Economic, Social, and Environmental

Global Discord: Values and Power in a Fractured World Order By Paul Tucker. Princeton University Press, 2022, 552 pp.

The Biden administration’s October 2022 National Security Strategy identified China as a strategic competitor. That designation motivated Washington’s ban on exports to China of advanced semiconductor designs and equipment, a measure that seems at odds with American values of economic liberalism and open international trade. Tucker’s book, completed before the release of that document, asks how democracies should deal with illiberal states while upholding their own political and economic values. He argues for cooperation among liberal states and for maintaining economic distance from states on the other side of the ideological divide. Concretely, this means “friend shoring”: that is, relying on like-minded countries for imports and finance. Tucker argues that the legitimacy of an international economic system must ultimately rest on shared values and on the responsiveness of its institutions to the priorities of states that uphold those values. He urges the reform of the World Trade Organization, which currently operates through the dictates of all-powerful judges; of the International Monetary Fund, which has weakened its legitimacy by straying from its core mission of supporting countries with weak finances; and of the Bank for International Settlements, which continues to extend privileged access to the titans of global finance.

The Long Shadow of Default: Britain’s Unpaid War Debts to the United States, 1917–2020 By David James Gill. Yale University Press, 2022, 416 pp.

In this thought-provoking book, Gill recounts the forgotten history of the United Kingdom’s 1934 default on its World War I debts to the United States. One of the largest payment suspensions in history, this episode is typically omitted from scholars’ lists