Book Review: After the Apocalypse: America’s Role in a World Transformed by Andrew J. Bacevich
The Apocalypse this book refers to is the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, which upended several previously sacrosanct presuppositions about economics, society, and diplomacy. Andrew Bacevich addresses the history and condition of the United States and the role the US is likely to play in the 2020s and beyond. The author argues that the age of American empire is over—and that that’s not a bad thing for the world, and especially the US. This book should help Americans discover that there is (good) life after learning that the world is not all about them.
Bacevich gores favorite oxes of both right and left—no matter who you are, you’re likely to cheer some of the points made and find yourself re-evaluating others. The neoconservative insistence on prosecuting the Iraq war receives special skewering—Bacevich traces a common thread of this mindset with the excesses of philosophical assumptions throughout the past 100 years. The obstinate positions of the Best and Brightest and other wise men throughout this period played major roles in getting us where we are today—that is, far from the best of places we could have been. This book is full of chronicled opportunities lost.
In an artful exposé of Frank Capra’s Why We Fight series of motivational propaganda films in the 1940s, Bacevich highlights the clever hypocrisy presented to entice African Americans to support a war defending a democracy in which Jim Crow restricted their participation. That sold for WWII—much less so in the Vietnam era.
Major media, especially the New York Times and Washington Post as societal influencers, are also called out for criticism about their hypocrisy. The Times for example in the 1990s celebrated the US in a “we are number one” manner—while later declaring in the 1619 project that the US democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. As such candor is necessary and refreshing (Americans, eat your historical spinach), the contradictory complexity of US history indicates that the truth is likely somewhere between the noble universal humanity of the Declaration of Independence and Jefferson’s own ethnic chauvinism in his regression away from striving for racial and cultural liberalism in his later life.
Even as this book was written prior to the brutal Russian invasion of Ukraine, Bacevich leaves open the question of whether America’s leadership (its ruling elites) can reform themselves (and the US) to establish a survivable direction. Whether America will re-calibrate its many erroneous readings and keep authoritarians (foreign and domestic) and its own advancing illiberalism safely contained remains unanswered—we must do all we can to influence the influencers to stay the (corrected) course and establish true justice for all.
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