[jcranmer]

> The focus of the post is two-fold: the recent outbreak of war in eastern Ukraine, in truncated form (the war has been going on at a low level since 2014, with militia forces supplied by Russia and Ukraine fighting one another in eastern Ukraine throughout that period), and a recommendation for a book about a naval battle in World War II. Hmm... what about Vietnam and Iraq?

That is not the focus of the post. It's a "Fireside Friday;" an abbreviated [1] discussion of some topic, combined with a generally unrelated list of recommendations. You're misreading a lot into the author to assume that there's some hidden agenda to avoid talking about America's modern wars. There's no discussion of the US here because the entire theory is essentially a pondering (not structured enough to be a full thesis) of "does long peace make countries into paper tigers?" where the US not having been at peace means it fails the precondition.

And as other commenters have noted, the author does have include criticism of America's foreign policy misadventures in this blog post, not to mention that there's been more forceful denunciations in other blog posts.

[1] Abbreviated here is relative; the author's in-depth discussions will be multiple blog posts on a single topic.