MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewIt’s a compelling narrative, and one congruent with the story of \'American carnage\' that brought Donald Trump to the White House ... In the course of breezily narrating the deficiencies of the past four presidencies, he breaks periodically to remind the reader what an unedifying spectacle Trump was making of himself at each point in time, and how that spectacle exemplified something ugly about the America aborning ... Yet Bacevich’s narrative is also congruent with older critics of America’s way of life and its way in the world. Readers of Thorstein Veblen, William Appleman Williams or Christopher Lasch, of which Bacevich is one, would hardly be surprised by the choices America’s elites made after the Soviet Union collapsed ... Meanwhile, though Bacevich doubts whether America’s distinctive illusions actually won the Cold War, I wonder whether Mikhail Gorbachev would agree. Would he have been so willing to withdraw peacefully and see his own empire dismantled if he had not, to some degree, taken our professed beliefs at face value? If so, then our case is classically tragic. The very illusions that brought us victory are what powered our subsequent hubris, and nemesis rose from the inevitable disillusion of a world that trusted us in our folly.
