vietnam. Bacevich also describes the 2002 invasion of Iraq as “a classic case of fears... riding roughshod over facts,” and calls on the U.S. to “normaliz[e]” relations with Israel and stop subsidizing the country’s military. Other policy suggestions include withdrawing from NATO “within the next decade” and building a North American Security Zone with Mexico and Canada. Bacevich has covered much of this ground before, and the connections to Covid-19 sometimes seem tenuous, but his arguments are well-informed and stoked by a sense of moral outrage (his son was killed in Iraq in 2007). Readers will agree that U.S. foreign policy needs a massive rethink. (June)