Enough time has passed for some of Kaplan’s forecasts to develop cracks—e.g., China has not yet stumbled—but much rings...
The veteran political affairs journalist returns with a collection of essays that have been published in the Atlantic, the Washington Post, the National Interest, and other venues.
Thoughtful, unsettling, but not apocalyptic analyses of world affairs flow steadily off the presses, and this is a superior example. Over the years, Kaplan (Earning the Rockies: How Geography Shapes America's Role in the World, 2017), a senior fellow at the Center for New American Security, has written several. Except for a long, insightful first chapter, these essays appeared between one and 15 years ago, so they say nothing about the post-Trump world, but few have aged poorly. Marco Polo claimed to travel from Italy to China across central Asia, returning over the South China Sea and Indian Ocean. To Kaplan, this journey encompassed the great Eurasian land mass whose faded empires (Turkey, Iran), rising imperial powers (Russia, China), and failed states (Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, etc.) have replaced Europe as the area most critical to American interests. Although aware, American leaders still continue to get it wrong. After apologizing for getting it wrong himself—he supported invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan—Kaplan devotes most essays to explaining the proper approach. A “realist” à la his hero, Henry Kissinger, Kaplan maintains that Americans must lead the world only because, if we don’t, another great power will step in. He emphasizes that today’s greatest international threat is not tyranny but anarchy. Nations need effective government more than free elections; in its absence, American efforts to promote democracy through military (Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam) or quasi-military means (Libya, Syria) always fail.
Enough time has passed for some of Kaplan’s forecasts to develop cracks—e.g., China has not yet stumbled—but much rings true, and all are presented with enough verve and insight to tempt readers to set it aside to reread in a few years.Pub Date: March 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9679-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
Occasionally unfocused, but redeems itself by putting a vivid, human face on an unimaginable nightmare.
A ground-level illustration of how the plague ravaged Europe.
For his tenth book, science writer Kelly (Three on the Edge, 1999, etc.) delivers a cultural history of the Black Death based on accounts left by those who witnessed the greatest natural disaster in human history. Spawned somewhere on the steppes of Central Asia, the plague arrived in Europe in 1347, when a Genoese ship carried it to Sicily from a trading post on the Black Sea. Over the next four years, at a time when, as the author notes, “nothing moved faster than the fastest horse,” the disease spread through the entire continent. Eventually, it claimed 25 million lives, one third of the European population. A thermonuclear war would be an equivalent disaster by today's standards, Kelly avers. Much of the narrative depends on the reminiscences of monks, doctors, and other literate people who buried corpses or cared for the sick. As a result, the author has plenty of anecdotes. Common scenes include dogs and children running naked, dirty, and wild through the streets of an empty village, their masters and parents dead; Jews burnt at the stake, scapegoats in a paranoid Christian world; and physicians at the University of Paris consulting the stars to divine cures. These tales give the author opportunities to show Europeans—filthy, malnourished, living in densely packed cities—as easy targets for rats and their plague-bearing fleas. They also allow him to ramble. Kelly has a tendency to lose the trail of the disease in favor of tangents about this or that king, pope, or battle. He returns to his topic only when he shifts to a different country or city in a new chapter, giving the book a haphazard feel. Remarkably, the story ends on a hopeful note. After so many perished, Europe was forced to develop new forms of technology to make up for the labor shortage, laying the groundwork for the modern era.
Occasionally unfocused, but redeems itself by putting a vivid, human face on an unimaginable nightmare.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-000692-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
A sharply different deconstruction of the prevailing orthodoxy, worthy of attention.
Leverett (International Affairs/Pennsylvania State Univ.; Inheriting Syria: Bashir's Trial by Fire, 2005) and his wife, Hillary, argue that, unless it changes, “the United States’ Iran policy is locked in a trajectory…that will ultimately lead to war.”
The authors take on what they identify as “a powerful mythology” that continues to influence U.S. policy toward the Islamic Republic—primarily, the proposition that because it is unpopular, the regime “is in imminent danger of being overthrown.” They offer an alternative to the prevailing view that Khomeini and his supporters hijacked the liberal revolution that began in 1978 and “betrayed the aspirations of those who actually carried out the campaign that deposed the shah.” The Leveretts take issue with American policymakers who propose that the U.S. should advocate the overthrow of the present regime in favor of liberal democracy. They believe in the possibility of negotiating with the present regime. The authors dispute the view that the mullahs have done nothing for the population and lack support, showing how literacy, health and medical care have been upgraded and the economy developed. They highlight present concerns about the Iranian nuclear program, which they claim are exaggerated. They identify the continuing influence of the neoconservatives, who brought about the second Iraq war, and “liberal internationalists,” who are ready to deploy military force in support of human rights. They believe that the time has come for an initiative like Nixon's visit to Beijing to begin a change in course.
A sharply different deconstruction of the prevailing orthodoxy, worthy of attention.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9419-0
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2012
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