Casey capably delves into a key U.S. policy of the Cold War and the reasons for its successes and failures.
A Cold War–era study of how military aid to “friendly tyrants” often created as many problems as it solved.
Realpolitik was the idea that informed much of the thinking of U.S. policy during the Cold War, especially when it came to supplying military aid to autocratic regimes. In this book, government analyst Casey explores the question of whether such support was successful and how American strategy differed from that of its main competitor, the Soviet Union. The author worked on much of this book while he was a research fellow at the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies at the University of Michigan, so he was able to draw together a large body of evidence, which he puts to good use in this carefully researched history. Casey readily accepts that many U.S. clients were, to say the least, unsavory. Still, if they were fighting communist insurgencies, or claimed to be, they received military and financial support. One of the primary policy goals was to separate the military from the political leaders, based on the American model. But as the author shows, this strategy often backfired, and the most common reason for the fall of an autocratic leader was a military coup, which then led to more autocracy. The Soviet aim, in contrast, was to integrate the army with the government party, which circumvented the problem of coups but led to mismanagement, stagnation, and corruption. Many autocracies would eventually move toward democracy, although Casey argues that this was only possible once the threat of communism faded away. He explains all this material with authority, though the book is written mainly for specialists in Cold War history and politics.
Casey capably delves into a key U.S. policy of the Cold War and the reasons for its successes and failures.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781541604018
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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