The United States of War: A Global History of America's Endless Conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State

Progressives and liberals will likely embrace David Vine's book, which claims that war has been the norm in U.S. history and which repeatedly asserts that U.S. leaders have unremittingly engaged in offensive wars of choice for imperialist purposes. They will surely be persuaded by the evidence he employs to substantiate his sweeping indictment of U.S. military interventionism at calamitous and nearly incalculable human and ecological costs. Conservatives, however, will likely reject Vine's charges and conclude that his book is a politically biased polemic that simultaneously disparages legitimate military actions taken in the name of national defense and contemptibly and disgracefully dishonors the benevolence and personal sacrifices of U.S. military personnel and their families. This jarring book, with a subdued title, relentlessly indicts most U.S. wars as egregiously offensive, expansionist, and frequently genocidal. In fluid, clear, forceful prose, and employing personal vignettes, eye-catching quotations, and arresting data, Vine's analysis appears compelling. He solemnly and repeatedly asserts that the United States has engaged in perpetual war, impelled by the establishment of U.S. foreign military bases (today the nation has about eight hundred of them in eighty-five countries), which have sustained and benefitted a military-industrial-congressional-corporate war machine at incomprehensible costs, for purposes that have been deliberately buried, erased, or shrouded in nationalistic myths.