A cogent, detailed policy review, effectively studded with first-person recollections, that probably won’t sway Obama’s...
A measured insider’s account of President Barack Obama’s foreign policy, arguing that the very aspects that bring conservative derision represent subtle, long-term strengths.
Chollet (co-author: The Unquiet American: Richard Holbrooke in the World, 2011, etc.), who served Obama for six years in positions including assistant secretary of defense for International Security Affairs, relies on his heavyweight credentials and personal perspective in a spirited, thoughtful defense of how Obama responded to both George W. Bush’s missteps and the spiraling chaos that has greeted his own goals. He argues that the cool, cerebral Obama has pursued an oft-misunderstood “long game,” relying on long-term planning that has minimized the risks of Iraq-style quagmires. “Obama is like a foreign policy version of Warren Buffett,” writes the author, “a profoundly pragmatic value investor.” Like a tycoon’s discreet adviser, Chollet positions himself as a defender of Obama’s ambitions, portrayed as feckless by those for whom “the answer is almost always for the US to do more of something and to act ‘tough.’ ” Aptly, the author begins with the “red line” crisis presented by Syria’s chemical weapons; Obama was called weak for a restraint that led to the repressive regime relinquishing those munitions. Chollet then looks backward, arguing that Democrats felt a mandate in 2008 to remake foreign policy in line with Obama's broader advocacy of change: “The ascendance of the Bush/Cheney foreign policy was a key impetus behind Obama’s rise.” Yet despite Obama’s mandate to take a leaner approach to fighting terrorism while resolving conflicts in the Middle East, cascading crises in Libya and Egypt and the rise of the Islamic State group seemingly point out the limitations of Obama’s long-distance planning. As Chollet avers, “for Obama, the greatest threat that ISIS poses is that in responding to it, we lose sight of the Long Game.” With respect to Vladimir Putin’s aggressive Russia, the author notes, “Obama’s alleged ‘weakness’ did not drive Putin’s aggression.”
A cogent, detailed policy review, effectively studded with first-person recollections, that probably won’t sway Obama’s conservative critics.Pub Date: June 28, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61039-660-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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