Andrew Bacevich on Ending the US’s Forever Wars
Historian Andrew Bacevich has made his name picking apart the bipartisan forever wars from an idiosyncratic, conservative position. We spoke with him about Joe Biden’s foreign policy, whether American primacy is coming to an end, and the folly of a new Cold War with China.
US president Joe Biden in the State Dining Room of the White House on May 5, 2021. (Nicholas Kamm / AFP via Getty Images)
Over the past few decades, Andrew Bacevich has been one of the most trenchant critics of US foreign policy, assailing the bipartisan pursuit of “forever wars” and overseas adventurism from a conservative standpoint.
In the wake of Joe Biden’s announcement of the end of one of those wars, the nearly twenty-year campaign in Afghanistan, Jacobin sat down to speak with him about the failure of post–Cold War thinking, the end of the unipolar world order, and the need for a fundamentally different US foreign policy.
Branko Marcetic
What are your immediate thoughts on Joe Biden’s foreign policy after a hundred days? Has there been anything particularly significant about it?
Andrew Bacevich
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