The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory

America’s post–Cold War hubris bred economic discontent, military quagmires, moral chaos, and Donald Trump’s presidency, according to this sharp but unconvincing polemic. Boston University history professor Bacevich (The Limits of Power) posits a cohesive American identity built around middle-class prosperity, traditional morality, and anticommunism that lasted from WWII until the fall of the Berlin Wall. But after the Soviet Union’s collapse, he contends, America pursued a deluded agenda of economic globalization that yielded inequality and insecurity, world leadership ambitions that hatched indecisive “forever wars,” an unrealistic politics of “presidential supremacy,” and divisive cultural and moral upheavals that privileged individual autonomy over self-discipline and social obligation. Bacevich traces these developments in tart sketches of the presidencies of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, and of the resulting MAGA backlash. (He evenhandedly calls Trump “a noxious, venal blowhard” while disparaging the “protracted psychic orgasm” of the media’s obsession with him.) Bacevich’s assertion of a Cold War consensus is too pat—the era seethed with economic, military, and cultural conflict—and while his observations on the antagonism of modern-day politics sometimes hit home, they don’t break new ground or suggest a plausible way around America’s impasses. As a result, this righteous harangue fails to land many of its punches. (Jan.)