A highly learned but sometimes-ponderous survey that will appeal to policy wonks. For most readers, a long-form essay would...
A public policy insider mines the nuances of states’ sovereignty and legitimacy in an increasingly unstable world.
Divided into three parts, delineating something of a past, present, and future approach, this systematic work by Council on Foreign Relations president Haass (Foreign Policy Begins at Home: The Case for Putting America's House in Order, 2013, etc.) finds that the bland optimism maintained throughout the Cold War due to the grip of atomic deterrence has been unloosed by new structural and economic forces. For nations big or small, good or bad, these forces increasingly involve internal breakdowns requiring humanitarian intervention and occasionally lead to terrorism. In the first part, the author reaches back to the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) to show how the sovereignty of states was first acknowledged and respected; that order was “based on a balance of power involving independent states that do not interfere with one another’s ‘internal business.’ ” Subsequently, the Congress of Vienna helped to determine the sovereignty of states in the 19th century. While the world wars saw the breakdown of the Westphalian order—in the case of World War I, it was accidental and unintended, a “failure of deterrence and of diplomacy”—the era since 1945 has been transformational, with the former villains Germany and Japan now models of “regime change.” Moving from the Cold War to the present sense of disorder, rife with regional disputes, Haass sees Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and the American response as the beginning of troubling new developments (although the author applauds U.S. activism). The push back against Iraq and other trouble spots, where internal brutality prompted international intervention on humanitarian grounds, drove the adoption of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine by the United Nations in 2005. The author concludes his knowledgeable but overlong narrative with some predictions for the future—e.g., “mounting debt will hasten the demise of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.”
A highly learned but sometimes-ponderous survey that will appeal to policy wonks. For most readers, a long-form essay would have sufficed.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-56236-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics,...
A provocative analysis of the parallels between Donald Trump’s ascent and the fall of other democracies.
Following the last presidential election, Levitsky (Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America, 2003, etc.) and Ziblatt (Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, 2017, etc.), both professors of government at Harvard, wrote an op-ed column titled, “Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy?” The answer here is a resounding yes, though, as in that column, the authors underscore their belief that the crisis extends well beyond the power won by an outsider whom they consider a demagogue and a liar. “Donald Trump may have accelerated the process, but he didn’t cause it,” they write of the politics-as-warfare mentality. “The weakening of our democratic norms is rooted in extreme partisan polarization—one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture.” The authors fault the Republican establishment for failing to stand up to Trump, even if that meant electing his opponent, and they seem almost wistfully nostalgic for the days when power brokers in smoke-filled rooms kept candidacies restricted to a club whose members knew how to play by the rules. Those supporting the candidacy of Bernie Sanders might take as much issue with their prescriptions as Trump followers will. However, the comparisons they draw to how democratic populism paved the way toward tyranny in Peru, Venezuela, Chile, and elsewhere are chilling. Among the warning signs they highlight are the Republican Senate’s refusal to consider Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee as well as Trump’s demonization of political opponents, minorities, and the media. As disturbing as they find the dismantling of Democratic safeguards, Levitsky and Ziblatt suggest that “a broad opposition coalition would have important benefits,” though such a coalition would strike some as a move to the center, a return to politics as usual, and even a pragmatic betrayal of principles.
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics, rather than in the consensus it is not likely to build.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6293-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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