A road map for effective, well-considered policy.
Classical drama provides crucial lessons for policymakers.
Kaplan has had an impressive career: many years as a journalist reporting on the Middle East, author of numerous books on international affairs, and many years working in high-level think tanks. Consequently, it may seem strange that he begins this meditative narrative with an admission of a mistake that still haunts him. He saw the regime of Saddam Hussein firsthand and believed it was so awful that it had to be removed. Consequently, he supported the U.S. invasion, but the anarchy that followed, he admits, was even worse. This led him to the conclusion that order, even that imposed by dictators, was preferable to chaos in all but a few extreme cases. Kaplan suggests that presidents and policymakers should look to Greek classical dramas and Shakespeare’s plays to understand the importance of considering the consequences of actions and the limits of power. The tragic mind, in this sense, is one that is aware of itself and of the contrariness of human events. He cites George H.W. Bush as the last president with this sort of depth. After him, presidents have been quick to send troops to one hot spot or another, always with good intentions but with little in the way of positive outcomes. Military involvement should be a last resort, used only as a response to true evil, such as the Nazi regime. In fact, the author notes that the idea of evil has been devalued through overuse. “Every villain is not Hitler,” he writes, “and every year is not 1939….Passion should not be allowed to distort analysis, even as social media does exactly that.” Kaplan can often sound pompous and old-fashioned (not a new criticism), but the advice that military actions should be carefully thought through, and then thought through again, should be heeded by anyone who contributes to making life-and-death decisions.
A road map for effective, well-considered policy.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-300-26386-2
Page Count: 152
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
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
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