A knowledgeable, sobering assessment of one of the most consequential geopolitical situations in the world.
A grim analysis of the “new order of three great powers.”
It’s fittingly Orwellian that the three great powers today roughly correspond to the prophesy of 1984—namely, the U.S., Russia, and China. The U.S. and Russia are in more or less direct conflict today, writes CNN national security correspondent Sciutto, author of The Madman Theory and The Shadow War, in Ukraine. China is watching carefully, notes the author, as it refines plans for a blitzkrieg war on Taiwan “while the world was preoccupied elsewhere.” Taiwanese military planners see the war in Ukraine as similar to their own, though in at least some sense they’re better equipped to defend their territory. As the author notes, military doctrine holds that an attacker needs to outnumber a defender by three to one, yet Ukraine’s costly counteroffensive has been close to parity, which explains what now appears to be an unbreakable stalemate. The conflict in Ukraine has had an immediate effect in reinvigorating NATO and making it more relevant, “reoriented…to its original mission, defending Europe against Russia and, now, a second strategic adversary in China.” Ukraine has done a good job of bleeding Russia’s army nearly dry, but that does nothing to diminish Russian naval and nuclear power, the former being exerted vigorously in the Arctic, the latter a constant looming threat. Another variable is the continued presence of Trump on the scene, a man who represents Sciutto’s observation that “today’s world is as rich in accommodationists as the world of the late 1930s.” Cleareyed without sensationalism, Sciutto’s text closes with the suggestion that China can be seen as the larger long-term threat and that dealing with Beijing will require clear negotiations on areas of both competition (semiconductors) and cooperation (climate change).
A knowledgeable, sobering assessment of one of the most consequential geopolitical situations in the world.Pub Date: March 12, 2024
ISBN: 978-0593474136
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 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
BOOK REVIEW
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
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