By Rachel Maddow
The number 1 long island occasions bestseller that charts America’s harmful flow right into a country of perpetual battle.
"One of my favourite principles is, by no means to maintain an pointless soldier," Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1792. Neither Jefferson nor the opposite Founders may possibly ever have anticipated the trendy nationwide safety nation, with its tens of millions of "privateers"; its bloated division of place of birth safeguard; its rusting nuclear guns, ill-maintained and hard to dismantle; and its unusual fascination with an unproven counterinsurgency doctrine.
Written with bracing wit and intelligence, Rachel Maddow's Drift argues that we've drifted clear of America's unique beliefs and turn into a state weirdly at peace with perpetual conflict, with all of the monetary and human expenses that involves. to appreciate how we've arrived at the sort of risky position, Maddow takes us from the Vietnam battle to today's struggle in Afghanistan, alongside the best way exploring the hectic upward thrust of government authority, the slow outsourcing of our war-making features to non-public businesses, the plummeting percent of yank households whose kids struggle our consistent wars for us, or even the altering fortunes of G.I. Joe. She deals up a clean, unsparing appraisal of Reagan's radical presidency. eventually, she indicates us simply how a lot we stand to lose via permitting the priorities of the nationwide safety kingdom to overpower our political discourse.
Sensible but provocative, useless severe but seriously humorous, Drift will reinvigorate a "loud and jangly" political debate approximately how, whilst, and the place to use America's power and power—and who will get to make these judgements.
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Extra resources for Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power
Example text
The prospect of a permanent French base on this vulnerable alley of water threatened not only the treasure fleet but Spain’s dominance in Europe. Yet for the staunchly Catholic Spanish crown, driving the French heretics from La Florida was not just a geopolitical necessity but a sacred cause—one that would be undertaken, like those earlier raids by the cutthroat dissenter Jacques de Sores, amid a mood of homicidal reli gious fervor. the clash nearly came at once. If the winds had been friendly, Man rique de Rojas might have made it to the mouth of the Saint Johns just as the French were arriving.
So devastated was Cuba’s first capital that it never fully recov ered and was soon overshadowed in importance by Havana. ” But at least Le Clerc, who may have been Catholic himself, spared the local church. With the arrival of Jacques de Sores in Cuba the following year, Europe’s religious carnage began to spread to the New World. Sores saw himself as a Protestant avenger, a scourge against the false church. So deep was his hatred of Catholics that decades later, when he captured a Portuguese ship en route to Brazil with forty Jesuit mission aries on board, he ordered them thrown into the sea dead or alive, along with their holy images, books, and relics.
It is true that the historian and naturalist Gonzálo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés left an extensive, if crude, pictorial record of his travels in the New World, but even he conceded that he lacked artistic talent and training. And while Spanish authorities regularly asked explorers to bring back information on native 12 PA I N T E R I N A S AVA G E L A N D customs, “no request seems to have been made for drawings,” observed the historians Paul Hulton and David Beers Quinn. The first important European painter in Mexico, Simón Pereyns, did not arrive in the New World until two years after Le Moyne, and, once there, he painted the same things that he would have painted in Spain: religious scenes and portraits of his countrymen.