Nixon calls the geopolitical policy he advocates in this brief book “hard-headed détente”: “a combination of détente with deterrence.” It entails basing the new medium-range missiles in Europe, of course, and building up conventional NATO forces (to what level, and with what degree of US participation, Nixon doesn’t say). It also entails a NATO response worldwide: “The Western alliance must realize the Soviet advances in the Third World threaten the lifeline of every Western industrial nation.” The Europeans shouldn’t think “that the US can do it all”; at Soviet/American summits, however, the US president “should carry with him the chits of the other major industrial powers.” To Nixon, “hard-nosed détente” worked for his administration – meaning him (Kissinger, interestingly, is unmentioned) – from 1969 through 1974, until Congress cut funds for Vietnam and cut off funds for Angola. Nixon still thinks we could have won in Vietnam. The lesson of Vietnam for the future – and immediately for El Salvador – is not to “provide just enough military aid…to keep them fighting, but not enough to win.” (The lesson of the Bay of Pigs is also insufficient force – but then Nixon thinks, too, that the Cubans would choose to return to Batista.) Intertwined with the central argument are strictures against peacenik and anti-nuke forces, Churchill, de Gaulle, Brezhnev, et al.). There are instances of great fatuousness. (Re his concern for Mexico: “I went to school with Mexican-Americans for 16 years. Mrs. Nixon and I spent two weeks in Mexico in 1940 on our wedding trip. Our daughters’ second language in college was Spanish.”) There is also evidence of the shrewd pragmatism – in, for instance, his comments on Kadar’s Hungary – that made Nixon not ineffectual in foreign affairs. And he has the Soviets retreating around the world – losing the battle for minds, losing economic ground – even as he has them advancing: the text is so simple (less prolix than the Nixon norm) that many readers will be able to see through it.
Pub Date: Jan. 12, 1983
ISBN: 0316611492
Page Count: 142
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1983
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.
Known for her often contentious perspectives, New York Times opinion writer Weiss battles societal Jewish intolerance through lucid prose and a linear playbook of remedies.
While she was vividly aware of anti-Semitism throughout her life, the reality of the problem hit home when an active shooter stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue where her family regularly met for morning services and where she became a bat mitzvah years earlier. The massacre that ensued there further spurred her outrage and passionate activism. She writes that European Jews face a three-pronged threat in contemporary society, where physical, moral, and political fears of mounting violence are putting their general safety in jeopardy. She believes that Americans live in an era when “the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream” and Jews have been forced to become “a people apart.” With palpable frustration, she adroitly assesses the origins of anti-Semitism and how its prevalence is increasing through more discreet portals such as internet self-radicalization. Furthermore, the erosion of civility and tolerance and the demonization of minorities continue via the “casual racism” of political figures like Donald Trump. Following densely political discourses on Zionism and radical Islam, the author offers a list of bullet-point solutions focused on using behavioral and personal action items—individual accountability, active involvement, building community, loving neighbors, etc.—to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism. Weiss sounds a clarion call to Jewish readers who share her growing angst as well as non-Jewish Americans who wish to arm themselves with the knowledge and intellectual tools to combat marginalization and defuse and disavow trends of dehumanizing behavior. “Call it out,” she writes. “Especially when it’s hard.” At the core of the text is the author’s concern for the health and safety of American citizens, and she encourages anyone “who loves freedom and seeks to protect it” to join with her in vigorous activism.
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13605-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019
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