The Frugal Superpower: America's Global Leadership in a Cash-Strapped Era

The Frugal Superpower begins with what Mandelbaum takes to be an important turning point in the history of U.S. foreign policy: September 15, 2008. On that day, it shall be recalled, the investment bank Lehman Brothers collapsed, deepening a worldwide economic downturn. In a work of great clarity and elegance, Mandelbaum looks into the United States' future and into the growing economic constraints on its power. Seven decades of American assertiveness abroad followed World War II, and Pax Americana made the world safer and more prosperous. But the United States can no longer afford to pay for the international security order. Those who have complained about excessive U.S. power may live to worry about a greater threat -- the growing weakness of the United States as it takes up economic challenges at home.

This book is not a work of declinism but an unsparing assessment of the constraints on American power in the years to come. No single power, or concert of powers, Mandelbaum warns, shall step forth to assume the American burden. Humanitarian interventions and military campaigns such as those in Afghanistan and Iraq are not likely to be repeated. Such endeavors, Mandelbaum writes, will be resisted by an "American public worried about increases in the costs and reductions in the benefits of entitlement programs." Americans willed, and paid for, an imperial role in the modern world. And of course they borrowed with abandon; foreign creditors were willing to oblige. But that long run has come to an end. September 15, 2008, will indeed turn out to be a day of great consequence in the history of the American republic abroad.

 

What's Right with Islam: A New Vision for Muslims and the West

Nearly a decade after 9/11, communications between Muslims and the West (including Muslims in the West) remain plagued by mutual suspicion and ignorance. Efforts to remedy this have been useful in generating dialogue and good ideas, but there is still a long way to go. Rauf gets to the heart of the matter in What's Right With Islam Is What's Right With America. Of Egyptian heritage and now based in New York, Rauf is well positioned to identify principles that are common both to the United States' founding documents and to the Abrahamic religions. His thesis is that the Islamic ideal is far closer to the democratic thesis than to the dynastic doctrines that hold sway in many Muslim-majority states. This reality, if understood more broadly, could open the door to improved policy outcomes in areas of conflict, more accurate media depictions on all sides, and a healthier understanding of religion's role in public life. Rauf explains, better than any other commentator, why so many Muslims proclaim simultaneously their desire for democracy and their opposition to the United States' international actions. He also provides valuable insights into the nature of Islam, the lessons of history, and the failure of Muslim and Western leaders to live up to their professed beliefs. Whether or not one agrees with every conclusion, Rauf offers a basis for intercultural and interfaith dialogue that extends far beyond the discussion that has taken place thus far. This may not guarantee a brighter future, but it can certainly help the world avoid a bleaker one and set it on a better path.

 

13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown

This penetrating analysis of the economic and financial crisis of 2008-9 places the crisis' eruption and evolution and the policy response to it in the context of U.S. economic history. Emphasizing the "too big to fail" aspect of the financial problem, it relates the issue to past episodes of excessive concentrations of economic and political power in the United States. Johnson and Kwak compare the reaction to the recent crisis to President Theodore Roosevelt's response to the powerful industrial trusts of the late nineteenth century and to President Franklin Roosevelt's confrontation with the excessive financial power that characterized banks in the 1920s. In both cases, conventional wisdom largely accepted these powerful entities until they created major problems for the economy and were challenged at the highest level. The conventional wisdom then changed abruptly, and new regulatory laws, practices, and institutions became an established part of the U.S. policy framework.

Johnson and Kwak argue that the country is going through a similar period today. Financial markets have evolved well beyond the reach of current regulation and authority, jeopardizing the entire financial system and, through it, the economy. The authors document the evolution of this disastrous mismatch, analyze how its failures led to the crisis, and propose new policy approaches to avoid repeating the recent experience. The book provides a convenient one-stop shop for understanding both the crisis and the policy remedies, only a few of which have begun to take shape, that it necessitates.

 

THE MORAL EQUIVALENT OF WAR (UPDATED)

A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East.

Two Kinds of Time

Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China

Mr. China: A Memoir

Confessions: An Innocent Life in Communist China

 

Why the West Rules--for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future

It may seem at first sight a little odd to recommend a history book as a guide to the future. But Morris' new book illustrates perfectly why one really scholarly book about the past is worth a hundred fanciful works of futurology. Morris is the world's most talented ancient historian, a man as much at home with state-of-the-art archaeology as with the classics as they used to be studied. Here, he has brilliantly pulled off what few modern academics would dare to attempt: a single-volume history of the world that offers a bold and original answer to the question, Why did the societies that make up "the West" pull ahead of "the rest" not once but twice, and most spectacularly in the modern era after around 1500? Wearing his impressive erudition lightly -- indeed, writing with a wit and clarity that will delight the lay reader -- Morris uses his own ingenious index of social development as the basis for his answer. He also dares to pose explicitly some fascinating counterfactual questions. What if the Chinese had conquered the New World before the Europeans got there in the fifteenth century? What if the West had ended up subjugated by the East in the nineteenth century, instead of the other way around? Precisely because he has such a profound understanding of the ways that culture, technology, and geography interact over the very long run, Morris is better qualified than almost anyone else to answer the final question he asks: Is the world heading for "the Singularity" -- a technological quantum leap beyond our traditional limitations as a species -- or for a disastrous "Nightfall" brought on by climate change, famine, state failure, mass migration, pandemic disease, and nuclear war? Readers will find nothing better on the subject than his final, mind-blowing chapter.

 

The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

After the fall of the Soviet Union, political scientists scrambled to make sense of what the new world order would be like after the collapse. The best model was offered by Huntington in The Clash of Civilizations. The essential building blocks of the post-Cold War world, Huntington wrote, are seven or eight historical civilizations, of which the Western, the Muslim, and the Confucian are the most important.

The balance of power among these civilizations, he argued, is shifting. The West is declining in relative power, Islam is exploding demographically, and Asian civilizations -- especially China -- are economically ascendant. Huntington also argued that a civilization-based world order is emerging in which states that share cultural affinities will cooperate with one another and group themselves around the leading states of their civilization.

The West's universalist pretensions are increasingly bringing it into conflict with the other civilizations, most seriously with Islam and China. Thus, the survival of the West depends on Americans, Europeans, and other Westerners reaffirming their shared Western civilization as unique -- and uniting to defend it against challenges from non-Western civilizations.

The greatest advantage of Huntington's civilizational model of international relations is that it reflects the world as it is -- not as one wishes it would be. It allows decision-makers to distinguish friends from enemies. And it makes it easier to identify the internal conflicts within civilizations, particularly the historical rivalries among the Arabs, the Turks, and the Persians for leadership of the Islamic world. The Clash of Civilizations is a classic that should be taught in every international relations and history class -- until a new world order emerges.

 

A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East

The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once observed that "life must be understood backward. But . . . it must be lived forward." This applies to more than one's own life: what is past is more than prologue; it is essential for anyone wanting to understand how today's world was created. This is especially true of the critical region between the Mediterranean and the Himalayas. Without knowledge of its backstory, no policymaker will get the region right: history is continuous, even if, relatively speaking, Americans just tuned in.

Of the vast array of books on this region, none is more relevant than Fromkin's sweeping epic, A Peace to End All Peace. Fromkin states his theme starkly at the outset: "The European powers at that time [1914-22] believed they could change Moslem Asia in the very fundamentals of its political existence, and in their attempt to do so introduced an artificial state system into the Middle East. . . . The basis of political life in the Middle East -- religion -- was called into question by the Russians, who proposed communism, and by the British, who proposed nationalism or dynastic loyalty, in its place. . . . The French government, which in the Middle East did allow religion to be the basis of politics -- even of its own -- championed one sect against the others." Today, we live with the consequences of those almost forgotten events.

Other historians have challenged Fromkin on specific details. That is to be encouraged: history is not only continuous; it also needs to be continuously reexamined. And it should never be ignored, as American policymakers have done so often in the past, at their own -- and everyone else's -- peril.

 

From Asian to Global Financial Crisis: An Asian Regulator's View of Unfettered Finance in the 1990s and 2000s

Ever since the recent global financial crisis broke out, experts and officials have taken great pains to identify the causes, hoping to avoid similar crises in the future. Now, as the global economy gradually recovers, comes Sheng's clear and complete analysis of the recent crisis and the Asian financial crisis of the 1990s. In his view, unfettered finance was the core cause of these crises.

But the real picture is far more complex. In reality, governments tend to overregulate and underregulate the financial sector at the same time. This is especially true in Asia, a fact that Sheng implicitly admits. After the Asian crisis and then the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2000, he explains, the financial world undertook its most thorough overhaul since the 1930s, in areas that spanned accounting, corporate governance, regulation, and national financial sectors. But these measures were not enough to stem the latest crisis. In fact, some of them may have contributed to it.

The financial challenges faced by Asia are especially serious, so Sheng's perspective as an Asian regulator is particularly welcome. "There are very few books about the Asian crisis by senior Asian officials who were in positions during the crisis," he notes. "For posterity's sake, the Asian side of the story deserves to be told." But his most valuable contribution is that he identifies some of the major barriers standing in the way of a sound financial system and points to future solutions. "The key structural problem faced by Asian economies," Sheng writes, "is the legacy of a relatively closed, top-down silo governance structure faced with an open, rapidly changing and complex global market."

 

On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done

A key question about the future is whether new information technologies -- the Internet and its search engines and social media -- will strengthen or weaken democracy. New media are powerful tools of civic engagement in democratic societies, and they will bring new freedoms to closed societies such as China and Iran. At the same time, the perverse effects of these new technologies cannot be ignored. They have become gigantic amplifying devices, raising the volume of false whispers to produce a deafening jeer heard around the world. Instead of creating a shared public space of common discourse, information technology seems to be increasing people's shrillness, malice, and unwillingness to listen to differing opinions. It also empowers anonymous denunciation, removes responsibility from opinion, and places reputations at risk. The speed of the new media forces decision-makers to react instantly, hobbling political judgment and enfeebling deliberation.

Sunstein's On Rumors raises fundamental questions about the troublingly ambiguous impact of social media on the marketplace of democratic ideas. The ancient Greek philosophers warned of Sophists in the public square. The new technologies have given these sophists a megaphone of unparalleled power. It is up to democrats to use the new media to fight back and defend a public square where truth, however inconvenient to one's own prejudices, remains the ultimate arbiter of democratic argument.

 

The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It

The challenges of global poverty are getting more attention lately, but helping people is far harder than it looks. For example, humanitarian aid is often used in effect to finance military spending, so that about 40 percent of African arms spending may inadvertently be paid for by aid donors. Still, people are getting better at addressing the challenges of global poverty, and one of the most lucid guides to this terrain is Collier's landmark book, The Bottom Billion. Collier, a former World Bank chief economist who is now at Oxford University, is a believer in foreign aid while acknowledging all the attendant difficulties. He notes that one billion people or so have been stuck in poverty and have not found an escalator out; he focuses on why that is and what everyone else may be able to do about it.

Collier is relentlessly empirical, acknowledging the many failures of aid (in 2004, a study found that only one percent of the money intended for rural health clinics in Chad reached its destination) but pointing the way to achieving more successes. He emphasizes that conflict is lethal to growth and notes that the typical civil war imposes costs to the relevant country and its neighbors of some $64 billion. Modest sums invested early on might reduce the risk that such conflicts get out of hand, he argues, and can be among the most cost-effective forms of foreign aid. The Bottom Billion is one of those short, sparkling books that had so many people in the development field gnashing their teeth, muttering, "I wish I'd written this!"

 

The Best and the Brightest

The United States will be the most powerful state on the planet for the next few decades. Since many Americans believe that their country is "the indispensable nation" -- to use former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's well-known phrase -- they will continue to support an activist foreign policy that seeks to shape the world in accordance with U.S. interests and values. Because American leaders sometimes make tragic mistakes -- as they did in Vietnam, Iraq, and now Afghanistan -- understanding how the United States makes key foreign policy decisions is essential.

No book explains this process better than Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest. First published in 1972 and dealing primarily with Vietnam, Halberstam's brilliant description of the American foreign policy establishment remains highly relevant today. As Halberstam makes clear, that community is populated by well-educated and ambitious individuals who frequently lack wisdom and almost always lack humility. They tend to think that all problems have ready solutions, which their brilliance will enable them to identify and implement. These people rarely acknowledge limits to U.S. power, which means they sometimes pursue boneheaded policies that lead to disaster.

Unfortunately, the U.S. political system is not especially effective at checking foolish ideas before they influence policy, even though the Founding Fathers designed it for that purpose. As Halberstam shows so well, presidents have many ways to manipulate the policy process so that they get what they want. This capacity sometimes produces good outcomes, but when the United States miscalculates, look out. The central message of this seminal book: beware the indispensable nation.

 

My Life with the Taliban

Captive: My Time as a Prisoner of the Taliban

 

A Rope and a Prayer: A Kidnapping from Two Sides

Dozens of reports appear every year on the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but they rarely convey the essential truths of how the militants live and think. Three new books take you as deep inside as any Western reader is likely to get. One is My Life With the Taliban, by Zaeef -- the autobiography of a Pashtun who was an early recruit to the movement, then a top official of the Taliban regime in the 1990s, and afterward a prisoner at Guantánamo. The other two are narratives by American journalists who were kidnapped by the Taliban during the past few years and survived to tell the tale: Captive, by Van Dyk, and A Rope and a Prayer, by Rohde, co-written with Mulvihill, his wife.

Zaeef -- now "retired" in Kabul and considered to be a moderate and an intermediary to hard-line commanders -- betrays the severe narrowness of his and his comrades' world. The leaders of the Taliban were always parochial in the extreme, saturated with religiosity, and the years since their fall from power have only intensified these qualities: globalization makes them more ideological but not more worldly. The younger generation -- the militants who held and tormented Van Dyk and Rohde -- are wilder and harder: criminals and aspiring suicide bombers in love with death. The kidnapping narratives show that outsiders' categories of Afghan Taliban, Pakistani Taliban, and foreign jihadists hardly matter in the Hindu Kush. Whatever the future of Afghanistan, a deal with the Taliban will make life a nightmare for anyone who falls under their power.

 

Thinking in Systems: A Primer

An old metaphor to describe the behavior of complex systems is that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can create a tornado in Texas. This metaphor is even more relevant today. From economic crises and environmental destruction to political insecurity and growing inequity, the challenges of the twenty-first century are becoming more complex and interconnected every day. There are no silver bullets for them, and often the scope of the problems cannot be understood until solutions are tried. Governments, businesses, and philanthropic groups need to adopt a holistic perspective to respond to these global challenges and capture hidden opportunities.

A blueprint to help leaders and decision-makers develop this perspective is presented in Thinking in Systems, a book that explores the subtle yet powerful components of systems thinking, such as feedback loops, nonlinear relationships, and leverage points. Meadows distills the essence of this important problem-solving paradigm, noting that systems demonstrate "adaptive, dynamic, . . . and sometimes evolutionary" behavior in which the whole proves to be greater than the sum of its parts. Presented in a clear and accessible manner, the book makes evident that in order to succeed in the world ahead, prediction, control, and siloed analysis must be transformed into a framework in which complexities are embraced, silos broken, and partnerships welcomed. Doing so will not be easy, but as Meadows notes, only then can we "use our insights to make a difference in ourselves and our world."

 

The Long View from Delhi: To Define the Indian Grand Strategy for Foreign Policy

The elusive quest for a grand strategy, long a preoccupation inside Washington, has now begun to inform thinking in more distant chancelleries. The Long View From Delhi is the first attempt to elaborate a grand strategy for India. Taking up three possible scenarios for the world in 2020, the authors come up with a foreign policy strategy for India. There is an understandable focus on the United States and China and arguably not enough on India's own tough neighborhood on the subcontinent, but the combination of "net assessment" modeling and informed strategic analysis works impressively.

Kumar, who heads an economic think tank, and Menon, one of the country's premier security specialists, are cogent in their analyses and trenchant in their opinions. Their work is a major contribution to the intellectual transition from India's traditional focus on safeguarding its sovereignty to a greater desire to take proactive positions in world affairs. New Delhi's near obsession with strategic autonomy as an end in itself is giving way to a willingness to exercise responsibility on the world stage, as India moves beyond postcolonial concerns about self-protection to a new role in the making of global rules and even in helping impose them. Indian strategic thinking is evolving to keep up with this change, and this book is a valuable contribution to the process.

 

How Enemies Become Friends: The Sources of Stable Peace

One of the United States' strongest assets has been its capacity to turn its rivals into partners and its adversaries into allies. The United Kingdom, Mexico, Germany, and Japan all fought against the United States before they joined with it in what has become a zone of stable peace. At the start of the twenty-first century, this capacity is needed as much as ever before. The rise of major non-Western powers, such as Brazil, China, India, Iran, South Africa, Turkey, and others makes the avoidance of traditional geopolitical rivalries a must if one wants a peaceful world order.

In How Enemies Become Friends, Kupchan discusses how and why peace breaks out. He takes on the notion that stable peace can only be the product of liberal democratic development, an idea he calls unnecessary and unwise, and uses a rigorous theoretical framework and a wealth of historical evidence to elucidate pathways to stable peace. These include unilateral accommodation, reciprocal restraint, societal integration, and the generation of new narratives and identities.

Kupchan's findings are particularly relevant to Euro-Atlantic relations. Two decades after the end of the Cold War, Europe is still divided on security issues. Both NATO and the EU have expanded considerably, but countries such as Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan are beyond the zone of stable peace. The theory of democratic peace has worked for some but not others. Kupchan's timely book can help solve the hard cases.

 

The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations?

Ever since the fall of the Soviet Union, people have realized that the world has entered a new age, one characterized by lower levels of political discord among the great powers, free markets, free trade, and an information revolution. The shorthand is, of course, "globalization." And the assumption has been that as globalization increases, the individual ingredients of the pie will also increase in strength. Market forces will get stronger; technology will become more pervasive, giving individuals greater autonomy; and political conflict among the great powers will become more costly. But a funny thing happened on the way to an open global economy -- the rise of a global market has led to a rise in the wealth of large nations, and this in turn has led to a rise in the importance and power of the governments of these countries.

Bremmer has best identified this new twist to the story of globalization in his book The End of the Free Market. The title is a misnomer. The book is really about the rise of state capitalism, also the subject of a recent essay by him in this magazine. Whereas 20 years ago, the list of the largest companies in the world was dominated by private firms, it is now dominated by state-owned entities, many from emerging markets. China's state-owned companies now not only utterly dominate its economy -- of the country's top 100 companies, 99 are state controlled -- but also increasingly play a large role on the global landscape. They play by different rules and have different goals than do private corporations from the West.

This age-old tussle, between the rise of the state and the pervasive influence of the market, has taken a new form in modern times, and Bremmer has written an important account of it in his book.

 

Available at Amazon.com:

Enemies of Intelligence

The End of History and the Last Man

The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

The Tragedy of Great Power Politics

The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations?

Running Out of Water: The Looming Crisis and Solutions to Conserve Our Most Precious Resource

Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water

Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization

The Great Gamble

At War with the Weather: Managing Large-Scale Risks in a New Era of Catastrophes

Friendly Fire: Losing Friends and Making Enemies in the Anti-American Century

Dining With al-Qaeda: Three Decades Exploring the Many Worlds of the Middle East

 

 

(C) 2010 Foreign Affairs