The United States

Hand-Off: The Foreign Policy George W. Bush Passed to Barack Obama

EDITED BY STEPHEN J. HADLEY, PETER D. FEAVER, WILLIAM C. INBODEN, AND MEGHAN L. O’SULLIVAN. Rowman &

Littlefield, 2023, 774 pp.

At the end of a U.S. presidential administration, outgoing National Security Council staff prepare transition memos for the incoming team. The memos are classified and usually not publicly available for decades. Never have they been declassified (with surprisingly minor redactions) and published for a general audience as in this volume edited by Stephen Hadley, President George W. Bush’s last national security adviser. Reflecting the Bush administration’s preoccupations, a quarter of the original 40 memos dealt with the “war on terror.” The president’s so-called Freedom Agenda—his desire to aggressively spread democracy around the world—is also a central theme. Hadley and his predecessor Condoleezza Rice, who later served as Secretary of State, write that Bush fully understood that “freedom and democracy could not be imposed by force” but then label the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq “special cases.” The volume does not attempt to be a balanced history of Bush’s foreign policy. There is, for example, a single chapter on China and three on various diseases. The treatment of Iraq begins three years after the president’s fateful decision to invade. Too often, the postscripts that accompany the memos—mostly written by the original authors reflecting on their policy’s subsequent ups and downs—come across as an apologia. Still, the book is a valuable window into what senior officials were thinking at the time and makes a notable contribution to governmental transparency.

King: A Life

BY JONATHAN EIG. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023, 688 pp.

Eig brilliantly portrays the many dimensions of the civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., in a book readers will find hard to put down. King appears as an extraordinarily courageous, deeply troubled, terribly flawed, and incredibly talented man who did nothing less than change the country in a career that spanned only 13 years. Eig has been able to draw on sources unavailable to previous biographers, including memories recorded by King’s wife and father, thousands of newly released FBI documents, and extensive records belonging to the official historian of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of which King was the founding president. Using this material, Eig sheds new light on King’s profoundly important first 25 years, his relationship with his difficult father, and the FBI’s relentless campaign against him.The FBI’s appalling, unceasing surveillance—including a blackmail package that suggested he commit suicide—was carried out with U.S. President Lyndon Johnson’s knowledge and support. For years before his assassination in 1968, King endured constant physical violence; he was imprisoned

29 times, shot at, stabbed, and punched in the face. And yet he was more than a martyr. As Eig notes, “In hallowing King, we have hollowed him.” Eig’s balanced treatment of King’s manifest greatness and his human flaws, including his sexual infidelity, turns an icon back into a man and produces a biography that will be very difficult to surpass.

Six Stops on the National Security Tour: Rethinking Wartime Economies

BY MIRIAM PEMBERTON. Routledge, 2022, 234 pp.

Dying by the Sword: The Militarization of U.S. Foreign Policy

BY MONICA DUFFY TOFT AND SIDITA KUSHI. Oxford University Press, 2023, 304 pp.

Two volumes address the consequences of what President Dwight Eisenhower famously warned of in 1961, when he described the growing “military-industrial complex,” the huge military establishment that would have “grave . . . economic, political, even spiritual . . . implications” that would be felt “in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government.” Pemberton focuses on the military budget, which is now nearing $1 trillion per year: how it became so big, what it funds, its impacts on communities around the country, and how the linked forces of members of Congress, the military, and defense contractors work together to push its constant growth.The military’s workforce, which includes active-duty soldiers, reserves, and civilians, exceeds three million people. In addition to thousands of bases within the United States, the military maintains 750 bases in at least 85 countries. No other country owns more than a handful of bases abroad. The U.S. defense budget is larger than the rest of the discretionary federal budget combined, and private contractors now account for more than half of it. According to Pemberton, a well-funded force of congressional lobbyists and a revolving door that guides retired generals and admirals into senior roles at arms manufacturers keep the money flowing into private hands even in the absence of clear threats. At first glance, communities should be expected to benefit from military projects funded with huge sums of federal money. Yet a majority of the states that have received the most military contracts over many decades have poverty rates above the national average.

Toft and Kushi work from an ambitious data set they have created that covers every U.S. military intervention since 1776—a total of 392 operations by their reckoning, more than double the number covered in other such compilations. They classify interventions by type, region, causes, consequences, and length and supplement the empirical data with case histories. The authors argue that the data reveal patterns of U.S. military activity through six historical eras they succinctly define in terms of the country’s prime strategic objective at the moment, from winning independence from Great Britain in the 1700s to fighting jihadist terrorism in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Since the end of the Cold War, the data show a sharp uptick in the use of force, more interventions in semidemocratic countries, shifts in objectives, and a widening gap in the level

of hostility between the United States and the countries in which it chooses to intervene. This amounts, they argue, to Washington’s increasing propensity to use “force-first diplomacy” in the face of ill-defined threats. These interventions frequently backfire and threaten long-term national interests. The authors’ conclusions go beyond what their numbers prove, but the data they have amassed provide powerful insights into the trajectory of both recent and long-term American foreign policy that deserve close attention.

Merchants of the Right: Gun Sellers and the Crisis of American Democracy BY JENNIFER CARLSON. Princeton University Press, 2023, 288 pp.

In the United States, there are 100 million more guns than people, mass shootings occur nearly twice a day on average, and the country has by far the weakest gun laws of any peer country. In attempting to understand these facts, Carlson largely eschews the familiar focus on the National Rifle Association, the Republican Party, and the Supreme Court. Instead, she takes a bottom-up approach by delving into the political and cultural views of gun sellers and gun buyers. She finds that gun ownership has become an increasingly accepted way of dealing with feelings of insecurity in the United States’ volatile democracy. Guns represent an “ethic of security (i.e., guns as a bulwark against victimization)” but also an “understanding of freedom (i.e., guns as a vehicle of individual rights)” and “a particular stance against the state (i.e., guns as a defense against government control and liberal indoctrination).” In this subculture, steeped in conspiracy theories, guns are not simply a means of personal protection but a symbol of political identity and empowerment. If Carlson’s conclusion is correct, it leads to the profoundly depressing notion that reducing gun violence in the United States will depend not merely on finding acceptable legislative formulas for gun control but on the vastly larger task of somehow mending the deadly partisanship and polarization that currently grip the country.