Max Boot Biography

Max Boot is an American author, editorialist, consultant, lecturer, and military historian. He worked for Christian Science Monitor as an editor and writer and then for The Wall Street Journal in the 1990s.

He is Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Max Boot has written for numerous publications such as The Weekly Standard, The New York Times, and The Los Angeles Times, and has also authored books of military history.

In 2018, he published The Road Not Taken, a biography of Edward Lansdale, and The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right, which details his “ideological journey from a ‘movement’ conservative to a man without a party” in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election.

Max Boot Age

Boot was born on 12 September 1969 in Moscow, Russia. He is 53 years old as of 2022.

Max Boot Height

Boot stands at an estimated height of 5 feet 10 inches tall.

Max Boot Family

Boot is the son of Alexander Boot, a lecturer and his mother, Penelope Blackie is a pianist. Both his parents are Russian Jews who emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1976 and moved to Los Angeles, where he was raised.

Max Boot Wife

Max is Married and has three children, Victoria, Abigail, and William. He likes to keep information about his family away from the limelight and lives with his family in the New York area.

Max Boot Net Worth

Boot has an estimated net worth of around $5 million which he earned from his career as an author, editorialist, consultant, lecturer, and military historian. 

Max Boot Education

He attended University of California, Berkeley where he got his BA in 1991 and then went to Yale University where he got his MA in Diplomatic History in 1992.

Max Boot Career

He began his journalistic career writing columns for the Berkeley student newspaper The Daily Californian. Since 2007, Max has blogged regularly for Commentary Magazine and for several years on its blog page called Contentions.

He has given lectures at U.S. military institutions such as the Command and General Staff College and the Army War College.

From 1992 to 1994, he worked as a writer and as an editor for The Christian Science Monitor. He then moved to The Wall Street Journal for the next eight years.

Max wrote an investigative column called “Rule of Law” about legal issues. He rose to the position of editor of the op-ed page after four-year career with the column. He left the Journal in 2002 to join the Council on Foreign Relations as a Senior Fellow in National Security Studies.

His first writings with the CFR appeared in several publications, including The New York Post, Financial Times, International Herald Tribune, and The Times.

In 2002, Max wrote Savage Wars of Peace, a study of small wars in American history, with Basic Books. Its title came from Kipling’s poem “White Man’s Burden”.

The book was critisized by James A. Russell in Journal of Cold War Studies, saying “Max did none of the critical research, and thus the inferences he draws from his uncritical rendition of history are essentially meaningless.”

Victor Davis Hanson in History News Network gave a positive review about the book, saying that “Max’s well-written narrative is not only fascinating reading, but didactic as well”. Robert M. Cassidy in Military Review labeled it “extraordinary”.

In 2003, Max’s book also won the General Wallace M. Greene Jr. Award from the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation as the best non-fiction book recently published pertaining to Marine Corps history.

In 2004, Max was named one of “the 500 most influential people in the United States in the field of foreign policy” by The World Affairs Councils of America. In the same year, he also worked as member of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

In 2006, he published the work War Made New, an analysis of revolutions in military technology since 1500. In 2007, he wrote many more articles with the CFR and received the Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Opinion Journalism that year.

In 2008, Max served as a foreign policy adviser to Senator John McCain in his 2008 United States presidential election bid. In an editorial in World Affairs Journal, Max stated that he saw strong parallels between Theodore Roosevelt and McCain.

Through 2010 and 2011, he wrote for the CFR for various publications such as The Boston Globe, The New York Times , Newsweek, and The Weekly Standard among others.

In September 2012, Max co-wrote with Brookings Institution senior fellow Michael Doran a New York Times op-ed titled “5 Reasons to Intervene in Syria Now.” The book was advocating U.S military force to create a countrywide no-fly zone reminiscent of NATO’s role in the Kosovo War.

Max Boot Books

• max boot the corrosion of conservatism: why i left the right
• The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam
• Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present
• War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today
• The “American Empire” in the Middle East
• The Savage Wars Of Peace: Small Wars And The Rise Of American Power
• Out Of Order: Arrogance, Corruption, And Incompetence On The Bench
• War Made New: Weapons, Warriors, and the Making of the Modern World

Max Boot New Book

• The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right
• The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam

Max Boot Trump

In 2017, Max wrote an article based on the presidency of Donald Trump. After that, the US president announced plans to end the program, DACA, an American immigration policy.

He then wrote an article expressing his opinion toward Trump. In the article, he said that Trump was making him feel like a foreigner. To CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, he told,

“He’s making me feel like an outsider, a Russian, a Jew, an immigrant.”

Max Boot Invisible Armies

Invisible Armies is about the history of guerrilla warfare, analyzing various cases of successful and unsuccessful insurgent efforts such as the fighting during the American war of independence, the current Syrian Civil War, and the Vietnam War.

Max states that traditional, conventional army tactics as employed by the American military under the administrations of President Bush and President Obama against guerrilla organizations have produced strategic failures.

Max has discussed his book in various programs such as the Hoover Institution’s Uncommon Knowledge series, appearing on it in January 2014.

Max Boot Road Not Taken

Praised as a “superb scholarly achievement” (Foreign Policy), The Road Not Taken confirms Max Boot’s role as a “master chronicler” (Washington Times) of American military affairs. Through dozens of interviews and never-before-seen documents, Boot rescues Edward Lansdale (1908-1987) from historical ignominy to “restore a sense of proportion” to this “political Svengali, or ‘Lawrence of Asia’ “(The New Yorker).

Boot demonstrates how Lansdale, the man said to be the fictional model for Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, pioneered a “hearts and minds” diplomacy, first in the Philippines and then in Vietnam. Bringing a tragic complexity to Lansdale and a nuanced analysis to his visionary foreign policy, Boot suggests Vietnam could have been different had we only listened.With contemporary reverberations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, The Road Not Taken is a “judicious and absorbing” (New York Times Book Review) biography of lasting historical consequence.

Max Boot Invisible Armies Pdf

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Max Boot Articles

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