A persuasive case for rethinking America’s guiding foreign policy doctrine in the face of global chaos.
European affairs expert Vindman recounts the many ways in which American foreign policy has gone astray.
“Realism’s impulse to avert crisis at virtually any cost doesn’t even avert crisis,” declares the author, deprecating the long-standing doctrine, courtesy of Henry Kissinger and company, that indexes foreign policy decisions to American interests. Instead, Vindman advocates a rising doctrine called neo-idealism, which “demands using a more nuanced and coherent understanding of interest, viewed through our values, along with other important inputs, to determine a compass heading for a US foreign-policy approach.” In the instance of his native Ukraine, Vindman argues, U.S. foreign policy has been driven by Moscow’s narrative, a holdover of a long-ago empire and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, in which Ukraine is seen as an integral part of Russia. “Without Ukraine, Russia cannot sustain an imperialist, revanchist narrative of the so-called unity of the ethnic-Russian and Russian-speaking peoples,” he writes. Vladimir Putin’s use of this narrative includes the view that the U.S. has continued to wage the Cold War all along, using “hybrid warfare” that includes—deep irony here—American interference in Russian elections. In a carefully laid-out case, Vindman urges that the U.S. take stronger steps to protect Ukraine as a democratic nation with Western values whose very existence repudiates Putin’s Russia “and Putinism itself.” Neo-idealism also demands that the U.S. take greater interest in protecting democratic nations that realism would consider insignificant and, with that, “strengthening South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan” against China. Regrettably, he concludes, all that’s unlikely to happen under his bête noire, Trump, with the result that the “next administration will inherit not just a fractured global order but also allies wary of America’s reliability”—a situation reparable by means of neo-idealism.
A persuasive case for rethinking America’s guiding foreign policy doctrine in the face of global chaos.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781541705043
Page Count: 304
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.
A memoir on the making of a literal “jailhouse lawyer.”
Wrongfully arrested and convicted of murder in New Orleans, which at the time had “the highest rate of wrongful convictions in the nation, with nearly all the victims being Black men who…grew up poor,” Duncan served for 23 years in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison and other institutions. He might have done his time at the Orleans Parish Prison, but, he writes, he wanted access to Angola’s more extensive law library. Well before being transferred there, he petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for a law book, a motion denied because it had not first been adjudicated in a lower court. A sympathetic judge gave him a copy all the same, and Duncan was off to a career as an inmate advocate, regularly filing petitions and lawsuits on his own behalf and that of his fellow prisoners—the first suit being “over the jail’s failure to provide him with a high-fiber diet,” soon followed by motions to provide mental health treatment, end beatings and arbitrary punishments, and improve medical care. Known as the “Snickers Lawyer” for taking payment in candy, he became a self-taught expert on constitutional issues. Naturally, he recounts, he was targeted by guards and wardens for his legal activism, even as he proved essential to Angola’s population; in time, too, he found a few unlikely allies among the staff. Duncan’s well-told story is full of fraught moments of abuse both physical and judicial, though it has something of a happy ending in that, after earning a law degree after his release, he was exonerated of the crime and has since been fighting for other prisoners to “have meaningful access to the courts.”
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593834305
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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