A Nation Unmade by War

by Tom Engelhardt

As veteran author Tom Engelhardt argues, despite having a more massive, technologically advanced, and better-funded military than any other power on the planet, in the last decade and a half of constant war across the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa, the United States has won nothing. Its unending wars, in fact, have only contributed to a world growing more chaotic by the second. From its founding, the United States has been a nation made by wars. Through incisive analysis and characteristic wit, Engelhardt ponders whether in this century, its citizenry and government will be unmade by them. Tom Engelhardt created and runs the TomDispatch.com website, a project of the Nation Institute, where he is a fellow. He is the author of The United States of Fear, Shadow Government , and The American Way of War all published by Haymarket Books; a highly praised history of American triumphalism in the cold war, The End of Victory Culture , and a novel, The Last Days of Publishing .

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, History, War

192 pages, Paperback

Published May 22, 2018

Reviews

[Tonstant Weader · Rating 2 out of 5]

Tom Engelhardt of Tom Dispatch wrote A Nation Unmade by War to offer his explanation of why America is in decline. Rather than accepting complexity, he unites everything under the destructiveness of the neverending wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and where the hell else we’re intervening. It’s true, neverending war is bankrupting us and undercutting the social fabric with failing infrastructure, education, healthcare, and the safety net.

So much is going wrong, rising inequality, a partisan rift that functions as a proxy for racial divides with the Republicans embracing open white supremacy and white nationalism, and an election of a corrupt conman though racist appeals.



I struggled to finish as the book became tedious. It’s not just that it is relentlessly pessimistic absent even glimmers of hope, but I don’t believe in a unified theory of failure. Yes, America has given itself over to a faux-patriotism that trades actual service for making a fetish of service. Rather than everyone at risk of going to war, of serving, we buy off our guilt in evading service by “honoring the troops.” Now we have started treating the military like a political class. Generals are filling positions in civilian government as though we were Argentina or Chile thirty years ago. It’s dangerous and Engelhardt is right to remind us that along with the daily outrage fest, a whole lot of other things are going on.

He also thinks the militarization and constant war are responsible for things more logically explained by the persistence of racism and the backlash against a Black president. Also, if the generals were really in charge, they actually believe climate change is a serious global security threat.

It felt like blog posts strung together so it felt repetitive and tedious. I also think if you’re going to hand me 10,000 problems, you have an obligation to offer some solutions, so actions. Otherwise, it’s the road to despair, helplessness, and in the end, apathy.

I received an e-galley of A Nation Unmade by War from the publisher through Edelweiss.

A Nation Unmade by War at Haymarket Books
Tom Engelhardt author site

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[Randall Wallace · Rating 2 out of 5]

Here’s my favorite fact in this book that would be public knowledge had we an honest media: “More American taxpayer dollars have been poured into reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan alone than went into the whole of the Marshall Plan.” Tom notes how places where the U.S. Military has been, are now failing or failed states: Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, or Syria. Then he notes the red flag of how President Obama “talked more about American exceptionalism than Presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush combined.” Tom asks the important question, “Don’t we Americans have any responsibility for the situation we now face globally?” We got a death spiral economy under control, the more failed states that exist, the more our military has to step in at great cost, and the violence of others means more $ for US weapons manufacturers. Tomahawk missiles cost $750,000 each. For all our bombing experience and prowess, Tom notes how bizarre it is that 9-11 (caused not by the U.S. or Britain) meanwhile ends up being the “most successfully use of strategic bombing in history.” Since the death of Chalmers Johnson, Tom keeps noting U.S. inept military strikes that could cause ‘blowback” (like 9-11) from taking out a soccer game in Iraq to killing a Kurdish wedding party. I’d love to rank this book higher, after all Noam liked it, however I didn’t learn much at all. I’ve learned far more on this subject from reading Noam, Chalmers Johnson, Walter L. Hixson, Chris Hedges, Michael Mandel, John Tirman, William Blum – even reading ½ of any Andrew Bacevich book teaches me more than this book. I had high hopes – too bad.

[Eve Ottenberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

In handing unprecedented power to his administration’s generals, Donald Trump has endorsed the U.S. military brand – failure is the new success. A seventeen-year long war in Afghanistan with no end in sight and no new ideas – hello? What about leaving? Fifteen years in Iraq and precious little to show for it besides nearly a million displaced Iraqis, cities turned to rubble, continued fighting and untold thousands dead? A proxy war in Yemen. Missiles flying into Syria. A failed state in Libya. And what do our military sachems say? The wars in the Middle East are a “generational conflict,” something we can bequeath to our grandchildren. And why? Because these generals have no idea other than doing the same thing over and over, even though it hasn’t worked. This, as Tom Englehardt explains in his new book, “A Nation Unmade by War,” is the definition of brain-dead.

That’s our military – the most expensive in the world by far, feasting like a vampire on our tax dollars – with not a single idea other than to repeat the same thing that has failed over and over. “An empire of madness,” Englehardt calls the U.S. with its endless wars and determination to deny the environmental catastrophe of climate change unfolding right before our eyes. Not only to deny but to ship crude from tar sands, fracked gas, coal and oil all over the world, to fry the planet as fast as possible. The brain-dead, endlessly violent military and the equally brain-dead, ecocidal fossil energy promoters – this is the lethal combination currently directing the world’s lone superpower.

This book is not a happy read. It documents the cost of America’s war on terror – $5.6 trillion – and how Bush and Cheney’s “soaring geopolitical dreams of global domination proved to be nightmares.” Indeed, Englehardt observes that in the past 15 years “no goal of Washington – not a single one – has been accomplished by war.” And yet the American wars grind on with no end in sight. Meanwhile, we inhabit “a country that no longer invests fully in its own infrastructure, whose wages are stagnant, whose poor are a growth industry, whose wealth now flows eternally upward in a political environment awash in the money of the ultra-wealthy and whose over-armed military continues to pursue a path of endless failure in the Greater Middle East."

“A Nation Unmade by War” consists of Englehardt’s journalistic columns, edited and strung together in book form. As such, there is a certain inevitable repetition, but given the stakes here, this is not a bad thing. Much of what Englehardt has to say cannot be said often enough. In fact, often enough won’t come until these arguments echo in so many people’s brains that they start opposing, en masse, a disastrous, mindlessly fatal political course. At the book’s start, Englehardt quotes Amr Moussa, former head of the Arab League, announcing that an invasion of Iraq would “open the gates of hell.” Anyone who doubts the truth of Moussa’s prescient words, need only look at our post 9/11 grotesquely swollen and expensive national security state with its 17 secret agencies, or glance at the numbers of the secretive special operations command, seventy thousand soldiers strong, “which might be thought of as the president’s private army,” or consider the drone assassination program, creating new terrorists worldwide for our assassin-in-chief, or listen to our military leaders like David Petraeus referring to the mayhem we’ve unleashed on the Middle East as a “generational struggle.”

If doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result each time defines insanity, what are we to make of our generals’ endless calls for more missiles, more drones, more soldiers, where the previous flood of such has failed? Could it be that, well before Donald Trump’s attempt at kingship, our military leaders in Washington had lost their minds? This money, these trillions of dollars, could have gone to shift the world’s second worst carbon polluter from fossil fuels to renewables. In a country with truly sane leaders that would have happened. Our leaders would have observed the freak weather embodied in hurricanes, droughts, wildfires, “nuisance flooding” in coastal cities and listened to our scientists’ warnings about our profligate burning of oil and gas. Instead scientists are screaming in the wilderness, the planet has overheated, arctic and Antarctic ice melt, Greenland is losing its glaciers, all of which means many feet of sea-level rise, but what do we get? A trillion-dollar upgrade of our nuclear arsenal, which will doubtless provoke Russia and China to something similarly wasteful, and eternally expanding war in the Middle East. Our so-called leaders will reap the ruined world they deserve, but unfortunately they may very well drag the rest of us down with them.

[Ruthie · Rating 2 out of 5]

After hearing the author on the Intercept, I checked out his book from the library. Unfortunately, this book is basically the same essay over and over again. Engelhardt is a compelling speaker but I found this book to be repetitive and not very useful.

[Sharon E. · Rating 2 out of 5]

lost interest in this book. wouldn’t call it capitulating. a lot of emphasis on Trump. Some interesting parts on the dollar amounts of military equipment and Bush. The main point of war deteriorating the own US nation through crappy infrastructure, wealth inequality, etc while billions more gets dunked into wars we are not “winning” is important and obtained early on in the book.

[Norgri · Rating 3 out of 5]

I agree with a lot of the author’s assessment but I can rate this book any higher than a 3. There was just too much repetition between chapters. I realize they are repurposed blog articles but I think the book would have been better had they been pulled into a new long read.

[Nick Sorrentino · Rating 2 out of 5]

Pretty boring. The emphasis on Trump doesn't fit when reading this in 2021.
Was expecting more of a focus on the military industrial complex over decades instead of a heavy focus on the Trump administration

[Robin Case · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ok read, a reasonably well argued perspective. A little long and repetitive.

[Geoff Walling · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very valuable lesson in why our wars have been ineffective and the impact that they have had on both our military and civilian populations. Highly recommend.

[David Bradshaw · Rating 4 out of 5]

GWoT thank you Generals - Bush - neo-cons - and a supine Populus

[Guillaume Dohmen · Rating 5 out of 5]

A serious book

This is a book everyone should if the future of the world is worth thinking about. One cannot leave the future to one of the great nations of this world.