The Forty Years War
The Rise and Fall of the Neocons, from Nixon to Obama
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- $189.00
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- $189.00
Descripción editorial
In The Forty Years War, authors Len Colodny, author of the New York Times bestseller Silent Coup, and Tom Schactman, offer an eye-opening exposé of the history of the neoconservative movement—from its little-known role in Richard Nixon’s downfall through its ultimate expression in the preemptive war in Iraq. Groundbreaking and provocative, The Forty Years War documents the neocons’ undermining of the Nixon White House, their success at halting détente during the Ford and Carter years, their uneasy alliance with Ronald Reagan, and their determination to eventually take the U.S. all the way to Baghdad.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Neoconservative ideologues battle pragmatists by fair means and foul in this scattershot history of American foreign policy. Colodny (Silent Coup) and Schachtman (Decade) hang their study on the figure of Fritz Kraemer, an obscure Pentagon analyst, whose championing of a militarized, moralistic foreign policy allegedly inspired two generations of neoconservatives. The book's first half follows the departure of Richard Nixon and erstwhile Kraemer-ite Henry Kissinger from conservative orthodoxy in seeking a rapprochement with Communist powers. In a voluminous rehash of Watergate, the authors insinuate that White House chief of staff and Kraemer prot g Alexander Haig, abetted by reporter Bob Woodward (a sinister "mouthpiece"), undermined the Nixon presidency for this apostasy. The second half treats ensuing decades as a seesaw struggle in which neocon policy makers' adventurism, from the Iran-Contra affair to the Iraq War, periodically self-destructs and generates a realist backlash. The authors' sharp narrative of factional infighting exhausts itself in flogging the Haig-Woodward conspiracy theory. Kraemer is an ill-chosen central character, more figurehead than intellectual godfather; his sketchily elaborated ideas shed little light on this serviceable but mundane account of the conflict between hawks and doves.
