Khan recounts Taiwan’s story in a way that shows the importance of understanding the context of the conflict.
An expert in Asian geopolitics delves into Taiwan’s past, finding critical clues to the turbulent present.
Taiwan is often in the headlines as a possible trigger for a catastrophic war between China and the U.S., but behind the noise is a complex history, according to Khan, a senior academic at Tufts and author of Muslim, Trader, Nomad, Spy. Khan is skeptical of the Chinese view that Taiwan is historically part of China, although Beijing has made the claim since the defeated Nationalists retreated to the island in 1949. The U.S. supported the autocratic government of Chiang Kai-shek, arguing that it was the legitimate government of China. This idea evaporated when Nixon went to China and Taiwan’s position became ambiguous. In fact, ambiguity has since been the defining aspect of Taiwan’s place in the world, with the island locked in a non-country limbo while growing into a dynamic economy and thriving democracy. The U.S. stance has varied with the prevailing winds in Washington, D.C., although the past few years have seen a more pro-Taiwan attitude. The Taiwanese population seems to be leaning toward independence while aware of the difficulties such a move would entail. Beijing regularly makes threats and provocations, seemingly unaware that its belligerence usually backfires. Khan suggests ways to reduce the tension but also discusses options for increasing the deterrence factor, and he emphasizes that the U.S. should determine what future it wants to see. At the same time, it should keep communication channels with China open, so minor tiffs do not spin out of control. Most of all, writes the author, policymakers should be aware of the history that has built the present—but on the issue of Taiwan, there are no easy answers.
Khan recounts Taiwan’s story in a way that shows the importance of understanding the context of the conflict.Pub Date: May 14, 2024
ISBN: 9781541605046
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
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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BOOK REVIEW
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