Quotes from Max Boot

Well, a general danger of punditry is that there's very little incentive to change your position or admit error. If you reverse your position, the people who backed you before will be unhappy, but a lot of the people who now agree with you will still pillory you.

The United States has been locked in an escalating confrontation with Iran ever since President Trump decided to pull out of the nuclear deal in 2018 and to impose unilateral sanctions in 2019.

Joining the Grand Old Party seemed like a natural choice for someone like me who fled the Soviet Union as a boy and came to Los Angeles with his mother and grandmother in 1976.

Even being too good at teaching is risky at research universities; the joke is that a 'teacher of the year' award is the kiss of death for non-tenured professors.

At the University of California at Berkeley, my interests broadened from military history to diplomatic history and other disciplines.

Upon closer examination, it's obvious that the history of modern conservative is permeated with racism, extremism, conspiracy-mongering, isolationism and know-nothingism.

Hillary Clinton is a centrist Democrat who is more hawkish than President Obama and far more principled and knowledgeable about foreign affairs than Trump, who is too unstable and erratic to be entrusted with the nuclear triad he has never heard of.

I don't know if I can ever change the world, but at least I can change the oil in my car.

I am by no means suggesting that everyone who uses the neocon label is doing so as an anti-Semitic smear, but the word has been used often enough in that ugly context that it should make any person of goodwill think twice before employing it.

I used to be one of those people who read thrillers on vacation, but for some reason most thrillers no longer thrill me. Maybe because these days reality is far more unbelievable than any fiction?

There are two kinds of people: Those who like active vacations and those who like sedentary vacations. I'm one of the weird hybrids who likes both. That makes me, I suppose, the Jekyll and Hyde of holidayers.

Olga E. Kagan was the strongest woman I knew - and probably the reason I've spent my life with other strong women.

I still have admiration for the vast majority of police officers, but there is no denying that some are guilty of mistreating the people they are supposed to serve.

Catering to populist anger with extremist proposals that are certain to fail is not a viable strategy for political success.

Once upon a time - in the days of Margaret Thatcher and John Major - I would have rejoiced in a Conservative Party landslide in Britain. But now, Prime Minister Boris Johnson's victory fills me with fear and foreboding.

The Immigration Act of 1924 closed our doors to virtually all non-European immigrants - a great wrong that was not rectified for decades.

Putin is smart enough not to believe his own propaganda. Trump isn't.

Here was an American president adopting the language used by Adolf Hitler (the Nazis referred to the Lügenpresse, or "lying press") and Josef Stalin, who called the press "vrag naroda" (enemy of the people).

I have always had an intolerance of orthodoxy, even when I agreed with it, and I was interested in producing a lively page full of unexpected insights rather than simply rote repetitions of the party line.

Ralph Peters, a conservative uber-hawk and former army intelligence officer who in early 2018 resigned in disgust as a Fox commentator. In a scorching letter of resignation leaked to BuzzFeed, he wrote, "Fox has degenerated from providing a legitimate and much-needed outlet for conservative voices to a mere propaganda machine for a destructive and ethically ruinous administration.

Republicans can continue to win elections nationally for a few more years by relying on a base of older, less educated white voters, but that strategy will prove less and less successful as the number of people of color continues to grow. By 2044, whites are expected to be a minority in America—very bad news for a party that has alienated everyone who isn't white.

following the playbook of strongmen such as Viktor Orban, Vladimir Putin, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who silenced the press not by imposing censorship but by imposing financial pressure on independent news organizations to either force them out of business or into the hands of friendly owners.47

The key American shortcoming, in the early twenty-first century as in the 1960s, was the inability to constructively guide the leaders of allied states in the direction desired by Washington

I swilled a Scotch and took some sleeping pills—something I don't normally do—and tried to sleep. And, yes, I know you're not supposed to combine sedatives with alcohol, but you're also not supposed to elect a bigoted bully as president of the United States.