Max Boot is an historian, best-selling author, columnist, and national-security analyst who has been described by the International Institute for Strategic Studies as one of the “world’s leading authorities on armed conflict.” He is the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, a columnist for The Washington Post, and a Global Affairs Analyst for CNN.

Max Boot’s latest work of history, The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam, was a New York Times best-seller and the 2019 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography. It was praised as an “epic and elegant biography” (The Wall Street Journal), “judicious and absorbing” (New York Times), and “a superb scholarly achievement” (Foreign Policy).

Max Boot was also the author of another book released by Norton/Liveright in 2018—The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right—which was described as a “devastating dissection of conservatism’s degeneracy in America” by Andrew Sullivan in New York magazine and as “soul-searching” and “refreshing” by The New York Times.

Max Boot is the author of three other widely acclaimed works of history: The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (2002), War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today (2006), and the New York Times best-seller Invisible Armies: The Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present (2013).

Max Boot has advised military commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan, and his books have been assigned reading by the military services. Boot was a senior foreign policy adviser to the presidential campaigns of John McCain (2008), Mitt Romney (2012), and Marco Rubio (2016). He has been a columnist for Foreign Policy, a blogger for Commentary, a contributing editor to The Los Angeles Times, a member of the USA Today board of contributors, and a regular contributor to many other publications including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

Max Boot graduated from the University of California, Berkeley (BA, history, 1991) and Yale University (MA, history, 1992). Born in Moscow, he grew up in Los Angeles and now lives in New York City.