Team America is a dynamic history of four military leaders whose extraordinary leadership and strategy led the United States to success during World War I and beyond, from national bestselling author and acclaimed military historian Robert L. O’Connell.
Today, we are honored to feature a guest post from Robert O'Connell about how this book is feeling very topical for our current climate:
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Ironically, Team America: Patton, MacArthur, Marshall, Eisenhower, and the World They Forged, a book about four men born in the late 19th century, has been dragged into extreme relevance by Vladimir Putin's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine—one which directly challenges the international order the American quartet had a major role in establishing. Unlike Putin it seems, they were all excellent strategists and practitioners of war on an industrial scale, and all came to see that massive conscript based conflict in an era awash with nuclear weapons was not only extremely dangerous, but in large part futile. They came to this conclusion by living it—witnessing two World Wars' destruction, wrought by whole societies devoted to generating military power, then watching that power transmute into the central obstacle to all-out war, nuclear deterrence through Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD, its black humor acronym.
Putin wants to put all that up for grabs, literally reverse the course of history. Rather than being a creature of the Cold War KGB as earlier thought, he has revealed himself as a man of the previous century, determined to restore the full breadth of the empire of the Romanovs, all on a gross national product less than South Korea's. On that budget he couldn't do better than a Potemkin colossus—the supposedly rebuilt Russian military mostly based on the old Soviet stuff with improved electronics, manned by professionals who turned out to be conscripts. Then he marched into Ukraine expecting the illusion would hold up against Javelin missiles. When it crumpled, he tried the most implausible of bluffs, a nuclear one. The leaders of the democratic world, living in reality, simply shrugged and tightened the economic noose even further. Power politics, as we now live it, and the real basis for a better and a more peaceful world, or at least a world without all-out war.
Team America and its four all-stars played an enormous role in establishing that world, and this braided biography follows their interwoven and momentous path to the survival niche we now occupy and find so fundamentally and futilely challenged. It's one worth following.
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Thank you so much, Robert!
Team America publishes on May 17, 2022.
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