Top 5 Books of 2019

My favorite week of the year is #listweek. I love reading people’s lists of favorite books, music, articles/essays, and movies. Though I rarely watch movies, so you won’t likely find me making a list of them, I do read a lot. These are my favorite books of the year.

5. Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero (2019),
by Tyler Cowen (St. Martin’s Press)

Readers of Tyler Cowen know that his books tend to be quite different than what the title often suggests. This book, however, is Cowen’s most straight forward. In it, he defends big business and U.S. multinational corporations, which have always been a bain of existence for the left; and which have also come to face scathing criticism of some sectors of the right as of late, including from Senator Marco Rubio and Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson. In this populist age, Cowen found it the right time to take a close look at the largest players in the private sector to really see if in fact, they deserve the scorn they so often receive. Cowen admits in a podcast interview that readers could actually come away with divergent opinions about where to go from here: sure, the intuitive reading could be to leave these Goliaths alone, they are doing what we asked them too – lower prices, increasing quality, and following consumer demand. However, the counterintuitive could be “these companies because they are strong, could actually face greater regulation and still produce what we want.”

I recommend this book as a good introduction to Tyler. I’ve read many of his other works, one changed my life and my self-understanding (The Age of the Infovore), but this book is the easiest to follow; it’s an exciting read since it challenges so much of my priors. Readers of the left should read this. It’s also not a puppy dog love-letter; there are negative findings regarding some sectors of the private sector, including health care, for example. Health care faces “the single greatest market concentration issue in the U.S. today, and I think the critics are on the right track here,” Cowen writes (91). One creepy acknowledgment and a strange one coming from a libertarian-ish thinker is one that comes from the section where he talks about the coming Internet of Things when all our appliances will be connected to the Internet. He writes:

“When that rueful day comes, I’m going to be more careful about what I say, even in the confines of my own home. Perhaps especially in the confines of my own home, where it is going to be fairly clear who the main speaker is” (125). I will never be careful as to what I say in my own home.

Cowen actually sketches out a theory as to why we hate business the way we do: we personalize it; it’s human nature to do so, and we don’t think about comparing it’s successes and promises and achievements against other industries or people in our own lives. He writes that we should be far more worried about our family and friends lying to us and betraying us than these global Goliaths. A provocative (but not gratuitously so) and really fun read, actually.

4. Only the Dead: The Persistence of War in the Modern Age (2019),
by Bear F. Braumueller (Oxford University Press)

Bear F. Braumueller, at The Ohio State University wrote one of my favorite international relations (IR) books I’ve ever read. I’ve dug into the “decline of war” literature and found most of the quantitative works wanting, at best; and disingenuous and alarming at worst. This is a long, arduous and complicated debate but I can give a few sentences on the descriptive consensus. After two devastating world wars, interstate war has been declining; and in particular, interstate war has been declining and rapidly so since the end of the Cold War (1990-onwards). We are still plagued with intrastate war (civil wars) and terrorism, but not interstate war. The three big claims of the “decline of war” literature are that the rate of war initiation, the deadliness of war, and the conditions that are the most likely causes of war have all decreased in a systematic way. However, Professor Braumueller reassesses the data, and models that IR scholars use and his findings and techniques deserve serious attention.

The professor finds these three above claims as largely, though not entirely, baseless. He does so, with a team of researchers, by replicating many “decline of war” quantitative papers from the top journals from the last decade. His three most salient points are as follows. First, there is no “general downward trend in the incidence of the deadliness of warfare.” Much of the decline of the deadliness of war comes from the decision to use the global population as the denominator which is stupendously misleading, as it assumes that every person on earth has an equal chance of dying in any war, regardless of location. This is the formulation that Pinker (2011; 2018) uses, for example. Second, at least until the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, Braumoeller shows using technique after technique, model after model, that since 1815 through the end of the Cold War, even if you take out the two world wars, the rate of initiation of war has actually quadrupled, or increased by four. So yes, interstate wars have been declining for maybe 30 years or so. But, we would need another century of no great wars between nation-states for this to actually become a trend. Finally, myriad factors have been discovered as causing war: geographical and land disputes; trade disputes, personality or psychological factors; regime-type; alliance commitments, and so forth. The findings show that some of the potency of some of the variables have declined while others have increased or showed no statistically significant pattern.

I could talk about this book all day long. My above summary only scratches the surface. The author gets into different world orders; finds that the deadliness of war follows a “power law”; and explicates why it’s a fallacy to assume the effect of a given variable is constant over time. This last point for IR students is important. As he notes, “students of international conflict who use statistical methods will probably be horrified by these results. They should be. Nearly all statistical studies of international conflict use methods that assume the effect of a given variable is constant over time. That assumption is so wrong, so often, that it should probably be considered incorrect unless proven otherwise” (174).

This is a must-read for IR students, or for global politics nerds, in general.

3. Ways of War and Peace: Realism, Liberalism, and Socialism (1997),
by Michael W. Doyle (W.W. Norton)

I read this book over the summer leading up to my master’s exams. I can’t quite remember what sparked me to finally read this book but I was absolutely blown away at is comprehensive and learned understanding of international relations. IR textbooks are actually quite good; however, I’ve read no better book that encapsulates that state of the field’s leading theoretical contributions than this book, released over 20 years ago. It also acts as a compendium of resources; it has extensive footnotes and a great bibliography. The next time I have a student come into my office asking for an international relations book recommendation (last time I recommended A World in Disarray (2017) by Richard Haass) it will be this book.

As a professor, I anticipate pulling from this book quite frequently. Textbooks mention classic thinkers like Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, Marx, and Kant, for example; Doyle actually summarizes quite succinctly and uses passages from the above thinkers in smart ways to expose the context of the arguments.

This book is great and will be an indispensable resource for decades to come.

2. A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism, by Adam Gopnik (Basic Books)

Last year I read Why Liberalism Failed (2017) by Patrick Deenen and it became my favorite contemporary work of political philosophy. This year Adam Gopnik’s beautifully written exploration of what exactly liberalism is, easily became my new favorite contemporary work making an explicit argument for liberalism. As readers of The New Yorker know Gopnik is an exquisitely beautiful writer. This book illustrates that.

The style of the book is twofold. It first opens with Gopnik telling the reader that while on a walk with his daughter in the early morning hours after Trump won the US presidency in 2016, he was struck that he wasn’t able to articulate the importance of liberal democracy. He then realized he had a book to write; first to his daughter, Olivia; then to all of us. So throughout the book Gopnik speaks to Olivia. Second, Gopnik directly and earnestly engages in the best arguments against liberalism (ch. 2: Why the Right Hates Liberalism; ch. 3: Why the Left Hates Liberalism). This method allows Gopnik to make his argument in favor of liberalism that much stronger.

What is liberalism? It is “the most singular spiritual episode in all of human history,” Gopnik muses (18). Ok, more on that in a minute. What else is it? “ Liberalism is an evolving political practice that makes the case for the necessity and possibility of (imperfectly) egalitarian social reform and greater (if not absolute) tolerance of human difference through reasoned and (mostly) unimpeded conversation, demonstration, and debate” (23-24). This is a somewhat dry definition but it is what Gopnik does to bring this idea, value-system, discovery to life that gives this book its beauty and power. Later Gopnik argues that “liberalism isn’t a political theory applied to life. It’s what we know about life applied to a political theory” (238). I find this aphorism true.

For thousands of years, we have tried to understand what makes a human being well…a human being. We are a higher-order mammal with transcendental dreams and experiences. We are an evolved species that has been incredibly successful because we create and spread culture; we are capable of absolute beauty, innovation, and amazing levels of cooperation; yet are also capable of absolute tyranny, destruction, and zero-sum competition. The social-political system that best allows us to keep discovering what we really are, psychologically, artistically, biologically, spiritually, interpersonally and so forth, is a liberal one. “The special virtue of freedom is not that it makes you richer and more powerful but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive,” writes Gopnik (238).

Liberal values include skepticism, constant inquiry, fallibilism, and self-doubt. These values actually produce the space for richer non-material, inner and outer lives. This brings us back to claim that liberalism is a spiritual endeavor. How so? “All of these consequences of these values seem ‘merely’ material, but they are what enable us to live a richer life, accept our mortality, and find the path to unselfish attainment. They allow us to pass on a better world to our children—to spend every day with better music, more poetry, better food, better wine grown in more places. To make love with whom we want instead of with whom we’re ordered. These are positive values. And to those who don’t find them satisfying we say: go, choose your own” (231-232). Beautiful. A commitment to pluralism is the glue here.

This book is a reminder to not take the civilization we have for granted. Like Carl Sagan said about science working so well that it allows us to underappreciate and to take for granted the modern application of science allowing us to live happy, comfortable lives, by way of indoor plumbing, electricity, indoor heating and cooling, 24/7 wifi Internet, and the internal combustion engine; liberalism and liberal political systems allow us to discover who and what we are; it allows us the space necessary to adapt, make mistakes, build families of our choosing (or not). The time is now for these reminders.

Gopnik’s book A Thousand Small Sanities is one of my favorites of the year and of all time.

1. How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (2019), by Daniel Immerwahr (Macmillan)

This book is my favorite of the year; it’s one of those books that you can randomly read a sentence, or paragraph, and think about or discuss in context or out of context for hours.

This is a remarkable history of what Immerwahr calls “the Greater United States,” the parts of the U.S. that are obscured and obfuscated about: the fact that for nearly half of century, the U.S. occupied, controlled, and in its own idiosyncratic way, was a colonial, imperial power over. This is a history of how the U.S. acquired Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, American Samoa, Wake, the Bikini Atoll, Guam and so many more territories (94 islands in the Caribbean alone, mostly to mine guano), including now states Hawai’i and Alaska (established in 1959). Including occupied countries after World War II (WWII), “the Greater United States included some 135 million people living outside the mainland” (17). More than 12.5% of the Greater U.S. population leading up to WWII was outside the states, which is a larger percentage than black Americans. The historian notes this not to compare lives and repressions, but to illustrate this massive part of the Greater United States that most U.S. citizens know nothing or very little about.

Some of these colonies/territories fought long battles to become independent (Philippines, became independent from the U.S. in 1946; the Panama Canal Zone in 1979). Others, such as Puerto Ricans, U.S. Virgin Islanders, Guamanians, American Samoans are considered citizens but only by statutory; this status can be revoked. These “unincorporated territories” or commonwealths are treated unequally and the people are treated as second-class citizens with partial rights and representation. Peurto Rican “citizens” can vote in primary elections but not in general elections, for example; Medicaid on the island is less generous but facilities must meet the same standards of care as the mainland, for another example (US News 2018).

This book is lively with larger-than-life characters and inventions all used as examples to show just how you hide an empire. Some territories were used as “zones of experimentation” (2019, 158). Take Cornelius P. Rhoads, who made the cover of TIME in 1949. As we know, TIME often features stories on important people, even if they are notorious or despicable figures. Rhoads is not often used as such an illustration. He should be.

Rhoads, trained at Harvard, was a physician who was deeply racist. Through the Rockefeller Anemia Commission, he experimented on Puerto Ricans, without them knowing; giving some treatment for anemia, while letting others suffer, for example. He wrote in a letter that Peurto Ricans were “the most dirtiest, laziest, most degenerate and thievish race of men ever inhabiting this sphere,…they are even lower than Italians.” (TIME actually published this letter but omitted the above part). Rhoads was also the chief of the Chemical Warfare Service, a part of the U.S. Army founded during World War I. He was part of the team that implemented “jungle tests,” experiments with chemical weapons (293). Rhoads was indeed a prominent and leading cancer researcher and his reputation on the mainland was high. To Peurto Ricans, he was a villain. Immerwahr highlights that the American Association for Cancer Research gave a reward for over 20 years named after Rhoads. How so? A hidden empire is an answer. The donor who gave the award had no clue of Rhoads’ history in Peurto Rico until a biologist from the University of Peurto Rico filed a complaint.

There are fascinating chapters on guano and guano mining (ch. 3), the hundreds of military bases the U.S. has around the world (ch. 21), and how the synthetic revolution (in rubber, fertilizer) and globalization (international weights and measurement standards) helped the U.S. liquidate its holdings and to shed overseas territories (chs. 16, 17, 18). Immerwahr explores the spread of English and the red octagon stop sign as forms of U.S. soft power. This book has everything. He explores the origin stories of Gojira/Godzilla, the James Bond movie franchise, the Beatles and so much more – and how so much of popular culture was inspired by and/or constituted directly from the expanding U.S. influence.

How to Hide an Empire (2019) is one of the best books I’ve ever read. Period.

 

To Make a Virtue of Necessity: A Review of Melting Pot or Civil War?

Reihan Salam, a wonky conservative columnist and all-around interesting person, wrote a bracing, emotional, personal, and far-sighted new book called Melting Pot or Civil War? A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case Against Open Borders (2018, Sentinel). He admits that just a few years ago he found his views on immigration pedestrian and mostly aligned with the immigration activists. After a few years of research, he says he is more aligned with those, like President Trump, who think America should be more, not less, selective regarding immigration. This book is part-memoir, part economic and sociology literature review, and part-policy prescription; it is well written, nuanced, and generous. We need more books like this about disparate subjects as soon as possible.

Early on in the book, Salam makes the case that we need to forge a new “middle class melting pot,” that minimizes what he calls “between group inequality” (26). Salam is apt to highlight that the current immigration system is “increasing both the number and the share of children being raised in low-income households,” and that “today’s poor immigrants are raising tomorrow’s poor natives” (25), which should worry anyone who cares about the future of a united nation, one that actualizes the “melting mot” mythos of American identity. The data presented by Salam to substantiate his descriptive claims is numerous, and are from sociology, political science, and economics, among other fields.

The question that Salam took on was: How do we make sure we make an integrated America, that precludes racialization and ethnically Balkanized areas of existence? This is where Salam’s idiosyncratic mind comes in, one that is largely conservative but not entirely. In short, he thinks we need to limit low-skill immigration, at least for a time (this is Salam’s hedge); he claims that “a more selective, skills-based immigration system would yield a more egalitarian economy, in which machines do the dirty work and workers enjoy middle-class stability. And a more egalitarian economy would help heal our country’s ethnic divides” (28). But, in the pen-ultimate chapter of the book, he couples this more right-of-center idea with “offering amnesty to the long-resident unauthorized population, and fighting the intergenerational transmission of poverty” (157) sure to satisfy his left-of-center readers. I will get to the details of his package of proposals down below.

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In a relatively short book (excluding notes, this book runs a crisp 184 pages), Salam is ambitious, far-reaching and explains complicated ideas simply, yet in a way that respects his reader and that does not engage in simple binary thinking. In chapter two Salam briefly describes the existing immigration systems operative in the world: mongenerational, the Qatari model; multigenerational, the US model; and a hybrid model like those seen in Canada, Australia, and Singapore (60).  By doing so, he really focuses the reader to understand the range of alternatives: utopia doesn’t exist, and, we have to choose something (though the status-quo has largely remained the same because of a lack of choosing; almost no one thinks that the status-quo is sustainable, however). So, what are we going to choose? Salam’s choice is not a limitation on the number of immigrants America takes in, but a shift in which migrants we take in. His proposals assume that a multigenerational model is surely the American model of the future.

He has a chapter focused on the intersection between immigration and group identity, and it he portends a possibly dark future since assimilation is differentiated by groups. He introduces the concepts of amalgamation and racialization here. When immigrants effectively assimilate, they join the “melting-pot mainstream,” and become an example of successful amalgamation, or the process of becoming “mainstream American” where ethnic differences become insignificant. When the opposite occurs, ethnic segregation emerges, producing racialized enclaves or ghettos. Both of these realities exist in America. Salam argues that on our current trajectory, the later path is increasingly likely to become reality for second- and third-generation immigrant families. Why does this matter? Because the type of immigration that makes the ethnic enclave life more likely is the family-based system, the one that Salam thinks we should curtail; and because social science research is pessimistic about what happens when ethnic tribalism rises to the surface and becomes political tribalism.

Offshore caregiving
Salam understands that if America did, in fact, decrease low-skill immigration that the source country could be worse off. Salam proposes ambitious solutions here: allow retiring Americans to access Medicare in Mexico, for example. This would create more low-skill jobs in Mexico, staunching the need for Mexicans to move abroad. Salam points out that we will have to get creative to adequately deal with a population that is getting older, sicker, and who are increasingly without kin (137). Salam proposes we shift some of our counternarcotics and counter-human trafficking budget to help develop poorer regions in Mexico (and Central America). Moreover, we should help subsidize Mexico’s efforts (already underway and successful enough) to “halt migrants long before they reach” the America-Mexico border. I like this idea and have nothing substantial to really say about the idea as a concept. Political contingencies always come to mind, and social security politics deserves a blog post of its own.

Creating Megacities
Salam believes that “our long-term objective should be to help all countries achieve broad-based prosperity,” because there is no way that America, or Europe, or countries such as China or South Korea, will be able to accommodate the hundreds of millions of people coming of age who will need work and fulfilling lives. So what does he propose? This, too, is where his idiosyncratic and curious mind shows off: the creation of new cities out of cloth. Call it “conservatism for those who read The Economist,” if you will. However, this is not a new idea, as Salam acknowledges: the world has already created “charter cities,” such as the successful example in China of Shenzhen, which turned a fishing backwater into a “teeming entrepreneurial metropolis of ten million” in just over three decades (144). Also see Paul Romer’s “charter cities,” TED Talk. The reason this idea is less pie in the sky then it seems is that the alternatives are far worse, and that the need is there. We have no choice argues Salam. We should strive to create “dozens of Shenzhens” (151). This is similar to Paul Romer’s idea to create “100 Hong Kongs.” However, Hong Kong was created after two wars, an imperial reign by the British, and has a symbiotic (deep financial integration) and contentious (remember the Umbrella Movement; this will flare up again) relationship with China to this day.

Another weakness of this “charter city” idea is he does not address how the creation of megacities could happen. If the goal is to create better governance, we must do it where people live right now; how to do this is contested. China carefully turned Shenzhen into what it is now, backed by the heavy hand of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and is home to visionary and successful (and heavily subsidized) companies such as Huawei. Even as a concept, the idea of “charter cities,” is underdeveloped, according to Kee-Cheok Cheong and Kim-Leng Goh, in an article for the international journal of urban policy Citites. I would have loved if Salam got more into this debate since it’s the most interesting part of his proposal. I’ve written an essay on what the future looks like for migrants and it’s mind-blowingly complicated, and requires multilateralism at its finest.

Salam digs into his syncretic proposal in the penultimate chapter. His goal is ambitious: how to reconcile those who are aligned with the Dreamers with those who sympathize more with the so-called “angel moms,” or parents of children who were killed by unauthorized immigrants (and often those who have committed earlier crimes who were not deported, or who were deported but returned). How so? First, “large-scale amnesty followed by resolute enforcement” (164). This entails support for DACA and Dreamers coupled with a verifiable and enforced E-Verify program. Fair enough; this is a popular idea.

Finally, Salam supports increasing the very successful Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and a “universal child benefit” (177). He does not go into details of what this would do to already existing child programs such as the Child Tax Credit (CTC) except as to say that his proposal would help the 25% of families who have children who do not receive any tax subsidies or food stamps and hurt the “nearly poor families” (178). Before I endorse such a program, I’d have to see more details.

I would support paring back some mortgage tax reduction programs that the upper-middle class receive, highlighted brilliantly by Derek Thompson and Suzanne Mettler.  Many believe that the Home Mortgage Interest Deduction (HMID) benefits the middle class but it mostly benefits the rich: three-quarters of the benefits accrue to the top 20% of households, those who make around $130,000 a year (Brookings 2017). Depending on how we reform the deduction, revenues could increase by as high as $60 billion per year, which could help support Salam’s proposals and also shore up existing programs such as the CTC. A melting pot requires stirring lest it curdles.

This is a burst of a book; a book that makes you think, and that was written in all earnestness. What should America do about immigration? What should America do about global income equality? What is the balance between humanitarian concerns and concern for second-generation immigrants in your own country? What about the lives of ninth-generation natives or immigrants? None of this is binary, Red or Blue.

I applaud Salam for this effort.

 

My Favorite Books I Read in 2018

I tweeted out my favorite books of 2018, and I wanted to blog a bit about my selections.

(5) Monica Prasad’s The Land of Too Much: American Abundance and the Paradox of Poverty is what I categorize as an “ideal type.” This book was assigned in a graduate seminar in American Politics and Political Economy. My professor encouraged us to use her first few chapters as a template for any literature reviews we might write. I completely agree. Prasad proves that she has a firm grasp of the alternative arguments that she adds to, takes away from, or directly challenges. This book is one of the most learned, nuanced, and counterintuitive books that I have read on the topic of welfare states, inequality, and historical institutionalism alike.

Prasad brilliantly details that early decisions and putative progressive successes in the late 19th century set American on a path that, paradoxically, entrenched progressive income taxes, and cheap credit which has produced more, not less, inequality. America has a welfare state, like all other advanced welfare states, but it is one that encourages private consumption for goods that are normally more socialized. The reason for the “paradox of poverty” that is seen in the subtitle refers to the fact that this type of welfare state was pushed for by agrarians in the 19th century: progressive successes have produced a welfare state that hurts those worse off and one that benefits the middle class. I won’t do this book justice in this blog post: here is a great piece from the author herself that succinctly displays her thesis, which is that America has plenty of government, it has a welfare state; the problem, if you want a more egalitarian society, is the type of welfare state and what function and outcomes it achieves. Read Prasad on political economy and comparative analysis and you will be rewarded.

(4) Patrick J. Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed is an immediate classic, in my opinion. A real piece of political philosophy that, due to Deneen’s environs, milieu, and academic home (University of Notre Dame, a private Catholic institution), might challenge its most likely reader because Deneen (similar to Benjamin Barber’s Jihad vs McWorld) argues that both the state and the market have disrupted the traditional lifestyles that conservatives tend to champion. Deneen does a fantastic job of explaining that liberalism, the classic-type (free markets, hyper-individualism) is failing American families because it is succeeding. Liberalism, the left and right varieties, has become the only game in town – which, in his estimation, has largely contributed to what is commonly referred to as our current “crisis of meaning.”

Deneen’s prescriptions – localism, tradition, religion – are the most contentious part: if liberalism is better than fascism and communism, can we guarantee that a post-liberal age that would be more rooted in tradition, small, and local communities, be preferred? I agree with the likes of Tyler Cowen and Ezra Klein that this book is a must read, even if you disagree with the ultimate thesis that liberalism is failing. Personally, I think we need a new “embedded liberalism,” that understands that family, tradition, and local-connections that foster human capital is the way to assure that liberalism can be maintained and strengthened.

(3) In How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, Northeastern University’s Lisa Feldman Barrett produces cutting-edge synthesis on a field that she is a heavyweight in: the science of emotions. A fascinating, and brilliant read. Malcolm Gladwell remarked that this book “turned [his] understanding upside down.” For me, this book actually aligns with much of what I have come to believe about emotions: they are socially constructed, not determined by the array of neurochemistry produced by an individual emotion, and that we have much control regarding our experience. “When it comes to your experiences and perceptions, you are much more in the driver’s seat than you might think. You are an architect of your experience,” writes Barrett (152).

Barret is not saying, of course, that emotions don’t have a biological foundation; she is saying that we need to understand that “physical states and actions” (X), combine with “the emotion categories that exist in a particular culture” (Y), and “the contents and the workings of the categories as situated conceptualizations that constitute emotions in a particular culture” (C). Barrett backs up her claims with a rigorous review of the data from psychology accumulated over the last few decades. Her work, if true (which I am convinced of), should (in a just world) revolutionize how we think of mental health (she is a fan of mindfulness), criminal justice law, interpersonal relationships, and, yes, how we think of our emotions and the meaning we attribute to the physiological reality of them. There is even a provocative–some science, some speculation–chapter called “Is a Growling Dog Angry?” about whether animals experience emotions (in her opinion: not exactly, though they do experience “affect”).

This book is incredible.

(2) I picked up On Grand Strategy on a hunch. I knew of Gaddis as a Cold War historian, but was not familiar with hardly any of his work. I picked this book up a few weeks before I started my Fall 2018 semester because I was embarking on research on the history of post-Cold War US grand strategy and this book’s title jumped out at me. Little did I know what I was picking up. If I recall correctly, I only used one page or so of this work for my paper. Nonetheless, this book was a superb, erudite read.

On Grand Strategy is a literary fusion of Gaddis’ lifelong accumulation of knowledge and wisdom teaching such classes as “Strategy and Policy,” from 1975-1977 at the US Naval War College, and “Studies in Grand Strategy,” at Yale from 2002 to the present. Gaddis defines “grand strategy” as “the alignment of potentially unlimited aspirations  with necessarily limited capabilities” (21). In chapter after beautiful chapter, Gaddis traces acts of good, effective leadership (Lincoln, who he discusses in a chapter called “The Greatest President.”), and failures of leadership (Xerxes’ failure in 480 BC to invade Greece (for a second time). Lincoln was able to adapt, like Berlin’s foxes; Xerxes acted as a hedgehog – overconfident in his aspirations, failing to match his ends (wanting to conquer all of Europe) to his means (uh….not enough to do THAT). Gaddis brings his reader across continents, ages, books, events, and leaders. Distilling wisdom from the likes of Thucydides, St. Augustine, Machiavelli, Berlin, Lincoln, Clausewitz, and Tolstoy (the last two he calls “the grandest of strategists”) this book is a must read for anyone who wants to be a leader, or who wants to develop strong character.

Gaddis teases out leadership qualities that have been successful across space, time, and scale: the ability to manage polarities, which requires psychological maturity; flexibility; proportionality; “seeing simplicities in complexities”; acquiring a “sense of the whole that reveals the significance of  respective parts” (58); and, one that both the Islamic State and Assad’s Syria seem to misunderstand, distilled from Augustine and Machiavelli, that “if you have to use force, don’t destroy what you’re trying to preserve” (111).

These principals, in this blog post, can read abstract; the beauty of this book is the erudite, and literary way that Gaddis brings these principles to life. You really feel like you are watching Xerxes attempt the impossible; you get a sense of the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858; and the “a-ha, moment” when one truly grasps that Woodrow Wilson “confused strengths with hopes,” for example, is highly effective. Reading this book was a real treat.

(1) Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress was my favorite book of the year. Pinker provides nearly 70 graphs, all (with a few exceptions) in a unilinear direction of progress. Humanity has decreased poverty, rates of child neglect/abuse and undernourishment, child labor; increased literacy rates, leisure time, real GDP per capita, and IQ gains, for example. There are lots to chew over in this book; and Pinker is not all sanguine, contrary to many critical book reviews. He notes potential existential threats on the horizon that could jeopardize these positive, and global, trends: he has a chapter dedicated to nuclear weapons, climate change, and cyber/AI threats.

The most interesting and important parts of this book are the subtle, nuanced explanations regarding why our brains are programmed to be pessimistic; fooled by random, and rare events; And in a similar vein, why journalism has an “if it bleeds, it leads” ethic. The people who won’t read this book, need it the most.

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EDIT: I decided that my workload this semester is too much to write a longer blog post on what I loved so much about Enlightenment Now. I added the above paragraphs after initially titling this post as “part one,” promising to write a separate blog about Pinker. Maybe sometime I will, but not now. 

Albright Warns of Rising Authoritarians

The first woman U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright recently released a book with the alarming title: Fascism: A Warning (2018; HarperCollins). Though President Donald Trump is a looming specter throughout the book, the former secretary claims that she was already writing this book, and would have published it even if Hillary Clinton would have won the U.S. presidency in 2016. She does, however, declare in the first chapter that one reason that Americans are asking themselves existential questions such as  “Why have such dangerous splits been allowed to develop between rich and poor, urban and rural, those with a higher education and those without?,” and “why, this far into the twenty-first century, are we once again talking about Fascism?” is Donald Trump. Further, she adds, “we have not had a chief executive in the modern era whose statements and actions are so at odds with democratic ideals.”

The opening chapter also attempts at defining fascism but does not do so in a very specific way. She sets the scene by relaying to the reader a discussion session that she and her Georgetown graduate students had attempting to answer the question(s) what is fascism? or what makes a fascist…well…a fascist? Albright ends up describing the characteristics of a fascist as “someone who claims to speak for a whole nation or group, is utterly unconcerned with the rights of others, and is willing to use violence to achieve the goals he or she has.” I like the historian Robert O. Paxton’s description of fascism better. He writes that fascism is “a compound, a powerful amalgam of different but marriageable conservative, national-socialist and radical Right ingredients, bonded together by common enemies and common passions for a regenerated, energized, and purified nation at whatever cost to free institutions and the rule of law” (2004, 207) However you define it, the important part of getting a reader to really understand something is to give them concrete examples of a phenomenon.

Albright spends a good third of the book giving a sort of biography and history of the birth of twentieth-century fascism, and various pivotal characters and events leading up to, and during, World War II (WWII). She does this first in a chapter on Benito Mussolini. Mussolini rose to power in a post-World War I (WWI) Italy, a country that was part of the winning coalition yet one that felt cheated out of unheeded promises given to them by Britain and France. Socialists had power in the parliament, and Mussolini tapped into discontent and the urge, desire, and belief that Italy needed to become powerful. As Albright puts it, Mussolini “promised all things,” in a time of desperation, depression, and in the very alive memory of the last great calamity, WWI, which claimed 1.2 million Italian deaths. Next, she profiles Adolf Hitler. After being appointed chancellor Hitler convinced the parliament to pass the Enabling Law, which began the Third Reich, and, as they say, the rest is some of the darkest history of the modern era. Most of the details she offers regarding fascist Italy and Germany are common knowledge, at least for people most likely to read her book. I do love it when I come across quotes that are chilling. For Mussolini: “It is better to break the bones of the democrats…and the sooner the better;” “Often, I would like to be wrong, but so far it has never happened.” For Hitler: ” “There are . . .only two possibilities: either the victory of the Aryan side or its annihilation and the victory of the Jews.” Such blinkered narcissism and binary, black and white thinking is a devastating combination. And, to this day, we keep electing such leaders because of their charisma, and unconcern in over-promising.

She later profiles modern despots such as Chávez/Maduro in Venezuela, Erdogan in Turkey, Putin in Russia, and the recent rise of far-right illiberal parties in Hungary (under Victor Orbán) and Poland (under Jarosław Kaczyński). She also profiles North Korea; the one state that she considers truly fascist. Readers of political science and history know much of what Albright writes about, but it is a decent book for a refresher on some of the most important people, countries, and pivotal moments and events. She adds anecdotes and personal stories from her experience meeting several of the men she profiled. She calls Putin “small, and pale, and so cold as to be almost reptilian,” for example (2018, 158). She also was the first secretary of state to visit and speak with the North Korean leader, who was Kim Jung-il at the time. She mentions that President Bill Clinton, with only months to go in his second term, was planning on meeting up with the North Korean president, but instead chose to attempt to make headway regarding the Israel-Palestine situation. The former president has expressed regret that he chose the latter instead of the former.

The final section of the book is the part that she was asked about in interviews during her speaking tour: the rise of Donald Trump in the U.S.  It is interesting that Albright mentions a few policies of President Trump in supportive terms. “He deserves credit for preserving Crimea-related sanctions against Russia, sending arms to a beleaguered Ukraine, and managing an effective military campaign against ISIS. In December 2017, he implemented a law, the Global Magnitsky Act, that imposes penalties on individuals and entities accused of corruption and human rights violations,” writes the former secretary (2018, 220).

President Trump has continued the Middle East policies of his predecessor Barack Obama, who’s administration championed the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS, a 75 country organization with multiple goals, including degrading and defeating ISIS in Syria, and Iraq. While the military campaign might be effectively campaigned, ISIS is still alive, Iran has gained an operating base in Syria, and rebuilding efforts will take trillions of dollars and nearly a decade; and that is if efforts are enacted with earnest, little graft, and if the frail peace actually becomes a sturdy peace. It is hard to give Trump credit for simply continuing what was already in motion; and the specific changes that Trump has made, such as “looser rules of engagement,” has contributed to a more than 200% increase in civilian deaths, according to AirWars. It is not surprising that Albright does not mention the serious problems with U.S. strategy but it was disappointing nonetheless.

Albright warns Americans, and her global readers alike, of this new era, one of encroaching authoritarianism. However, there is no action plan, or concrete steps offered. Instead, she offers questions we can ask ourselves regarding future leaders. I find myself asking who exactly is this book written for? And I also am reminded of better books that cover the same terrain such as How Democracies Die (2018). Young readers just getting into international affairs and American politics would find this book a helpful primer, as Albright hops around the world and provides decent profiles of important countries right now. However, more educated readers could completely ignore this release. Read The Anatomy of Fascism instead for a deep dive into the ideological and historical contingencies that produce such monstrous regimes.

References not hyperlinked:
Albright, Madeleine. 2018. Fascism: A Warning. HarperCollins: New York.
Paxton, Robert O. 2004. The Anatomy of Fascism. Alfred A. Knopf: New York.

The Age of Webcraft is Upon Us

In her new book, The Chessboard & The Web: Strategies of Connection in a Networked World, Anne-Marie Slaughter, the president and CEO of New America, argues that foreign policy makers still overwhelmingly rely on an outdated paradigm; one that views nation-states as sovereign actors engaged in a security dilemma that ends in zero-sum moves. Slaughter advocates for flipping over the proverbial chessboard and replacing it with something more modern, precise, and fluid: the so-called “networked web.” Slaughter posits that academics and practitioners need to understand the links between nation-states and non-governmental organizations (NGOS) to realize that complex interdependence demands a nuanced understanding of the various players, institutions, processes, and norms developed in the last half century.

We are no longer in a zero-sum world of top-down ”direct[ion] and control” but rather a world of networks that “are managed and orchestrated,” writes Slaughter. Think of it, Slaughter continues, as “the power to evoke rather than to impose.” The actors, state or non-state, that can act as the choirmaster on the world stage, dictate the direction of the international order.

As an undergraduate at Princeton, Slaughter read and was fascinated by the seminal work Power and Interdependence, written by the scholars Joseph S. Nye Jr. and Robert Keohane, former Dean of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and Professor of International Affairs at Princeton, respectively. Their idea of “complex interdependence” illuminated the world for her. However, that book simply described the web; Slaughter’s goal is to begin crafting strategies beginning with understanding the links between the myriad actors on the global stage.

This work is a summary and synthesis of extant studies of networked solutions. In Slaughter’s ideal world, we would see “network experts work[ing] with foreign policy practitioners and other problem solvers to design and create networks that they will then learn from, modifying both theory and practice.” Slaughter shows an adept understanding of network theory from various disciplines, distilling the important theoretical and empirical findings from seemingly disparate fields, including biology, physics, and industrial organization, among others. Her preferred operative definition of networks that she derives from organization scholars, is that networks “are emergent properties of persistent patterns of relations among agents that can define, enable, and constrain those agents.”

The classic academic paradigm of analyzing international affairs posits that the world is a chessboard, in which each state finds itself in a perpetual game of strategic advantage, engaging in a game of statecraft. Nye Jr., and Keohane updated that image and view in their book Power and Interdependence, released in 1977, by arguing that it is more helpful to think that nation-states are playing a game of three-dimensional chess, in which states have multiple goals instead of only security. Further, they argue that interstate cooperation is possible, with multiple parties winding up better off as opposed to a situation that requires one party to lose for other parties to gain.  By contrast, Slaughter maintains Nye Jr. and Keohane  did not go far enough to explain the world’s relationships accurately. The world we are living in is more like the Internet, the web, argues Slaughter.

To visualize the difference, Slaughter suggests envisioning a standard classroom world map showing borders and capitals as a “chessboard view” of the world. This is a map of “separation,” she muses. Think of a map at night that highlights “the lit-up bursts of cities and highly concentrated regions and the dark swaths of rural areas and wilderness.” This is “the web view,” and a map of “connection, of the density and intensity of ties across boundaries.”

The two dominant international relations theories, realism and liberalism, assume that the main unit of analysis is the “state” and that the state of nature is “separation” and the focus should be on “static equilibria,” for example. The “state of nature” in international relations theory is simply referring to the fact the world is made up of individual sovereign states acting in self-interest. “Static equilibria” is the goal of organizing the world into a relative balance of power that allows for increased trade, commerce, and diplomatic relations. Slaughter argues that global actors must transcend older notions of statecraft.

Statecraft should be complimented by webcraft, argues Slaughter. A state with careful understanding of the various nodes and links between state and non-state actors, will be able to adeptly situate themselves to “maxim[ize] [its] number of valuable connections.” The strategic necessity of maximizing valuable connections, for one, enables countries to take more risks and to diversify their economies, and diplomatic partnerships. Webcraft acknowledges the precariousness of isolationism and having few allies around the world.

Slaughter argues that global problems can fit into three broad categories: resilience problems, execution problems, and scale problems. First, resilience problems require resilience networks to solve them. These networks should aim to “strengthen, deepen, react, respond, bounce back, stabilize, and assist” in solving problems. An example of a resilience problem is climate change; an example of a resilient solution would be the 2015 Paris climate accord, where nearly 200 countries agreed on states-specific targeted reductions of carbon emissions.

Second, execution problems require task networks to solve them. Slaughter describes task networks as “designed to perform more precise and time-bound tasks carried out by small, diverse, but cohesive groups.” This type of network was applied in Iraq under General Stanley McChrystal, who directed the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) activities in Iraq. Al-Qaeda is a networked organization. McChrystal knew that in order to defeat al-Qaeda, the U.S. military had to transform from a highly hierarchical and bureaucratic institution into a more flexible “team of teams.” This networked-strategy helped weaken  Al-Qaeda and was utilized to take out its its leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Finally, scale problems abound when considering topics like alleviating poverty, improving health, and increasing literacy worldwide. “Many hands make light work, but how to create the global equivalent of a barn raising or a quilting bee?” is the poetic way Slaughter illuminates this challenge. Scale problems, she continues, should be thought about in three basic ways: replication, gathering in, and parceling out. A successful scale network would be the Bolsa Família Program (BF), an anti-poverty program of remarkable success implemented by Brazil in January 2005.

President Lula was able to replicate the problem; coordinate; streamline; and parcel out the program to the rural and urban poor of Brazil. Jonathan Tepperman, managing editor of Foreign Affairs describes the program as immensely popular. Brazilian voters on both sides of the political spectrum support the program since it has work requirements which satisfy conservatives, and programs that directly target extreme poverty with explicit poverty reduction goals, which satisfy liberals. The BF program cost less than half a percent of the country’s total gross domestic product; this amounts to costing “30 percent less per person than more traditional aid programs.” Moreover, the program has cut extreme poverty by 15 percent and has “helped lift a total of 36 million people of our general poverty,” summarizes Tepperman in Foreign Affairs.

Slaughter promises  in the beginning of her book that in the final three chapters she would lay out exactly how network strategies could be implemented globally. She fails to do this with any depth, however. But she does propose that the new international order must be built on three pillars: open governments, open society, and an open international system. This “open global order” must be one in which “states must be waves and particles at the same time.” Slaughter uses the physics metaphor to capture the fact that states have to be more flexible in terms of their capacity; states that can maximize their hard and soft power simultaneously will control the web, for example.

This book is a deceptively challenging read. It covers a vast number of fields in an attempt to explain the world as it is, alongside attempting to establish a new paradigm of thinking, with the goal of becoming this generation’s The Strategy of Conflict. The reader is treated to fascinating overviews of chaos theory, network analysis, and social physics. However, there could have been more specific examples of how to tackle the world’s biggest problems. With that being said, I highly recommend this book for it is a work of great ambition, importance, and scholarship.

Apologize For Being Verbose: A Review of Friedman

I just read Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations, by Thomas L. Friedman and man…that was a drag race and I don’t like cars.

Did that turn of phrase make sense? It wouldn’t matter if you were The New York Times Pulitizer Prize-winning columnist, Mr. Friedman.  It would matter if you were a high schooler attempting to turn in a research paper; you would be asked to refine, edit, and rethink your choice of words. You would be asked–politely– to be more clear. If you were Friedman, you would be paraded around institutions such as Politics & Prose, the Brookings Institution, and Talks @ Google, for example. Do I sound bitter? I’m not. OK…maybe a little; only because I really should have been reading Religion in Human Evolution by Robert N. Bellah but for some inexplicable reading I sat down with Friedman instead. I guess I needed some light reading after semester.

Thank You for Being Late is an uneven book that should have been edited down to size. Not including acknowledgements, this book runs 453 pages and could have been quite the read if it was a crisp 225 or so. Hell….if it would have been 300 or less pages I might have even recommended reading it. Now: I wouldn’t bother reading this book if I were you. I would pick it up, jot down some of what he references, and then go and read what Friedman read to compile this book. For instance, he references a fascinating paper by Will Steffen et al from the Anthropocene Review from 2015, about myriad ecological stresses that we ignore at our peril.

What is this book about? This book is about the fact that everything is speeding up and because of this, job competition is increasing and “average is over.” Everyone has to keep learning, and improving if they want a shot at the good life. Moreover, in order to tackle the challenges of the 21st century, we have to rekindle and build-up our local communities in a bi-partisan way. We have to be open and not closed.

The best chapter in this book is chapter 3, “Moore’s Law,” and it really is quite a fascinating history regarding the exponential growth of various technologies, such as microchips/integrated circuits/microprocessors, sensors, storage/memory chips, software, and even fiber-optic cables and wireless systems. It never gets old to hear about Gordon Moore’s “law”, the “expectation that the power of microchips would double roughly every two years.” The heroes of this chapter are bigwigs at Intel, Qualcomm, and At&T; Gordon Moore, too, of course. We really are living in an unfathomable time. I’m excited and terrified about the future.

The first 187 pages or so are quite good, albeit with the unfortunate decision to summarize someone else’s work; which is then followed-up with that person’s actual words. This book really should have been edited, and condensed; if only because there are powerful stuff here drowning in wordy superlatives best left on the cutting room floor. Chapter 2, “What the Hell Happened in 2007?” is illuminating on how important that year was. For example, what follows the colon either were created, emerged, or really started to take off and scale in 2007: IBM started to build “Watson”; Apple introduced the iPhone; Google had just bought YouTube and launched Android; Facebook was taking off; Amazon released Kindle; Airbnb was drawn-up; Intel introduced non-silicon materials into microchips; Hadoop began to make ‘big data’ possible; and so on. 2007 was quite remarkable and this was actually a poignant profound chapter, in my opinion.

There are good sections on climate change and biodiversity loss, too. But, Friedman does as Friedman does and uses the term Mother Nature to describe various separate though connected phenomenon; I think for the sake of making many of these ideas stick but that comes across…flat. As flat as the world is now, as Friedman, himself, might say. (Matt Taibbi calls Friedman’s particularities, lets say, as Friedmanese.) Friedman does a good job highlighting what is important but doesn’t really add anything of value himself. Oh, and he builds a platform for a political party that he says is precisely and exactly what Mother Nature would want in a party. I would have appreciated it more if he would have just written: these are political ideas that I support. Nope: he speaks for Mother Nature instead. Weird.

Overall, I don’t recommend reading this book. I would recommend renting it from the library (which I did) and reading the first few chapters because the first few chapters are really fascinating. However, I wouldn’t finish this book especially when there are 130 million books in existence. I finished it because I’m stubborn. Oh, one more thing. Friedman calls the “cloud” the “supernova” for no good reason other than he thinks he is cute and clever, I suppose. Don’t we all? That, in fact, might be the lesson to learn from this book: we should all ask ourselves: do I sound like Thomas Friedman right now? And if so, time to do some yoga and contemplate a better path for yourself. And: edit!

White Fear; Black Bodies

Book review:
Hayes, Chris. 2017. A Colony in A Nation (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.).

The excellent and fastidious Chris Hayes is back with his second book; it’s a doozy full of righteous (patriotic) indignation; telling data and statistics; and is bathed in humane empathy in a surprisingly nuanced way. He tries to emphasize with quite literally everyone – that alone should be commended.

The book, A Colony In A Nation, comes off the heels of a highly divisive presidential election, seen by many as largely about identity issues, immigration, and race. The winning candidate, Donald J. Trump, pounced on and utilized white fear in a way that only dog whistles could previously capture.

Long live the dog whistle;
blue lives matter!;
all lives matter!

Hayes’ thesis is, as he himself puts it, “simple.” We have a divided justice system producing a divided country. One part of the U.S., which Chris dubs the “Nation” has a policing regime fit for the rules based democracy that we purport to be. Another part of our country, dubbed “the Colony,” has a policing regime with remarkable similarities to militarily-occupied colonies. These “two distinct regimes,” have disproportionate results.

Black Americans largely live in the Colony and thus live by the dictates of order over law. This order is administered by low-level bureaucrats and “petty officers.” When order prevails, you get results such as: “black men aged 20 to 34 without a high school degree have an institutionalization rate of about 37 percent.” Homicide rates in the Colony? 20 per 100,000. In the Nation? 2.5 per 100,000. There are even predominantly black neighborhoods, adjacent to white neighborhoods that “have a homicide rate that is 9,000 percent higher.”

Hayes illuminates the difference not only with hard numbers, but also with his on-the-ground experiences, some from his college years and some from his reporting from the past few years in Ferguson, Baltimore, and other cities.

In one particularly unique passage, Hayes, the host of the award-winning All In w/ Chris Hayes (MSNBC) visited police training headquarters in New Jersey where he participated in a virtual reality simulator. This simulates 85 different scenarios and recruits are assessed based on their actions. One must be quick. Chris draws his weapon in the first scenario; the officer reminds him that that was the incorrect move. “We’re only one scene in, and already the self-righteous liberal pundit has draw his weapon on an unarmed man holding a cinder block,” Hayes rights – channeling that his training officer was “delighted” to instill some humility into the pundit.

Hayes spoke with many everyday folks, black and white, and referenced many scholarly works on criminal justice, policing, and American history; making this book’s potential audience quite wide and it’s content myriad. (Down below, I’ll finish up my thoughts regarding this strategy).

As Hayes unpacks the causes of this Nation/Colony bifurcation, he starts from the top-down and makes his way downward, to me. You. Voters. Citizens. All of us.

How did this happen?

The War on Drugs, beginning with the election of Richard Nixon in 1968 and continuing through to this very day, is a good answer; a good place to start. (It’s not the earliest place to start, of course but it’s definitely relevant.) It was top-down; Nixon created the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and Congress passed laws such as the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) in 1970, for example. But, Hayes, surmises that the War on Drugs is not the only answer. Hayes claims that “20 percent of the increase in incarceration,” can be legitimately considered occurring due to the precepts of this so-called War on Drugs.

In Ch. V, Hayes details a nice summary of what is known as “broken windows policing.” Beginning in New York City, under multiple mayors, and continued nationally by President Bill Clinton. It’s the idea that a vacant building with a broken window will facilitate and bring forth other crimes.  The idea was that “one could reduce crime by stamping out disorder.” “Stop and frisk,” was implemented; black and brown people were disproportionately stopped, humiliated, and has their constitutional rights violated. (Hayes notes that federal district judge Shira Scheindlin, in 2000, did find the policy constitutional.)

Hayes leaves no stone unturned; it’s quite an impressive feat, he weaves in history and then personal story and then reporting from Baltimore back to law, scholarship, and pointed philosophical musings.

Hayes is his most passionate when he writes about white fear being a “force” that is a “social fact” and “something burned into our individual neural pathways.” But far from coming across as morally superior, Hayes is up-front about his own biases and fear, growing up in the Bronx, a “white straight male.” He talks about getting a pass from police officers, who found weed on him as a twenty-one-year old; at the Republican National Committee conference in 2000 no less. He opens up about his fears; he agrees that that order is nice. Yet he is aware that order usually comes at the cost of violating Constitutional rights of fellow Americans, who belong in the Nation, but who live in and are policed by The Colony. In fact, in the last few pages of the final chapter, he waxes philosophically, shades of Peter Singer regarding the moral sandpit that comes with valuing order over law.

Hayes isn’t careless or ideological when he tackles the War on Drugs. (He does get a bit ideological at other times.) The Crack Years were horrifying and nearly every single crime, violent and non-violent, skyrocketed from the 1970s, into the early 1990s. In fact in 1992, the U.S. “set an all-time violent crime record with 1,932,274 incidents.”  People are driven by fear and fear is hard to assuage. Fear resides in our brain stem, an ancient part of our brain, Hayes reminds the reader.

Above when I mentioned the top-down side of the creation and propagation of the Colony, I referred to the bottom-up side, too. In the last chapter, Hayes references work from law professor James Whitman who concludes: “it is the strong anti-aristocratic strain in the American legal tradition that has made our punishment system so remorseless and harsh.” I agree with this analysis; I also agree that it’s madness that we elect prosecutors.  Perhaps the most democratic part of our system is our criminal justice system. This doesn’t shine a positive light on the American psyche or on direct democracy frankly.

Here is where I began to add up the cons of the book. Educated readers know most, if not all, of what he chose to write about. I must say that I find this book wanting. There are many paths that Hayes could have explored more, but he leaves them after promising introductions. He mentions Racecraft….doesn’t explore it. He begins to paint a picture relating what he calls the Colony to how the British treated the colonists here during the revolutionary days…then he never brings it up again. He begins to explore police training….and leaves it after a page or two. (I wouldn’t begin to write a book on criminal justice; this is extremely hard to do and the book is quite good and ranging.)

Chirs makes the reader fill in a bunch of details themselves. I simultaneously like this and dislike it.

Solutions? He doesn’t investigate any concrete solutions…at all.  I know Hayes has ideas; I’m a big admirer of his previous work. In interviews, for example, he talks about needing radical desegregation as a political and societal project that, if continued to be unmet, should be openly considered a moral failure. Now THAT is what I hoped he was going to explore.

I would be remiss to say that Hayes didn’t fill out his thesis – he did; I suppose I’m just expressing that I wanted the book to be different than what it was.

This book turns out to be about two-thirds journalistic reporting and one-third memoir. I’m not sure if Hayes would classify it as such, but it is how it reads nevertheless. Overall, I enjoyed reading it. The book is well-written – if sporadic- and needing a bit more of a focus.

I do recommend it if only for the last chapter alone.

 

No One Has Read Huntington

The more I read people reference The Clash of Civilizations, the more I continue to believe that no one has read the actual book. In a recent New York Times article, journalists Scott Shane, Matthew Rosenberg, and Eric Lipton write that:

“Mr. Trump was echoing a strain of anti-Islamic theorizing familiar to anyone who has been immersed in security and counterterrorism debates over the last 20 years. He has embraced a deeply suspicious view of Islam that several of his aides have promoted, notably retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, now his national security adviser, and Stephen K. Bannon, the president’s top strategist.

This worldview borrows from the “clash of civilizations” thesis of the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, and combines straightforward warnings about extremist violence with broad-brush critiques of Islam.” [ NYT: “A Sinister Perception of Islam Steers the White House.”]

The article was about how President Trump and his team of Culture Warriors at the helm of his administration believe in a far-right notion of radical Islam and have an outsized fear of it. Yeah. Ok. I know.

To say that this worldview borrows from Huntington is akin to saying that because my co-worker said the words “I am Genghis Khan,” means he is Genghis Khan. I’m bad at comparisons, I know.

My point is that just because there is a cultural element to Trump’ grand strategy and that his chief strategist Steve Bannon believes in a clash of civilizations means that it is borrowing anything from a thesis that was trying to predict how conflicts in the future might look like. Huntington wasn’t endorsing clashes of civilization, he was simply arguing that culture – shared values, customs, language, and belief-systems – are likely to spark conflict in the future as opposed to any other possible reason for war, such as trade or land.

All three reporters are fantastic. Scott Shane’s book from two years ago about Anwar al-Awlaki was probably my favorite of 2015. This to me is sloppy, lazy and I don’t know what purpose it serves, to be honest.

Books: 2016

I present my favorite reads of 2016. Since I only read 4 books released last year, I will simply include in my list books that I read. In total, I finished 34 books and started many more.

6: The Way of the Knife:: the CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth (2013) Mark Mazzetti, reporter for The New York Times

This book, by Pulitzer-prize winning Mark Mazzetti, has astonishing anecdotes, literally, on every page. I had my nephew pick a number from page one through 327 and voila – “two hundred” he says. “OSS founder William Donovan was so despondent that President Truman had not named him the first director of central intelligence he decided to set up an intelligence operation of his own. During business trips to Europe he collected information about Soviet activities from American ambassadors and journalists and scouted for possible undercover agents.” When President Truman was made aware of such private shenanigans, he was mad, “calling him a prying S.O.B.” One example from one random page, and it is a good one. I read this book along the way of researching for my final analysis of President Obama’s counterterrorism (CT) policy and the most pertinent quote from the president himself was: “The C.I.A. gets what it wants.” My question is: what president has skirted the power of CIA the most? A muckraking funny-if-it-wasn’t- true expose on the CIA. One con would be that it’s anecdote heavy and hard to pull together a comprehensive understanding of the complex-nature of Intelligence work, the CIA, and the various actors, individuals and states.

5:  Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization (2016)
Branko Milanovic, Senior Scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study Center

A fresh, updated accounting on what we know about macroeconomics and what this portends for the future. Milanovic, reforms a classic theoretical understanding of inequality – the Kuznets curve – and coins the Kuznets wave. Succinctly put, inequality rises as economies develop yet the curve flattens out as education, for example spreads. Milanovic adds more lines to the curve and argues that inequality starts to increase once again in developed countries for various reasons, such as high-skilled and information-based job growth. This book is about (1) the rise of the global middle class; (2) the stagnation of the developed world’s middle class; (3) the rise of the global 1%. His prediction is gloomy: we will most likely see increased inequality because the current global climate to tackle this problem is wanting and the task arduous and global governance is limited. “Social separatism” is increasing and this portends a precarious future in our ever-globalizing world.

4: The 1970s: A New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality (2012)
Thomas Borstelmann, a Distinguished Professor of Modern World History at the University of Lincoln-Nebraska

I keep trying to formulate exactly when much of the world took a right-wing authoritarianism and extreme form; look at photos of Afghanistan in the 1950s-1960s for an example of what I’m conjuring up. I keep getting to 1979. Well, before said year the 1970s was a fascinating decade that so many positive strides regarding civil rights for black Americans and also women. Income inequality started rising precipitously for the developed world in the middle of the decade and the first Islamic revolution of the modern era happened, when the Shah in Iran was overthrown by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. This global history, which really is American-centric, is a fantastic read. I think about this book all of the time. For readers of contemporary history, this is a good one that I stumbled upon while perusing the “sale” section at my local library.

3: The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy (2011)
Dani Rodrik, the Rafiq Hariri Professor of International Political Economy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University

We read this book in my proseminar in globalization and out of the ten books we read, this book warranted the most discussion and “thumps up” bar none. Rodrik brilliantly excoriates, at times but with minimal vitriol – his fellow economists and their religious adherence to the Washington Consensus. He provides data to support his argument that some sort of embedded liberalism or a updated version of Bretton Woods is the most secure, fair, popular, and effective way for states to enter the developed strata of states. It’s in this book that he presents the trillemma: you can pick two, but only two. We can either live in a world of deep globalization and democracy; deep globalization and global governance; or global governance and democracy. Rodrik inclines

2: Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis: Second Edition (1999)
Graham Allison, Philip Zelikow, John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and Department of History at University of Virginia, respectively

This essential read for IR students is one I am grateful was assigned; I used the Rational Actor Model and the Governmental Politics model to compare the president’s counterterrorism policy for my capstone research paper. Along with Organizational Structure Model, these 3 frameworks are theoretical kingpins. The case study analyzed was the Cuban Missile Crisis and it was brilliantly done. Essence became the bedrock textbook and the impetus for opening the JFK School of Government at Harvard. If you want to know exactly how the insider process happens, and the complexity and complications of hundreds (now thousands) of actors involved in decisions, this is a great start. A foundational IR text from a heavyweight scholar, Allison, who has since penned many more books that are worth reading.

1: The Clash of Civilization and the Remaking of Global Order (1996)
Samuel P. Huntington, co-founder of Foreign Policy; Professor at Harvard; president of the American Political Science Association (APSA)

I’m linking to my blog post where I opined my feelings of this work. Seminal work here.

Best book released in 2016

Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror
Michael Hayden, former head of the CIA, NSA, and intelligence of the Air Force

Hayden has worked in the U.S. Intelligence community for decades and his part-memoir and part-current affairs review of the world we live in was my favorite memoir I read this year. For an intelligence official, the work was deeply honest, fair, and wide-ranging. The impression you get is of a big mind with big ideas and even bigger secrets; at once, a patriot who wishes he could tell Americans more but he can’t, for their security. I have been going through government official memoirs – I’ve only read a few so far – and this might be my favorite, though Chollet’s and Brooks’ are close. (I haven’t finished Brooks’ yet therefore it can’t be on this list but it’s damn good.)

I’m looking forward to reading so many more works next year – I hope to even finish listening to Moby-Dick!

The Brilliant Foresight of Huntington

Samuel P. Huntington’s seminal book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, is a foundational text for any student of international relations, globalization, and contemporary history. I have the fortune of hindsight and I have to say – this book might in fact be my favorite book I’ve ever read. It’s certainly one of the most important I’ve ever read re: my field of study, political science. It’s not that often that a book stands up like this one does. It’s not only useful as a period piece or a “hot take” but rather as a paradigm piece. My opinion is certainly twenty years late and most students do consider this a paradigm book; I’m simply expressing my gratitude that I experienced this read for myself. I can concur what others have said before.

Honestly, I can’t think of a more magisterial IR text that explains the current zeitgeist than this one. Jihad vs McWorld does a good job; not an IR text but Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature is great too; Joseph S. Nye’s work is, of course, canonical as well. For what it’s worth, however, this text is paradigm-capturing and worthy of Kissinger calling it “one of the most important books to have emerged since the end of the Cold War.” This is my favorite.

I will try and capture just why I think it predicted so much of what we are living through right now. Counting the essay, Huntington conceived of this understanding more than 23 years ago. It was the end of the Cold War, Fukuyama thought it was “The End of History”, and 9/11 and the Arab Spring were a decade, and two decades away, respectively. Yet, if I would have read this book before the turn of the century, I would have had a framework to understand it quicker than it has taken me.

Huntington Predicted the Russian annexation of Crimea
Just shortly into the first chapter and I was already enraptured by his definition of civilizations, for example, and then s.m.a.c.k – I thought, “what?! He basically just predicted Putin’s capture of Crimea. Damn.” In a paragraph where Huntington is testing the validity of statism, or neorealism, such as that exposed by John Mearsheimer, who foresaw a Russia-Ukraine “security competition,” he lays out precisely what happened 18 years later. “A civilizational approach emphasizes the close cultural, personal, and historical links between Russia and Ukraine and the intermingling of Russians and Ukrainians in both countries, and focuses instead of the civilizational fault line that divides Orthodox eastern Ukraine from Uniate western Ukraine, a central historical fact of long standing which, in keeping with the “realist” concept of states as unified and self-identified entities, Meirsheimer totally ignores.” He continues: “While a statist approach minimizes that and instead highlights the possibility of Ukraine splitting in half, a separation which cultural factors would lead one to predict might be more violent than that of Czechoslovakia but far less bloody than that of Yugoslavia.”

Huntington was sage-like here. Not only did he foreshadow the Russian annexation of Crimea, but he was correct regarding the comparisons as well. Casualties from the Ukrainian crisis are more than 9,000. The “Velvet Divorce” in 1993 of Czechoslovakia was bloodless; Slovakia has since become a quiet success of Europe. The breakup up of Yugoslavia was protracted, genocidal, and devastating.  Huntington was right: what was to transpire in Ukraine was somewhere in the middle, and it was about identity and culture, or to use his parlance, “civilizations.”

His framework based on understanding that culture is Real and that culture is tremendously powerful and binding, especially in a modernizing world that is cold, fast, and spiraling out of control, has predictive power. No good theory leaves home without predictive power. Ukraine effectively split, with 65% of Crimean’s being ethnically Russian. Under the civilizational paradigm, this break up makes since and those who studied this work, should have anticipated this. Huntington even argued that “contingency planning for the possible breakup of Ukraine,” should have been in the works.

“In the long run, Muhammed wins out”: Religious revivalism and Islamic Renewal
For those like myself who read science websites, and who know the ins-and-outs of and have read all of the New Atheist tracts published early in this new century, it’s easy to think that, or hope for depending on your worldview, religion is on the ropes. That, in fact, would be horribly wrong. Religion, a steady and reliable form of culture/identity like no other, is on the rise. Huntington really hammers the point home that the future of conflict will be about culture. And when wars are fought over cultures, culture loses. Huntington, again, was correct. “The Cold war division of humanity is over. The more fundamental divisions of humanity in terms of ethnicity, religions, and civilizations remain and spawn new conflicts. There is a subsection titled La Revanche De Dieu, or “The revenge of God” that I am jealous of. Great analysis with zero fluff or wasted words. If you have the book, this section starts at the middle of p.95 and ends at the end of p.97.

The Rise of the East, Latin America and Africa(?)
“The West is overwhelmingly dominant now and will remain number one in terms of power and influence well into the twenty-first century,” asserts the author. Although one can (and often does) split hairs regarding this statement, as of Dec. 2016 this is still true. In the context of this book, where Huntington paints the rise of the East, it’s particularly still relevant because he did predict what was on the horizon. This entire section is less spectacular than, in my opinion, his analysis about culture being central to our identities and the Islamic Resurgence, for example, this still is worth mentioning.

Latin America and Africa – sub-Saharan Africa – lack a “core” state that would allow them to rise to the level of say, the West (America is the core state), or the Sinic world (China, core), or the Orthodox world (Russia). The consequence isn’t necessarily given much thought but the analysis and prediction is true. Huntington puts a question mark after Africa (like he did at the end of the title when this was first published as an essay, which most people seemed to forget; “The Clash of Civilizations?,” is was the title of the essay iteration.) in this book since it was hard to envision a core emerging African power. The contenders were South Africa and Nigeria. Interesting. Latin America, Brazil and Argentina, and Mexico, also don’t seem to be likely leaders of a civilizational world. Mexico, has one foot in the West and one foot in Latin America. The future is up in the air and going to be determined by much contingency in the future. The reason: “Throughout history the expansion of the power of a civilization has usually occurred simultaneously with the flowering of its culture and has almost always involved its using that power to extend its values, practices, and institutions to other societies.” Pan-Africanism is a fiction that never materialized. Latin America is very diverse and just in the split of languages alone, makes it hard to foresee any one country becoming the “core” state of Latin America.

The rise of Asia, including India as the “core” state of the Hindu world, Japan (Japanese is  a civilization on it’s own according to Huntington’s paradigm), and China (the Sinic core) is an unstoppable historical force. The “blip” of Western dominance of 200 years will come to an end, and China, once again will be the leading power of the world by the middle of the next century. I can’t recall where I learned or who I learned this from, but a scholar has mapped the trend line of power and it is now sitting in Persia, working it’s way towards the East. 3 billion people all industrializing and modernizing is unstoppable. Well, at least by other people. Mother nature is a force to be reckoned with.

Conclusion
All-but-predicting the Crimea annexation by Russia; the rise of cultural and identity politics and the antidote of religion and community; and the likely power-shift from the West to Asia has come to pass, make The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of Global Order a must read. Impossibly relevant. Satisfying. Groundbreaking. The book, itself, is a paradigm. Huntington, in the last sentence, argues that a global order must be based on civilizations – regionalism (though he wouldn’t use that word), and bi- and tri-lateral regimes; and he claims that globalization is only for the Davos World and global government seems like a 22-century utopian idea that we have yet to figure out because we ignore culture.

Everyone should go out and pick up, and highlight, and annotate and devour this book. Certainly one of the best books I’ve ever read regarding international relations and the future of the global order.

*Bonus: Here’s a link to me reading this essay, basically, on my Foran Policy: Book Reviews & Miscellany podcast.*