Donald Trump: America's Berlusconi?

[TeacherinExile]

(01-13-2017, 03:32 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: Apropos of Reilly's segment on the present period (written in the early 90s), here is an interesting take on the period from the fall of the Soviet Union to the present day.

I read his excellent book The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism a few years ago, and recently ran across the article you referenced here.  (Bookmarked it for a second, closer reading.)  I originally gave Bacevich a "listen" for no other reason than that he served in Vietnam and lost a son in the Iraq War.  Bacevich displays a dispassionate view of war in general, and has rightly questioned where our military efforts in the Mideast have gotten us.  I thought the article as a whole was a decent summary of what has transpired in American foreign policy since the fall of the Berlin Wall.  Not sure how it dovetails with 4T theory exactly.  (Not that it has to.)  It's a useful historical perspective on its own merits.  That's all I care about.

And, as an aside, I wish we had more military advisors like Bacevich in the Situation Room.  Our presidents might be more circumspect before launching new wars.