Sobering reading for geopolitics mavens and Risk aficionados alike, offering no likely path beyond decline and fall.
If you’re American and want to rule the world, get to work immediately. By McCoy’s (History/Univ. of Wisconsin; Policing America's Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State, 2009, etc.) reckoning, you’ve only got a few years left.
The so-called American century has run longer than 100 years. It began, the author argues, in 1898, when the U.S. assumed colonial territories formerly controlled by Spain, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Guam, and the Philippines. It extended throughout the industrialized 20th century and the Cold War but then faltered in the “bid to extend that hegemony deep into the twenty-first century through a fusion of cyberwar, space warfare, trade pacts, and military alliances.” Considering that the current occupant of the White House has repudiated such pacts and alliances, it would seem that there are plenty of hard-power options left in terms of sheer military might, but that doesn’t get the job done alone. That repudiation, however, is not unnatural. For as long as America has had an empire—and McCoy does not shy from calling it that—there has been an uneasiness, a “profound, persistent ambiguity” about whether a putatively democratic republic ought to be controlling distant countries, whether militarily or through soft-power paths. Meanwhile, our position abroad has been weakened by numerous missteps, as when, in one of the author’s examples, the troop surge in Afghanistan had the unintended consequence of alienating country people and pushing them into the arms of a now-resurgent Taliban. McCoy closes with several scenarios for how American hegemony and superpower dominance will fade—and, he urges, “every significant trend points toward a striking decline in American global power by 2030.” The likeliest beneficiary would be China, he adds, which makes war a near inevitability. If only a dozen or so years are left, then it’s time to start preparing for a post-imperial world—which is unlikely to happen, given the present “inward looking” leadership.
Sobering reading for geopolitics mavens and Risk aficionados alike, offering no likely path beyond decline and fall.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-60846-773-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
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As with nearly all of Lewis’ books, this one succeeds on so many levels, including as a well-written primer on how the...
Lewis (The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed Our Minds, 2016, etc.) turns timely political reporting he published in Vanity Fair into a book about federal government bureaucracies during the first year of the Donald Trump presidency.
At first, the author’s curiosity about the relationship between individual citizens and massive federal agencies supported by taxpayer dollars did not lead him to believe the book would become a searing indictment of Trump. However, Lewis wisely allowed the evidence to dictate the narrative, resulting in a book-length indictment of Trump’s disastrous administration. The leading charge of the indictment is what Lewis terms “willful ignorance.” Neither Trump nor his appointees to head government agencies have demonstrated even the slightest curiosity about how those agencies actually function. After Trump’s election in November 2016, nobody from his soon-to-be-inaugurated administration visited federal agencies despite thorough preparation within those agencies to assist in a traditionally nonpartisan transition. Lewis primarily focuses on the Energy Department, the Agriculture Department, and the Commerce Department. To provide context, he contrasts the competent transition teams assembled after the previous elections of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Displaying his usual meticulous research and fluid prose, the author makes the federal bureaucracy come alive by focusing on a few individuals within each agency with fascinating—and sometimes heartwarming—backstories. In addition, Lewis explains why each of those individuals is important to the citizenry due to their sometimes-arcane but always crucial roles within the government. Throughout the book, unforgettable tidbits emerge, such as the disclosure by a Forbes magazine compiler of the world’s wealthiest individuals list that only three tycoons have intentionally misled the list’s compilers—one of the three is Trump, and another is Wilbur Ross, appointed by Trump as Commerce Secretary.
As with nearly all of Lewis’ books, this one succeeds on so many levels, including as a well-written primer on how the government serves citizens in underappreciated ways.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-324-00264-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
James Baldwin has come a long way since the days of Notes of a Native Son, when, in 1955, he wrote: "I love America more than any other country in the world; and exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually." Such bittersweet affairs are bound to turn sour. The first curdling came with The Fire Next Time, a moving memoir, yet shot through with rage and prophetic denunciations. It made Baldwin famous, indeed a celebrity, but it did little, in retrospect, to further his artistic reputation. Increasingly, it seems, he found it impossible to reconcile his private and public roles, his creative integrity and his position as spokesman for his race. Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, for example, his last novel, proved to be little more than a propagandistic potboiler. Nor, alas, are things very much better in No Name In the Street, a brief, rather touchy and self-regarding survey of the awful events of the '60's — the deaths of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, the difficulties of the Black Panther Party, the abrasive and confused relationships between liberals and militants. True, Baldwin's old verve and Biblical raciness are once more heard in his voice; true, there are poignant moments and some surprisingly intimate details. But this chronicle of his "painful route back to engagement" never really comes to grips with history or the self. The revelatory impulse is present only in bits and pieces. Mostly one is confronted with psychological and ideological disingenuousness — and vanity as well.
Pub Date: May 26, 1972
ISBN: 0307275922
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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