The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power

While the major conflicts in American history have become all too familiar, America’s “small wars” have played an essential but little-appreciated role in the country’s growth as a world power. First published in 2002, The Savage Wars of Peace quickly became a key volume in the case for a new policy of interventionism. Max Boot shows how America’s smaller actions—such as the recent conflicts in Bosnia, Somalia, Haiti, Kosovo, and Afghanistan —have made up the vast majority of our military engagements, and yet our armed forces do little to prepare for these “low intensity conflicts.”
A compellingly readable history of the forgotten wars that helped promote America’s rise in the last two centuries, The Savage Wars of Peace is now updated with new material on the repercussions of America’s far-flung imperial actions and the impact of these ventures in American international affairs.