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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
44 of 48 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
KOLKO: A Randolph Bourne for Our Age,
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This review is from: The Age of War: The United States Confronts the World (Paperback)
The seminal debate over America's entry into World War I was between John Dewey and his one-time student Randolph Bourne. Debate may be too strong a word as Dewey never responded to Bourne's eloquent jeremiad against his embracement of "the war technique" as the preferred route to democratizing the world. Bourne died, aged 32, as the Great War was ending, but his spirit lived and lives on.
Dewey's spirit lives on as well (even if he ultimately accepted that Bourne was right), most recently under the banner of "Humanitarian Intervention," a banner that has probably seen numerous defections based on the report card of their latest Noble Cause, Iraq. But they'll be back. The peculiar romance of American Liberalism with military adventures: Korea and Vietnam, to name the most important, must account for some of its intellectual and moral paralysis in the face of Bush the 2nd's Middle East disaster. It's the Bournian spirit that pervades the vast body of work of Gabriel Kolko and his wife, Joyce Kolko. Like Bourne, Kolko is an "irreconcilable" to the self-satisfied, optimistic chauvenism that has led this country into more wars since 1945 than any other. His first published writings appeared over 50 years ago. They have embraced a staggering range of topics, and displayed great depth of scholarship and an intellectually uncompromising effort to understand who we are and what we have done to others. Kolko is a self-professed, but non-Marxist, man-of-the-left. Yet the American Left has produced few balanced, as opposed to sectrian, critiques of its rather meager achievements to match Kolko's. See, for example, his 1966 essay, The Decline of American Radicalism. Many of Kolko's insights into the workings of American history have been adopted by historians without attribution. I don't think this is conscious plagiarism, but speaks to something of a bad-conscience regarding Kolko within the domestic historical profession. In his massively researched book on the Vietnam War, Choosing War (1999), to mention one example, Fredrik Logevall informs us that "Historians have been slower than political scientists in exploring the concept" of "credibility," as a causal agent in the American military escalation, citing "political scientists" who "got" the saliency of the concept before "historians" did, citing, in the former category, works published no earlier than 1976. Kolko treats "credibility" as a cental motive for the escalation no later than his 1972 essay in Vol V of the Gravel edition of the Pentagon Papers. American historians are, understandably, a largely patriotic group, and Kolko is, well, just too intellectually uncompromising, skewering America's complacent optimism in refrains that would have pleased H.L. Mencken. But Kolko's skewering does not share the jaded and joyous elitism of Mencken but rather the belief that "American intellectuals," as Bourne put it in "War and the Intellectuals," "seem to have forgotten that the real enemy is War..." Like Bourne, Kolko is, in Russell Jacoby's sense of the term in his book The Last Intellectuals, a Public Intellectual. Kolko is not mentioned in Jacoby's book, although despite the density, depth and originality of Kolko's work, he has always written a readable Plain Style, pitched to educated, public-spirited Americans, not academic specialists. But perhaps Kolko isn't commonly viewed as an essentially public intellectual because he seldom seeks the public eye: he avoids the polemical combat that becomes "the talk of the town", I've never seen him on TV, never heard him on radio, never seen a book review by him, etc. I've seen just one picture of him: on the back-flap of his 1968 book, The Politics of War. The Age of War is a short book, a summing up of American foreign policy since the Korean War, but especially since 9/11. Those of have read most of his work will not find surprises. The volume's larger themes are The Limits of Power (the title of his 1972 book, co-authored with Joyce Kolko), and the limitlessness of the illusory and disasterous belief in military power within the foreign policy elite, whether neo-con, liberal or conservative. Worth watching, in terms of the trends Kolko predicts in The Age of War, is the terminal decay of the Western Alliance, and whether the result will be as positive as he believes it will be. As usual, Kolko's perspective on this issue is unconventional. As an avid reader of Kolko since 1969, my hope is that he will again explore new intellectual territories -- his most exciting writings for this reader are those where he's obviously exploring what is to him new territory. P.S. I commend the previous reviewer, Mr. Williams, for giving Kolko 4 and a half stars, but he misstates virtually all of Kolko's ideas, and spins his own crack-pot conspiracies as a better alternative. It wasn't Weaver in 1988 who discovered Kolko for conservatives, but Ayn Rand in the mid-1960's. Read Kolko.
15 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Enlightening readers on the international environment's likelihood to produce another great war due to its flailing status,
By Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Age of War: The United States Confronts the World (Paperback)
The Age Of War: The United States Confronts The World by Gabriel Kolko (Research Professor Emeritus, York University, Toronto, Canada) is an informed and comprehensive study of what may potentially occur in Professor Kolko's prediction of the world's current state and instability. Enlightening readers on the international environment's likelihood to produce another great war due to its flailing status, The Age Of War describes the American ideals and irrational pursuit of control of the world through a contemporary expression of a kind of "manifest destiny" mentality. A impeccably researched and well authored historical documented and predictive study, The Age Of War is very strongly recommended reading for all young Americans registered for the draft, scholars of American politics and contemporary social issues, modern political science, and those searching for a conceptual interpretation of America's coming potential future on the international scene.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Weapons and wars are not the solution,
By
This review is from: The Age of War: The United States Confronts the World (Paperback)
In this extremely hard-hitting book, Gabriel Kolko dissects the US political and military policies, the budgetary and economic implications at home, the schismatic structure of the military command, the strategies abroad and the ultimate results.
At Home For Gabriel Kolko, the military budget which takes the lion's share of US federal outlays hurts better alternative investments in basic human necessities and public infrastructure. Moreover, immense sums of money were wasted in futuristic weaponry which never worked. And, the weaponry which could be justified during the Cold War is now irrelevant for Third World interventions. The military budget is an important factor in the US economy and in US politics with arms plants spread over all important US States. Army Command For Gabriel Kolko, it is astonishing that the US military command is not integrated. The US Army, the Navy and the Air Force all have their own bureaucratic autonomy. They compete with each other for a bigger share of the military budget. They produce also their own intelligence reports. Abroad For the US, the Third World with its raw materials and the Middle East with its oil are considered crucial for the US economy and for the US global power base. After the Vietnam debacle, the US is relying more on proxies, friendly leaders and their armies which it supports covertly. But, it got entangled with the fate of venal and unreliable dictators and corrupt politicians, thereby alienating entire populations and sowing hatred among them. This hatred was and is enhanced by its support of socially dysfunctional IMF policies and by its subsidies for rice, cotton and other commodity producers, which prevent Third World farmers from earning a decent income. Ultimate Results For Gabriel Kolko, the US military interventions are counterproductive and create still more hornet nests. Weapons and wars alone cannot solve human, economic, social and political problems. Moreover, `never before was there such destructive weaponry in so many hands'. This really constitutes a threat for the future of mankind. Gabriel Kolko is perhaps a little naive when he states that the US and the world populations would be far better off if the US did nothing, closed all its bases overseas and allowed the rest of the world to find its own way. But, as history showed repeatedly, `irrational ambitions to run the world only produced general misery and upheavals of every kind.' Can the forceful arguments in this highly recommended book be countered by American scholars?
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