Reagan’s revival of the American spirit cleared the decks for further armed interventions abroad. For the likes of Boot, this was a true spiritual renewal. No need, in his view, to reflect on its catastrophic long-term effect: the resurrection of a bipartisan, exceptionalist mission within the US political class to ‘promote democracy’ across the globe. It is only a short step from Reagan to Biden, the decrepit old codger yearning to be a war president as he conjures up menacing adversaries in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and the South China Sea. But it is a significant step. Since the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of unipolar US hegemony, arguments for military intervention have become even more diffuse, more detached from conditions on the ground, than they were during the Cold War. Any sort of popular unrest in a foreign country can be manufactured or manipulated by the US intelligence agencies and eventually used to justify intervention in the name of ‘democracy’. The results are nearly always calamitous.
None of this concerns Boot. He is a thorough biographer, but his capacity for serious thought is undone by his attachment to a neoconservative creed. Trying to justify praise for Reagan, adrift in a murky sea of abstraction and sentimentality, he casts about for appropriate conceptual forms and seizes on the old reliable: reification. Abstractions become human entities with needs. When Reagan began his presidency, his biographer assumes, the nation (the country, the American people) all needed the same thing: to stand tall again, to feel proud to be citizens of the greatest country in the world – sentiments that in US political culture could only be achieved through imperial adventure and military dominance, or the simulation of it. Reagan, in effect, created the cultural conditions that enabled neoconservative militarism to become respectable and ultimately almost universal among the Washington elite. They also enabled Boot to become a successful Washington pundit, singing the praises of war and its tonic effects on the body politic.