Andrew Bacevich's The Age of Illusions

I’ve been a fan of Andrew Bacevich’s books for a long time—Breach of Trust and America’s War for the Greater Middle East, to name just two—but somehow I missed the publication of The Age of Illusions until recently. Well, oversight corrected, and this latest entry is as insightful, thought-provoking, and even gripping as the others, while also in some places being a bit more personal in ways that enhanced everything else that’s great about the book.

Bacevich begins with a quote from John Updike’s Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom books: “Without the Cold War, what’s the point of being an American?” It’s a question that animates the rest of the book, which in addition to being a solid critique of our rulers’ addiction to war, is also a meditation on what it means to be American.

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Of all the book’s insights, the one I found most resonant were its depictions of Trump’s ascendency as a manifestation of far more significant, longstanding, and consequential aspects of post World War 2 and post Cold War America itself. I tend to agree with this framework, and maybe some of that agreement is behind my praise for the insights. All I can say is that Bacevich himself strikes me as a non-tribal observer of events, motivated by a desire to illuminate the foundation of events rather than by the urge to score points.

It’s been my observation that when humans find a favored approach is no longer working as it once did, their first and sometimes continuing impulse is to do the favored thing longer, louder, harder. This might work for a while but is almost always counterproductive in the long term. In this regard it’s interesting—and disturbing—to consider what America’s post Cold War cultural defaults have become: domination and endless war. Yet the world is becoming increasingly multipolar regardless. If our rulers are true to my views of human nature, we are in for a long period of more of the same, but worse. At some point the never-ending wars and lust for dominance will become unsustainable, but there will be terrible suffering in the meantime, and perhaps worse.

On a brighter note, insights like Bacevich’s could help us change course now instead of drifting until it’s too late. Here’s hoping.

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