Valuable for readers interested in understanding matters of war and peace.
A bracing look at the many reasons nations go to war.
“There has never been a protracted war from which a country has benefitted.” So wrote Sun Tzu, whose The Art of War is a classic text. Blattman, a professor of global conflict studies at the University of Chicago, concurs—but he also notes that while there are countless reasons for individuals to fight individuals and countries to fight countries, war is rarer than it might be. The reason, as he brightly puts it, is simple: “Even the bitterest enemies prefer to loathe one another in peace.” Of course, war has always occurred, and Blattman identifies five principal reasons. One is “unchecked interests,” meaning that the goals of the ruling class are out of alignment: They gain power and wealth while ordinary people lose their property and lives. The author argues persuasively that these unchecked interests account for much of the world’s organized violence, but another is just as opportunistic: the “commitment problem.” If a rival nation seems to be growing in power, then why not crush it now, before it gets too strong to defeat with any certainty? (Think Vietnam.) Blattman attributes much warfare to what might be considered venal causes rather than the usual explanations of conflict as emanating from the quest for resources or ethnic divisions, though they certainly figure. More to the point, as he writes, “there is seldom one reason for a war.” Against modern theories of intervention, the author observes that aims such as regime change are often unrealized, but there are useful nonmilitary weapons that can be deployed in place of actual arms—targeted sanctions, for instance, and decentralizing authority, the latter of which is difficult for bureaucratized world police officers such as the U.S. government and the United Nations.
Valuable for readers interested in understanding matters of war and peace.Pub Date: April 19, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-984881-57-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Jan. 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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