Max Alexandrovich Boot is an American author, consultant, editorialist, lecturer, and military historian. He worked as a writer and editor for
Christian Science Monitor and then for
The Wall Street Journal in the 1990s. Since then, he has been the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a contributor to
The Washington Post. He has also written for numerous publications such as
The Weekly Standard, the
Los Angeles Times, and
The New York Times, and he has authored books of military history. In 2018, Boot published
The Road Not Taken, a biography of Edward Lansdale, and
The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right, which details Boot's "ideological journey from a 'movement' conservative to a man without a party", in the aftermath of the 2016 U.S. presidential election.