Max Boot Profile

Max Boot is a Russian-American author, editorialist, consultant, lecturer, and military historian who is Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He previously worked for Christian Science Monitor as an editor and writer and then for The Wall Street Journal in the 1990s.

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 Education

He attended the 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 Age

Boot is 52 years old as of 2021. He was born on September 12, 1969, in Moscow, Russia. He celebrates his birthday on the 12th of September every year.

Max Boot Height

Boot stands at a height of 5 feet 10 inches (1.55m) tall.

Max Boot Family

Boot is the son of Alexander Boot who is a lecturer while 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. However, he does not have any siblings.

Max Boot Wife

Boot is married to Jeannette Kathleen Boot who works at a firm in New York City. They both attended the University of California. Together the couple has been blessed with three children named Victoria, Abigail, and William. he resides in the New York area together with his family.

Max Boot Salary

Boot earns an annual salary of $207, 120.

Max Boot Net Worth

Boot has a net worth of $10 million which he has earned through his successful career as an author, editorialist, consultant, lecturer, and military historian

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 a 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 criticized by James A. Russell in the 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 a 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 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. Later on, he 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 stated that Donald Trump was making him 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 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 Articles

Boot wrote many articles in 2003 and 2004 with the CFR. In 2004, He was named by The World Affairs Councils of America as one of the 500 most influential people in the United States in the field of foreign policy. In addition, in 2007, he did write many more the 500 most influential people in the United States in the field of foreign policy. In the same year, he was awarded the Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Opinion Journalism.

Max Boot Saudi Arabia

In July 2021, Boot tweeted that Saudi Arabia would be more progressive than the United States because of their plans to impose new COVID-19 vaccine mandates.

1. I had posted an earlier tweet saying that Saudi Arabia was being more progressive than America, because Saudis will need to show proof of vaxx to enter schools, shops, malls, restaurants, concerts, public transport.https://t.co/5MlFtFeIoT

— Max Boot (@MaxBoot) July 28, 2021

However, his tweet was not taken lightly as people criticized Saudi Arabia stating that it would never be more progressive than the United States of America considering the fact that they have never stopped viewing women as second-class citizens. The critics did not stop thus he deleted the post stating that it led to too much silly trolling along the lines.

2. I deleted that tweet because it led to too much silly trolling along the lines of “Aha! So progressivism is authoritarian.”

I had originally written that the Saudis are being more rational than the US, and I probably should have stuck with that. “Progressive” is too vague.

— Max Boot (@MaxBoot) July 28, 2021

Max Boot Djokovic

Boot did not hold back his opinion when it came to Djokovic who is a Serbian professional tennis player who is currently ranked as world No. 1 by the Association of Tennis Professionals. Djokovic had refused to get vaccinated for Covid thus during a discussion on CNN he clearly stated that the United States should not let him play during the United States opening if he is not vaccinated. He also highlighted that Djokovic had previously been seen in public without a mask thus putting the lives of others at risk. Later when Djokovic got deported he stated that he deserved it.

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