Andrew Bacevich, a leading expert on American national security policy, will speak on “The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism” Thursday, March 13, at 7 p.m. in Ice Auditorium at Linfield College.
Bacevich, former Army officer, bestselling author and professor of international relations and history at Boston University, is a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, and served with the U.S. Army in Vietnam, Germany and the Persian Gulf before retiring as a colonel. Time magazine called him “one of the most provocative – as in thought-provoking – national-security writers out there today.” In this lecture at Linfield, Bacevich will illustrate how previous administrations, dating back as far as the end of World War II, have led America on this increasingly unsustainable path and offer suggestions on how to reverse it.
His bestseller, “Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War,” is a critique of the country’s military industrial complex. In “The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism,” he argues that America’s lust for empire and its sense of entitlement, coupled with its myth of indestructibility, has deluded and diminished the nation at home and in the eyes of the world. His book, “Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country,” is a critique of the gulf between America’s soldiers and the society that sends them off to war.
Bacevich received his Ph.D. in American diplomatic history from Princeton University. Before joining the faculty of Boston University, he taught at West Point and Johns Hopkins University. In 2004, Bacevich was a Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. He has also held fellowships at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, the John F. Kennedy School of Government, and the Council on Foreign Relations.
Bacevich is also the author of “The Long War: A New History of U.S. National Security Policy Since World War II,” “The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War” and “American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy.” His essays and reviews have appeared in a variety of scholarly and general interest publications including The Wilson Quarterly, The National Interest, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Nation and The New Republic. His op-eds have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Boston Globe and Los Angeles Times, among other newspapers.
The lecture is free and open to the public and sponsored by Linfield’s Edith Green Lectureship and Program for Liberal Arts and Civic Engagement (PLACE), a campus-wide mechanism to promote innovation in liberal arts education and civic engagement through the exploration of thematic connections among modes of thinking and inquiry. This year’s PLACE theme is focused on “The Legacies of War.” For more information, contact Patrick Cottrell at pcottre@linfield.edu.
