Book Review: ‘Losing Military Supremacy: The Myopia of American Strategic Planning’

Abstract

Andrei Martyanov was born in 1963 in the USSR in Baku (now the capital of Azerbaijan). He graduated from the Kirov Naval Red Banner Academy and served in the Soviet Coast Guard until 1990, before moving to the USA in the mid-1990s. Martyanov does not adopt a diplomatic tone or pull his punches in expressing his views; nor does he flatter his adopted country with lavish praise. On the contrary, he is highly critical of many aspects of American outlook and behaviour while claiming a greater degree of realism by Russia (and Russians) especially on the realities of war. For example, on the second page, he claims that ‘American vaingloriousness ... has today become a clear and present danger to the world and it is, in the end, a direct threat to what’s left of America’s democratic institutions and processes’. Whether he makes the case for this claim is debatable. He goes on to state that the USA devises excessive assessments both of its own capabilities and of the dangers it faces. The former condition stems from America’s sense of its own ‘exceptionalism’ dating