The United States

A World Safe for Commerce: American Foreign Policy From the Revolution to the Rise of China

By Dale C. Copeland. Princeton University Press, 2024, 504 pp.

Copeland’s valuable book is both a history of the key moments in American foreign trade policy and a theoretical study of what he terms “dynamic realism,” the middle ground between so-called offensive realism (aggressive policies in the interest of protecting the security of the United States) and defensive realism (the recognition that overly aggressive policies can be counterproductive). In his view, the generally understood drivers of U.S. history greatly undervalue the role that assuring access to global markets has played in U.S. foreign policy since before the American Revolution. In his telling, ideological and national security motivations and domestic political pressures (which he repeatedly diminishes) did not compel key decisions from the outbreak of the Revolution to the U.S. entry into World War I, as much as did the natural drive of any major power to maintain and expand its access to markets, resources, and investment abroad. The principal impediment for the United States in that quest now is China. He argues that U.S. policymakers should recognize that Chinese policies that might appear to be motivated by a desire for dominance may in fact be driven by insecurity and the fear of U.S. intentions.

In the Nation’s Service: The Life and Times of George P. Shultz

By Philip Taubman. Stanford University Press, 2023, 504 pp.

George Shultz combined years as an academic and as a successful business leader with service in four cabinet-level positions—as secretary of state, labor, and the treasury and as director of the Office of Management and Budget. Taubman covered Shultz as a reporter and had full access to the man, his family, and his papers and is the first to have seen a detailed journal kept by Shultz’s executive assistant at the State Department. The journal documents incredible infighting and sometimes humiliating end runs in the Reagan administration, producing nearly constant “chaotic conflict.” Shultz persevered, calling on a seemingly inexhaustible fund of personal loyalty to the president until he was able, in the end, to facilitate diplomacy with the Soviet Union and thereby make critical contributions toward ending the Cold War peacefully. Ultimately, he became one of the most admired public servants of the century. Taubman never lets his closeness to his subject cloud incisive judgments of an admirable career that was not without failings, including a reprehensible episode near its end involving the fraudulent biomedical company Theranos and its disgraced founder, Elizabeth Holmes.

A Real Right to Vote: How a Constitutional Amendment Can Safeguard American Democracy

By Richard L. Hasen. Princeton University Press, 2024, 240 pp.

How to Steal a Presidential Election

By Lawrence Lessig and Matthew Seligman. Yale University Press, 2024, 176 pp.

Two books explore the weaknesses in the U.S. electoral system that could be used to undermine American democracy. Shockingly, the Constitution does not establish the right to vote. The Supreme Court declared unanimously in 1875 that the Constitution “does not confer the right of suffrage upon anyone” and that, in the case then before it, state laws that restrict the privilege “to men alone are not necessarily void.” Hasen, an election law expert, shows that states have also variously disenfranchised African Americans, former felons, Native Americans, students, and military voters. He makes a convincing case that this hole in the fabric of rights that makes up a democracy creates many of the pathologies that threaten the U.S. election system today. These include endless disputes over registration requirements, voter identification residency requirements, and other efforts to shape electorates that have made attempted election subversion a near constant in recent years. He does not understate the challenge of getting legislative approval for a new constitutional amendment but notes that both parties would stand to gain from guards against election subversion and that just as during the 40 years it took to ratify women’s right to vote, the long fight for passage would build support for other measures along the way.

In the fall of 2020, months before the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, Lessig and Seligman, both leading scholars of constitutional law, attempted to uncover every possible means bad actors could use to overthrow the voters’ choice in a presidential election. They found seven, four they believe could not ultimately succeed and three they think could. The plan the Trump campaign adopted— to use slates of “fake electors”—they view as “the dumbest” of the possible subversive strategies. The most dangerous strategy—state legislatures could pass a law directing electors to vote for the candidate the legislature picks—was inadvertently suggested by the Supreme Court itself in a 2020 decision. The authors believe that since others will figure out one or more of these strategies, their book does not amount to publishing the “plans to build democracy’s nuclear bomb.” Rather, they see it as an effort to rally urgent public support to repair glaring vulnerabilities.

Illiberal America: A History

By Steven Hahn. Norton, 2024, 464 pp.

The dominant narrative of U.S. history is that over centuries, the country has seen the steady expansion of liberal political values and the strengthening of established rights, inclusive civic and governmental institutions, and the rule of law applied equally through democratic means. By the twentieth century,

the United States was open to immigration and sought to promote social and economic liberalization around the world. Hahn looks through a different lens at a parallel illiberal tradition that runs through this same history. Whether espoused by the left or the right, this tradition is usually marked by a belief in fixed hierarchies defined by race, ethnicity, religion, or gender. Its proponents have recognized violence as a legitimate means for acquiring and exercising power.These illiberal values do not merely erupt periodically at the margins of American society but have been “central fields of political and cultural force” since the very beginning of the country. Appreciating this history puts recent divisiveness and the upending of long-standing norms since the political rise of Donald Trump in valuable perspective; the current upheaval has deep and broad roots.