Want someone to blame for Iraq and Afghanistan? Blame the purveyors of “liberal hegemony,” whose blunders paved the way for Donald Trump.
The 2016 election, argues Walt (International Affairs/Harvard Univ.; Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy, 2005, etc.), went to dark-horse candidate Trump because voters had sensed, somehow, that something was wrong with the way American foreign policy was being conducted. By his account, the establishment against which Trump railed was invested in the idea that America was the primary superpower and responsible for policing the rest of the world. The end of the Cold War allowed the U.S. to pursue ambitious foreign policy objectives “without having to worry very much about the consequences,” some of which would manifest themselves in the rise of Islamism and other reactionary movements. Walt’s arguments against “liberal hegemony”—the adjective meaning not leftist in orientation but instead something that “seeks to use American power to defend and spread the traditional liberal principles of individual freedom, democratic governance, and a market based economy”—are coherent if sometimes strident, and his descriptions match what appears to be happening on the ground, such as the emergence of China as a foreign policy rival to the U.S. The author is not altogether against that emergence, for the arrival of a “true peer competitor” provides powerful incentive to overhaul the system and impose greater accountability for unsuccessful outcomes. In the place of the failed grand strategy followed by both Democratic and Republican administrations in the past few decades, Walt proposes a program of “offshore balancing” that would emphasize American interests and promote world peace. Among its tenets is the abandonment of threats of regime change, as with those recently directed against North Korea. Writes the author, “countries usually seek nuclear weapons because they fear being attacked and want a powerful deterrent, and U.S. efforts at regime change heighten such fears.”
Walt’s call for a greatly reduced military presence overseas will appeal to many readers, though his book will find many critics inside the Beltway and his own Harvard Yard.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-374-28003-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
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Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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“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. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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