To read Making the Forever War, a collection of once scattered and two formerly unpublished essays by Marilyn B. Young, the much-loved and hugely influential historian of US foreign relations, is to be struck by how well-matched Young was to her subject: American war-making. Born in 1937, the same year Japan invaded China in the opening act of what became the Second World War, she came of age amid the Korean War, entered the profession during the Vietnam War, refracted and historicized in her first book, The Rhetoric of Empire: American China Policy, 1895–1901, and published her most significant work, The Vietnam Wars, 1945–1990, within days of the launch of the First Gulf War. Until her death in 2017, Young wrote and lectured continuously, often acidly, on whatever wars the United States was waging—throughout her long life there was always at least one. “Over time,” she observed in her 2011 Presidential Lecture for the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, “this progression of wars has looked to me less like a progression than a continuation,” so war came to seem not an aberration but the very “substance of American history.” Yet war’s very constancy, combined with its remoteness, made it obscure to Americans, an erasure US policymakers encouraged by calling their wars limited—in time, in blood, in treasure. In truth, war’s costs were not limited, only borne by others. Young’s task, she said, was “to make war visible, vivid, an inescapable part of the country’s self-consciousness, as inescapable a subject of study as it is a reality” (187). These percussive, incisive, mordant writings, gathered and smartly introduced by Mark Bradley and Mary Dudziak, with an afterword by Andrew Bacevich, demonstrate her success in that mission and her passion for it. Here, Young matches the fixity and ferocity of “forever war” with an equally fierce and dogged critical analysis forged from her lifelong opposition to such violence. For both those familiar with her work and those new to it, the book is essential reading, and it would lend itself nicely to almost any course on the United States and the world, US foreign relations, US empire, or US military history.
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May 1, 2023
Kelly R Stevens + 1
Open Access