American Exceptionalism and 'After the Apocalypse'

Bacevich’s complaint is not just about this or that intervention, but the mentality that says that the U.S. is the “leader” of the world with the right to meddle wherever it sees fit.

Michael Hirsh’s review misses a lot of the most interesting material in Andrew Bacevich’s After the Apocalypse, and it misinterprets the rest.¹ My own review of the book focuses on Bacevich’s foreign policy recommendations, which weirdly receive almost no attention from Hirsh despite the fact that he is writing in Foreign Policy. Hirsh asserts that Bacev…