There is something extraordinarily arrogant to the claim that the way we do things is applicable to all others. That claim makes it rather difficult to recognize our own shortcomings and deficiencies, which are manifest, and frankly, deserve priority attention. Let us fix those things that need fixing in America before we presume we have the ability to fix the rest of the world.

Historian Andrew Bacevich reframes 120 years of American warfare into a series of decades-spanning geographic exercises with a unified aim - imperial control of the globe, blinding us to the devastating costs of war and true consequences of our actions abroad, and explains why this election's choice between a lunatic and a Reaganite offers no hope for a change from our disastrous reliance on military force to create and solve problems abroad.

Andrew wrote the Harper's article American Imperium: Untangling truth and fiction in an age of perpetual war and the book America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History from Penguin Random House.