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Drift, April 2012
Hardcover / e-Book
The Unmooring of American Military Power
Crown
April 2012
On Sale: March 27, 2012
288 pages ISBN: 0307460983 EAN: 9780307460981 Kindle: B005BUG6T8 Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
"One of my favorite ideas is, never to keep an unnecessary
soldier," Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1792. Neither Jefferson
nor the other Founders could ever have envisioned the
modern national security state, with its tens of thousands
of "privateers"; its bloated Department of Homeland
Security; its rusting nuclear weapons, ill-maintained and
difficult to dismantle; and its strange fascination with an
unproven counterinsurgency doctrine. 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, with all the financial and human costs that entails. 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 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. She offers up a fresh, unsparing appraisal of Reagan's
radical presidency. Ultimately, she shows us just how much
we stand to lose by allowing the priorities of the national
security state to overpower our political discourse. Sensible yet provocative, dead serious yet seriously funny,
Drift will reinvigorate a "loud and jangly" political debate
about how, when, and where to apply America's strength and
power--and who gets to make those decisions.
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