Donald Trump: America's Berlusconi?

[TeacherinExile]

(01-14-2017, 11:48 AM)SomeGuy Wrote:

(01-14-2017, 11:38 AM)TeacherinExile Wrote:

(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.

Bacevich is generally an enjoyable read.  I am pretty fond of the line-up at The American Conservative in general.  National Interest has some good ones, but there is also a fair amount of bleed-over from the neocon/National Review types of which I am less enthused.

And speaking of the "End of History," I wonder if it's worth the effort to read the latest book by Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy.  Yes, he famously "laid an egg," but he is still considered a leading intellectual on political history.  Has anyone on this forum read any of his work lately?