Max A. Boot is a Russian-born naturalized American historian, author, foreign policy analyst, editorialist, lecturer, and columnist. Born on September 12, 1969, in Moscow, Soviet Union, he immigrated to the United States as a child and became a prominent voice in foreign policy. He began his career as a writer and editor for The Christian Science Monitor and The Wall Street Journal in the 1990s. Boot is known as a neoconservative commentator; he held neoconservative views earlier in his career as a former Republican foreign policy expert, but has since become a vocal critic of Donald Trump, Trump-era isolationism, Trumpism, nationalism, and authoritarianism, detailing his ideological shift in his 2018 book The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right. He has collaborated professionally with figures like Robert Kagan and maintains a personal friendship with William Kristol. Boot served as the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and is now a weekly columnist for The Washington Post. His acclaimed works include the 2018 New York Times bestseller and Pulitzer finalist The Road Not Taken, a biography of Edward Lansdale, and the 2024 biography Reagan: His Life and Legend, which was named one of the New York Times' 10 Best Books of the year, as well as a top book by The Washington Post and The New Yorker. Boot's writings have appeared in publications such as The Weekly Standard, Los Angeles Times, and New York Times, focusing on U.S. foreign policy, military history, and political commentary.