Drift
The Unmooring of American Military Power
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- USD 4.99
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- USD 4.99
Descripción editorial
The #1 New York Times bestseller that charts America’s dangerous drift into a state of perpetual war.
Written with bracing wit and intelligence, Rachel Maddow's Drift argues that we've drifted away from America's original ideals and become a nation weirdly at peace with perpetual war. To understand how we've arrived at such a dangerous place, Maddow takes us from the Vietnam War to today's war in Afghanistan, along the way exploring Reagan's radical presidency, the disturbing rise of executive authority, the gradual outsourcing of our war-making capabilities to private companies, the plummeting percentage of American families whose children fight our constant wars for us, and even the changing fortunes of G.I. Joe. Ultimately, she shows us just how much we stand to lose by allowing the scope of American military power to overpower our political discourse.
Sensible yet provocative, dead serious yet seriously funny, Drift reinvigorates a "loud and jangly" political debate about our vast and confounding national security state.
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A bloated, secretive, lawless national security state is pilloried in this scathing but shallow critique of America's post-Vietnam defense policies. MSNBC talk-show host Maddow recaps milestones in a decadeslong process of giving presidents dangerously convenient and unaccountable war-making powers: the Reagan administration's gigantic military buildup, Iran-Contra illegalities, and assertions of executive privilege; the supplanting of soldiers with private contractors under Clinton and Bush fils; the growth of the CIA's secret drone air force; the many invasions, from Grenada to Iraq, launched by commanders-in-chief without constitutional authority. The author presents sharp, well-supported analyses of these episodes, spicing them with a caustic wit that skewers everything from Army recruitment ads to the Air Force's habit of accidentally dropping or misplacing its nuclear warheads. She's less cogent in blaming America's adventurism on the neglect of the Constitution's requirement that Congress declare war (many inane conflicts, like the Spanish-American War, passed that hurdle) and the lapse of the tradition of calling up the citizen-soldiers of the Reserves and National Guard, which she believes puts a brake on war-mongering (although the Iraq War call-up, she allows, had no such effect). Maddow's incisive look at the follies of militarism needs a deeper understanding of why America has so often embraced it.
