Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War by Andrew Bacevich.

This is an excerpt from Andrew Bacevich’s bestselling new book, Washington Rules, that focuses on how, as his army career was ending, his real education, which would turn him into a leading critic of American war policy, began. What follows below is the introduction to the book which stands on its own as a political essay about a personal odyssey into recent history and the realities of our moment; it also offers a powerful sense of the book itself.

An interesting little summary of an obscure book: The New Rome; or, the United States of the World by Theodore Poesche and Charles Goepp (1853).

“This book in its opening pages claims to be a ‘a horoscope’, ‘a map of the future of mankind’, and ‘what must be’.”

Securing US Control over Socotra Island and the Gulf of Aden: 

“This ocean is the key to the seven seas in the twenty-first century; the destiny of the world will be decided in these waters.” -US geostrategist Rear Admiral Alfred T. Mahan

A cautionary tale for would-be mercenaries

A blistering article by Dr. Thomas Fleming condemning the US government for “throwing even more money down the foreign aid rathole”.

The Long War ends not in victory but in exhaustion and insolvency, when the United States runs out of troops and out of money.