Max Boot

Max Boot

Max A. Boot is a Russian-American author, consultant, editorialist, lecturer, and military historian. He worked as a writer and editor for Christian Science Monitor and then for The Wall Street Journal in the 1990s. In 2018, Boot published The Road Not Taken, a biography of Edward Lansdale, and The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right. He is now Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a contributor to The Washington Post.

About Max Boot in brief

Summary Max BootMax A. Boot is a Russian-American author, consultant, editorialist, lecturer, and military historian. He worked as a writer and editor for Christian Science Monitor and then for The Wall Street Journal in the 1990s. In 2018, Boot published The Road Not Taken, a biography of Edward Lansdale, and The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right. He is now Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a contributor to The Washington Post. Boot served as a foreign policy adviser to Senator John McCain in his 2008 presidential election bid. He currently views himself as purely a military historian and journalist and currently writes for The Weekly Standard and The Los Angeles Times. He has given lectures at U.S. military institutions such as the Army War College and the Command and General Staff College. His book Savage Wars of Peace, a study of small wars in American history, with Basic Books, came from Kipling’s poem ‘White Man’s Burden’ The World Affairs Councils of America named Boot one of the 500 most influential people in the United States in the field of foreign policy in 2004. He wrote many more articles with the CFR in 2007, and he received the Eric Breindel Excellence in Journalism Award that year for that year’s Think Tank with Ben Wattenberg episode of Think Tank.

He also has written for numerous publications such as The New York Times, The WeeklyStandard, and the Washington Post, and for several years on its blog page called Contentions. The book’s central thesis is that a military succeeds when it has the dynamic, forward-looking structures and administration in place to exploit new technologies. It concludes that the U. S. military may lose its edge if it does not become more decentralized and less bureaucratic and more decentralized, and concludes that a more decentralized military is needed. The title of Boot’s book is ‘Savage Wars of peace’ and the title of his latest work is ‘War Made New’ The book received praise from Josiah Bunting, who called it ‘unusual and magisterial’ and criticism from Martin Sieff, who said it was’remarkably superficial’ and ‘foolish’ Boot is now a senior fellow at the CFR and is a contributing editor to The Weeklystandard and the Los AngelesTimes. He lives in the New York area with his wife and two children. As of 2005, Boot and his family lived in the NYC area.