On Shedding an Obsolete Past provides a much-needed and comprehensive critique of recent US national security policies in both the Trump and Biden administrations.

These policy decisions have produced a series of costly disappointments and outright failures that have destroyed the lives of hundreds of thousands around the world and cost US taxpayers astronomical sums of money.
Bacevich provides urgent and critical insights into how these failures occurred and what needs to be done to prevent similar failures in the future. He reminds us that, by understanding the past, we can alter our current trajectory and transform the world for the better. 

"Bacevich is less interested in exploring the hypocrisy as he is in examining the waste. The squandering of resources and blood. The hollowing of America while we pretend to be something we’re not. The sense that we’ve failed a generation clinging to an obsolete idea, and that failure is tearing us apart. In that, his true conservative nature comes out: why do something stupid, he asks, when we can just not do that?" —Chicago Review of Books

Andrew Bacevich is professor of history and international relations emeritus at Boston University. A graduate of the U. S. Military Academy, he served for twenty-three years as a commissioned officer in the United States Army. He received his Ph.D. in American diplomatic history from Princeton. He is the author of the forthcoming book After the Apocalypse: America’s Role in a World Transformed. Earlier books include The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory;Twilight of the American Century; and America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History.