What Comes After the Apocalypse?

Things have changed dramatically over the past year. Or have they? We’re living in a (nearly) post-pandemic, post-Trump, post-economic collapse world amidst the continuing rise of China, while reckoning with racism, populism, and impending environmental ruin. The purpose of U.S. foreign policy has, at least theoretically, been to keep Americans safe. Yet as we confront a radically changed world, it has become indisputably clear that the terms of that policy have failed. The timely launch of QI President Andrew Bacevich’s twelfth book — AFTER THE APOCALYPSE: America’s Role in a World Transformed — offers the opportunity to celebrate Andrew’s achievement and to interrogate this moment in history with three of the sharpest thinkers in the business. We hope you’ll join The Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel and the American Conservative’s Helen Andrews in conversation with Andrew about his call for nothing less than a profound overhaul of our understanding of national security. Buy After the Apocalypse from the Strand bookshop here.

Panelists

Andrew Bacevich

Andrew J. Bacevich is the President of the Quincy Institute. He graduated from West Point and Princeton and served in the army for 23 years, prior to an academic and writing career. Among his dozen books are: The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism; Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War; America’s War for the Greater Middle East; and The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory. He is professor emeritus of international relations and history at Boston University.

Helen Andrews

Helen Andrews is a senior editor at The American Conservative and author of Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster (January 2021). Previously she was managing editor of the Washington Examiner magazine and a 2017–18 Robert Novak Journalism Fellow. From 2012 to 2017, she lived in Sydney, Australia, working as a think tank researcher for the Centre for Independent Studies. Before that she was an associate editor at National Review.

Katrina vanden Heuvel

Katrina vanden Heuvel is editorial director and publisher of The Nation. She served as editor of the magazine from 1995 to 2019. She writes a weekly column for The Washington Post and is Vice-President of the American Committee for U.S.-Russia Accord. A frequent commentator on U.S. and international politics for ABC, MSNBC, CNN, and PBS, her articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and The Boston Globe. Vanden Heuvel is also the author of several books, including The Change I Believe In: Fighting for Progress in The Age of Obama, and co-author (with Stephen F. Cohen) of Voices of Glasnost: Interviews with Gorbachev’s Reformers.