The Long-standing Fault Lines That Define A Divided America

In his eye-opening 2020 non-fiction work When America Stopped Being Great , Nick Bryant didnt just dissect six decades of American history to show how a once-great nation was now flailing and had lost its standing in the world. He shattered the common view that the Trump presidency was an aberration, arguing instead that it was historically inescapable. In his new book, The Forever War Americas Unending Conflict with Itself , the much-acclaimed former BBC foreign correspondent, author and historian goes further. A searing analysis of 250 years of US history, The Forever War deftly maps out the deep rifts that define American society and politics today, and locates the origins of those divisions along with the origins of Trump presidency in the founding of the republic. For as Bryant himself says I saw this book as a prequel and a sequel to the last book, which finished on January 6.

The Forever War opens with Bryants personal account of Bidens inauguration two weeks later, along with the tense, sleepless hours Bryant himself spent in Washington in the lead-up to covering that event for the BBC in a city replete with concrete barricades and a military mobilisation akin to that of Baghdad. For Bryant, whos had a front-row seat reporting on many of the most extraordinary moments in Americas modern history the Reagan revolution, the Bush interregnum, the Clinton years and the lead-up to the war in Iraq, the victory of Barack Obama, and the defeat of Hillary Clinton that inauguration day, he writes, felt not like a new beginning, but rather a continuation of a tragic storyline.