The United States
There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-first Century
BY FIONA HILL. Mariner Books, 2021, 432 pp.
Hill deftly combines three books into one to great effect. She begins with a riveting memoir of her childhood in northern England in a family and community plunged into poverty by the shutdown of her hometown’s coal mines. She escaped by excelling in school and grasping every snippet of opportunity that came her way, eventually building a career in the United States as a Russia expert. The story is told without the smallest whiff of victimhood about the barriers of class and gender she encountered. The book also offers a compelling analysis, based on her experience living in Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, of the conditions that breed populism. She finds striking similarities among the trajectories of Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom from the rule of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to the Brexit referendum in 2016, and the United States, with its spiraling inequality and loss of opportunity, in the years leading up to Donald Trump’s presidency. In all three, “the infrastructure of opportunity” disappeared, producing the growing anger and cultural despair that create an appetite for authoritarian leadership. Finally, Hill recounts her time serving on Trump’s National Security Council. This is not a kiss-and-tell account, but what she does relate of her interactions with the president is in every case worth telling, as is her insight that Trump’s fragile ego made him a national security risk, vulnerable to the flattery of any foreign leader. The political extremism that continues to grow in the United States in the aftermath of Trump’s 2020 electoral defeat could, Hill fears, make his years in office “seem like a preface, rather than a postscript” to the country’s “democratic demise.”
Diplomacy and the Future of World Order
EDITED BY CHESTER A. CROCKER, FEN OSLER HAMPSON, AND PAMELA AALL. Georgetown University Press, 2021, 376 pp.
This collection offers a valuable review of the successes, failures, and potential of international peacemaking and conflict management in the still unnamed post– post–Cold War era. Chapters take both a regional and a functional approach to examine the various ways that states, multinational organizations, and civil society groups manage other people’s conflicts in places as disparate as Cyprus and Kashmir, address actual or potential conflicts among major powers in states such as North Korea and Ukraine, and cope with transnational threats such as piracy and terrorism. The conflict management mechanisms discussed include conventional bilateral diplomacy, multinational negotiations, public diplomacy, sanctions, mediation, formal peacekeeping, and, pivotally, the threat or actual use of force. The chapters on the role of international organizations, particularly the United Nations, and on U.S.-Chinese relations
are particularly strong. On balance, the editors conclude that the space for international peacemaking and conflict management is shrinking due to resurgent nationalism, a “sovereign backlash” against earlier multinational interventions, and the diminished willingness of the major powers to undertake peacemaking missions. On the other hand, regional organizations and local and international civil society groups can be more active and more effective than in the past.
The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict
BY ELBRIDGE A. COLBY. Yale University Press, 2021, 384 pp.
U.S.-Chinese relations have deteriorated to the point where official exchanges have become little more than destructive exercises in name-calling. Public hostility toward the other in both countries is higher than it has been for decades. China’s military moves in the South China Sea, its rapid qualitative and quantitative advances in weaponry, and its escalating invasions of Taiwanese airspace have made a U.S.-Chinese war over Taiwan alarmingly possible. In this climate, Colby’s step-by-step explication of a U.S. strategy that would deny China success in such a war is a welcome contribution. Washington can deny Beijing success, he argues, by recruiting an “anti-hegemonic coalition” in the region whose combined power would be sufficient to defeat China. Although detailed on some points, the proposed strategy rests on some major unexamined and highly questionable assumptions: that China is set on achieving regional hegemony in the short term and global predominance in the long term, that military preparations and eventual war are the best or only way for the United States to respond to China’s ambitions, that countries in the region that have made absolutely clear their determination not to choose between allegiance to China and allegiance to the United States would nonetheless be willing to join a coalition predicated on military confrontation with China, and that a major war over Taiwan would stay confined to Taiwan. These and other wobbly conjectures fatally undermine the argument.
American Exceptionalism: A New History of an Old Idea
BY IAN TYRRELL. University of Chicago Press, 2021, 288 pp.
Tyrrell, a distinguished Australian historian, has written a rich intellectual history of the dramatic shifts in the meaning of the defining but, it turns out, highly malleable idea of “American exceptionalism,” from its roots in the revolutionary era to the present. Tracing the term’s changing significance illuminates U.S. history more broadly. At times, this exceptionalism’s principal substance has been political; at other times, religious; and at yet other times (although this has been poorly appreciated), it has rested primarily on the country’s material abundance, whether of its rich natural endowment or its bountiful consumer society. Often, American exceptionalism seemed to denote only that the United States was uniquely great in its wealth and power. But in the beginning, when the fledgling country was neither wealthy nor powerful, exceptionalism was nonetheless a strongly held “loose and grassroots feeling” that the new country was a
major political innovation, destined to be a model for others. After numerous manifestations in the intervening years, American exceptionalism has emerged in the past dozen years as a “state-sponsored ideology,” a full-throated “ism” seen in some quarters as an accurate litmus test of patriotism. Closely related but distinct concepts, including “the American way of life” (framing American identity in opposition to communism), “the American dream” (the opportunity for all people to achieve everything their ability and ambition allow), and “the American creed” (capturing the political values of individualism and egalitarianism), provide additional insights. A tough closing chapter examines the often gaping differences between the beliefs Americans hold regarding their country’s exceptionalism and the realities of life in the United States and American conduct abroad.
Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury
BY EVAN OSNOS. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021, 480 pp.
Osnos returned from a decade living abroad to find a drastically altered United States, whose core values—the rule of law, truth, the right and the ability to pursue a better life—appeared to be under siege. His research into what has changed and why, told principally through the stories of individuals, stretched over seven years. The resulting book captures the widening inequalities of wealth and opportunity and the hardening of class lines that Donald Trump exploited. Others have recognized these same trends, but no one has told the story with more immediacy and impact. Osnos has an eye for the telling statistic and can make questions of policy come vividly alive. Osnos visits Clarksburg, West Virginia, and Chicago to paint the lives of the country’s poor. But his portrait of the transformation of “the Golden Triangle” of Greenwich, Connecticut, where he grew up, is the book’s high point. The town’s most influential residents were once wealthy, moderate Republicans, of the likes of the Bush family patriarch Prescott Bush, who were imbued with a strong sense of civic duty and a belief in government. Osnos finds Greenwich now inhabited by flamboyant hedge fund billionaires and private equity financiers building ever-larger mansions. These blinkered folks are libertarians who oppose taxes and regulations of any kind; they fervently believe that all they have achieved is their own doing, and they see little role for government in their lives or their communities.