A Million Drops by Víctor del Árbol

Paperback, 672 pgs, Expected publication: May 15th 2018 by Other Press (NY), ISBN13: 9781590518458

America’s literary scene is so robust and successful that it tends to influence and eclipse exciting work appearing around the world. Other Press of New York has a terrific record of finding and translating for us the best of European fiction and this month we are treated to a historical thriller from Spain, first published in 2014 in Barcelona. The author Víctor del Árbol was a seminarian and historian before embarking on a successful literary career, so his thrillers have recognizable historical underpinnings and a rich and brutal context of war and conflict.

Árbol’s name has begun to show up in lists for literary prizes at home and in Europe. With this second novel to be translated into English, we experience the emotional and historical depths of a Spain struggling with its political past. The richness of the novel stems from Árbol’s contextual complexity and recognized divergence from old societal norms, e.g., the centrality of strong but flawed female characters, acknowledged homosexuality, police misconduct, and in a predominantly Christian country, an important Jewish character who suffered Stalin-era torture at the hands of leftists, leading to lifelong psychological affliction.

Russia and Spain have long been intertwined, and the twentieth century brought enthusiastic support for communist ideals in Spain. Students from all over Europe travelled to offer their services to a Russian government trying to consolidate power under Stalin, but they found “being a non-Soviet Communist is seen as suspicious even in the USSR.” When a purge of dissident elements was undertaken, the Spanish engineering student Elías along with his cohort of fellow Europeans were caught up in the melee and deported to the now-infamous Nazino Island.

Nazino Island was home to a little-known real-life atrocity perpetrated by the Head of the Secret Police Genrikh Yagoda and the Head of Labor Camps Matvei Berman and approved by Stalin in May 1933 in which 6,000 deportees made up of petty criminals and political prisoners were forcibly relocated to a small island in western Siberia. The group was meant to construct a camp designed to bring unproductive land under cultivation during a time of nationwide famine. Few provisions accompanied the prisoners and within thirteen weeks 4,000 had died of starvation, sickness, or at the hands of others. Árbol allows his imagination to construct the camp, describing the depraved behaviors the survivors are thought to have witnessed. Elías’s hope for escape from Nazino looks extremely unlikely, lending a thriller-like air to the telling.

Elías’s 20th-century story is interspersed with the 21st-century stories of his children and the children of people Elías knew from his time in Nazino. His daughter Laura is a journalist-turned-policewoman, and his son Gonzalo is a lawyer with leftist sympathies. In fact, the novel opens with a shockingly brutal incident that leaves us gasping for air, and we are propelled to explain that event by looking for clues in the past.

The structure of the novel is deceptively simple, jumping from one century to the next through chapter headings, but not always immediately addressing the questions we have formulated—another source of tension in the novel. References to important historical moments in Spanish history are intriguing in their own right, generating an enthusiasm in readers to investigate more straightforward accounts that would explain the larger forces at work.

If I had any criticism of the book, it would be that the novel seems indulgent in length. While the situations of Elías and his family are intrinsically interesting and filled with tension, that sense of urgency is difficult to sustain over 600+ pages. Sometimes less really is more, especially in a mystery/thriller. Were the novel shorter, the author wouldn’t need to explain so much, as the reader would be following step-by-step.

The character list takes a toll, and begins to put a strain on our ability to remember an unfamiliar history along with strikingly similar-sounding names, e.g., Gonzalo-Gonzalez, Luis-Luisa, Lola-Laura. And finally, after the complicated relationships carried throughout the novel, the Epilogue seemed too easy, once again usurping the reader’s role to imagine.

While I wouldn’t call this international crime fiction, it has some elements common to that genre. It is closer to historical literary fiction in the way that books about WWII bring that era back to life. This mentions WWII, particularly Stalingrad, but for the Jewish character Elías that horror show just brought back memories of worse. Perhaps not enough was made of Elías’s Jewishness, unless the author meant for that to layer lightly over other elements without being explicit about what it means. In my own country, I’d know what that means. In Spain, I’m not too sure.

One of the more interesting aspects of the novel for me was Barcelona living and the mindset of current residents there. Descriptions of tourists blowing in for a week of sun rang as true as the description of a popular Spanish architect living in London coming to introduce his latest commission to the public. I am not entirely sure I got my fill of the authentic experience un-moderated by American TV scenarios (like Miami Vice, mentioned in the final pages) but I very much look forward to more.



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Easternization: Asia's Rise and America's Decline by Gideon Rachman

Hardcover, 320 pages (Orig pub Bodley Head, London August 2016) Pub April 4th 2017 by Other Press (NY) ISBN13: 9781590518519; due out in paperback by Vintage Sept 2017 Literary Awards: Orwell Prize Nominee for Longlist (2017)

Easternization turns out to be one very interesting book. I doubt Gideon Rachman, Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent for London’s Financial Times, expected Donald Trump to win the American presidential election in November 2016, but he doesn’t miss a beat. This book, published at the end of 2016/beginning of 2017 adds a Preface which addresses the expected focus and personality of a Trump presidency and addresses Trump’s impact on American influence in the world. Rachman looks at the world through a reducing glass and illustrates how much of what has happened and will happen over the near term in world relations has been “baked in.”

There are various measures used to illustrate China’s rising strength, but Rachman believes the balance has already shifted east. American and European military influence is definitely contracting as China increases its spending and the centrality of the needs of its billion people in Asia is drawing other economies into its orbit, creating spheres of influence. However, the population in China, as a result of the one-child policy, is aging. China will be dealing with this legacy well into the next thirty years when it is expected India will become the world’s largest economy. India’s population in 2015 was 65 percent under the age of thirty.

For the most part, countries in Southeast Asia have been unable to resist the temptation of China’s development aid and trade. One exception has been Vietnam. Encroachments from the sea by China testing coastal boundaries has so alarmed Vietnam that they apparently asked the United States if they wanted to establish a base at their old wartime location in Cam Ranh Bay.

"For the Vietnamese…the offer made perfect sense. In its thousands of years of history, Vietnam has found only one war against the United States—but seventeen against the Chinese."

China decided in the 1990s that it would pivot to Africa, and since has become Africa’s largest trading partner, with two-way trade exceeding $200 billion in 2010. Apparently India, watching China make great gains in Africa, stepped up its own investment there, where it is historically positioned to be at home. Africa, like India, has a large proportion of its population under the age of thirty, and some development specialists suggest that the Indian Ocean will become the next growth center of trade and development, when the Pacific Rim economies and growth has slowed.

China recently began purchasing Russia’s gas reserves in a win-win for both countries, though Rachman believes the Russians suffered a very difficult negotiation. Many Chinese have been moving northward, legally and illegally, to set up business distribution networks in the less populated regions of eastern Russia. China watchers wonder if China will eventually move to take the east back from a too-large-to-govern Russia. There are also signs of cooperation, if not alliance: On July 4, 2017 Russia and China together signed an agreement to sanction North Korea after their successful ballistic missile launch, and to warn the U.S. and South Korea of the provocativeness of joint exercises. The closeness of any relationship between these two goliaths is a new feature American and the Europeans have not had to consider for many years.

Latin and South America, both in America’s backyard, in the new millennium suddenly discovered it had options, and in 2011 Brazil’s largest trading partner was…China…who imported twice as much soy, sugar, meat, iron, and copper as did the United States. Japan, watching China, stepped up its aid and investment as well, creating life-giving competition in Mexico and Colombia. The formerly ignored BRICS alliance (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) may become a economic fulcrum to edge any power discrepancies into the Asian sphere.

One aspect of Obama’s pivot to Asia was intended to engage and contain China’s influence in Southeast Asia, though the pivot started to come undone almost as soon as it began. Events in the Middle East and his own intransigent government effectively kept Obama from erecting anything on the pillars of doctrine he might want to call his own. What we noticed instead was a gradual drawing away from involvement or intervention in the Middle East except in where others are willing to come in with us or in cases and places where surgical strikes might achieve an outcome without loss of life or treasure.

The West is still struggling to adapt to low growth and unemployment as a result of China’s low cost production, but Europe and America are still the desired destination of the world’s migrant peoples, make no mistake. China is able to make great investment of human resources into Africa’s infrastructure development because their own level of development is not so distant from what they find in Africa. The technologies used in both align.

Rachman makes clear that the West still holds the institutional advantage: many of the key institutions that allow smooth communication, banking, and trade were created by and situated in the West. Sanctions are suffocatingly effective on excluded countries, cutting them off from many life-giving international exchanges. Until changes are made to the centrality of these internationally-recognized bodies, and challenges are on the horizon, the West is still central to the aspirations of the world.

There is a huge amount of fascinating discussion and no-fat detail in this worthwhile read and Rachman has gotten a good deal of attention: check out the WSJ review, those of you with subscriptions, as well as the following links NPR interviewed Rachman, The Atlantic’s Uri Freidman interviewed Rachman, and the NYT published in April an article by Rachman about his premise. This is a marvelously readable ‘catch-up’ volume for those of us who took our eyes off the ball occasionally in the past ten years, but those who have been watching with undivided attention will be grateful for his overview and his discussion of where it is leading us. Highly recommended.





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Woolly by Ben Mezrich

Hardcover, 304 pages Expected publication: July 4th 2017 by Atria Books ISBN13: 9781501135552

Mezrich picks interesting topics, I will concede that. Readers may already have heard some years ago that a Harvard lab was working on de-extinction of the Woolly Mammoth. Mezrich brings us up to date on this project; indeed, the first and last chapters in this nonfiction are set in the future.

If you are familiar with Mezrich’s writing, the author weights the concept of narrative nonfiction heavily on the narrative and fiction sides, ostensibly to stoke momentum and get folks interested. The only problem is that his very good instincts about what is intrinsically an interesting story fights with his method. Sometimes the reader has to thrash through pages of invented dialogue to reach a critical conclusion, a real buzz killer if there ever was one.

But this story works on many levels, and while we are following his careful step-by-step thrust with one eye, our mind is busy on the operations of a lab and the implications of the study for medicine, for wildlife, for every aspect of our visible and invisible world. Mezrich eventually addresses many of these key issues in the text, usually making the science sound responsible and considered.

I started to grow more uncomfortable towards the end of the book, when we are reminded that the science has progressed so far so fast that genomic modifications have escaped the lab environment and can be undertaken in a made-over garage for relatively small costs, and that billionaires of every stripe are lining up to make their money count for something big.

The real excitement of this story is in our imaginations, and what the skills and knowledge of present-day scientists can allow us to imagine. Mezrich places us in fund-raising meetings with billionaires, allowing the most humble among us to enjoy the same stories and sense of excitement that fuels movers and shakers. If the glamour of the whole thing begins to seem suspect at some point, I think you’ve caught my sense of unease.

Mezrich shares the history of the project, including the work by Nikita Zimov in Northern Siberia, determining that woolly mammoths seemed to have played a role in preserving the permafrost levels of the tundra, by upturning the soil and exposing lower layers to the freezing temperatures. His father, Sergey Zimov, apparently theorized that reestablishing animal herds that roamed Siberia earlier in human history might play a role in keeping escaping carbon and methane, now sequestered in permafrost, from accelerating the speed at which the earth warms.

The fact that woolly mammoth remains are discovered regularly now in thawing and melting ice and snow of the north is something I had not known. The ancient ivory from the tusks is not protected and is therefore an important source of income for hunters, sold in lieu of protected elephant tusks, for the same reasons, to the same buyers.

The scientists involved in the story at one of the Church labs at Harvard are fascinating individuals in their own right, each with a backstory that only fuels our interest. The project has been going on long enough now that the twenty-something personnel involved at the beginning of the project are turning it over to others, younger ones still, to ensure continuity of skills on such a forward-looking project. The whole concept and execution of the mammoth idea is sufficiently…mammoth…and complex enough to make readers feel as though they have been subtly changed by the experience.

The real life story ends with woolly mammoth DNA implanted in an elephant cell. Dr. Frank Church, the originator of this project, to his credit, decides not to use elephants to gestate the beast that might develop, but to construct a synthetic uterus. That is currently underway. Stay tuned.

Due out July 4th.



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Hostage by Guy Delisle

Hardcover, 436 pages Pub April 25th 2017 by Drawn & Quarterly (first published September 16th 2016) Orig Title S'enfuir. Récit d'un otage. ISBN13: 9781770462793

With this new book released in the U.S. in the spring of this year, French Canadian graphic artist and animator Guy Delisle takes a departure from his more usual graphic novels about his life as the spouse of a Médecins Sans Frontières physician to tell the story of a real innocent abroad, Christophe André, on his first assignment for MSF in Ingushetia, in the North Caucasus in 1997.

Christophe was taken hostage, driven across the border into Chechnya, and outside of Grozny he was held for ransom for three months. He had been in his post for three months when they came for him. He spent the bulk of his captivity chained to a radiator in a small room with a mattress stuffed with straw. He was fed watery soup and allowed bathroom breaks, but otherwise had no opportunity to speak, see the sky, move freely.

Ransom negotiations were slow: when he escaped, finally, the translator assigned to his office in Ingushetia told him other foreigners had been kidnapped in the time he was being held. The 400+ pages of this book are not a struggle; readers spend the time thinking about what they might do in similar circumstances, and interrogate themselves about the scene and their own strengths. André himself passed the more terrible stretches by recalling in great detail the military commanders, battles, and outcomes he had studied when he was younger, including Russian, French, and American battles.

The escape at the end is harrowing, and stomach-dropping. André simply did not know whom to trust. Eventually he made it back to his home in Paris, and six months after that went back to MSF and asked for a new assignment. He worked twenty years for MSF after that experience.

Here is a Public Radio International The World radio interview with the artist Delisle about this new book, Hostage, the kind of story that lingers in one's memory:




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There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In by Ludmilla Patrushevskaya

Paperback, 181 pages Pub October 28th 2014 by Penguin Books (first published 2002) ISBN13: 9780143121664

Not long ago I reviewed a short memoir published by Petrushevskaya, The Girl from the Metropol Hotel: Growing Up in Communist Russia, in which I mused about rumors of her talent, never having read any of her poetry, stories, or novelettes. Petrushevskaya has a savage humor borne of long deprivation. Her work bears signs of torture of the spirit; she recognizes how to cannily exploit human weakness to stay alive. But she also has a huge umbrella of compassion which she holds over those she loves. Reading her work is a breathtaking experience.

This collection is comprised of a novelette, "The Time is Night," and two shorter stories. The work altogether expresses every feeling of love, desperation, hope, and bitter despair that a mother can feel about her children in any country in any time. It is an epic, deeply funny, excoriating look at how the deprivations in Russian social, political, and economic life have worked loose the traditional bonds of family. It is compulsive reading. The work was published in Germany before it could be published in Russia, having been banned there.

"It all seems like yesterday. I look back on my life—men are like roadsigns, children mark chronology. Not very attractive, I know, but what is, if you look closely?"

A proud poet finds herself destitute in late middle age. Her son is in prison for theft (and maybe murder) and her daughter keeps showing up pregnant and wanting more than the poet has to spare. The poet takes her daughter’s first child to care for and continues to suffer ungrateful visits from her children whenever they need something. Anna Summers, translator for this series of stories, tells us in the Introduction that

"…her heroines are tired, scared, impoverished women who have been devastated by domestic tragedies and who see little beyond the question, How to raise a child? How to feed it, clothe it, educate it when there is no strength left and no resources?"

When "The Time is Night" was finally published in Russia, it came out at the same time as the third piece, "Among Friends.” "Time…" is a novelette, its length over one hundred pages; "…Friends" is less than thirty pages, outlining a grotesque collection of viperish friends and former spouses, all calculating how and what they can score from knowing someone but paying no attention to the larger world outside their immediate purview. The incestuous theft and jealousy rife within the group is ghetto poverty: no one can break free of the poisonous atmosphere because they need each other. The story is a short quick shard that cleaves the heart, and leaves the reader gasping: it speaks directly to what some feel they must resort to “protect” their children.

The second story, "Chocolates with Liqueur," is the one written the most recently (2002). Summers tells us it was written as a tribute to Edgar Allen Poe. The story itself is broken into five parts; I thought the story was complete after the first part which contains the most horrendous and coruscating engagement scene I have ever encountered, without us knowing it is just a continuation of the theme of how difficult it is to find a place to live. The atmosphere gets thicker, darker, and heavy with motive as befits a Poe tribute, and finishes pointing to "The Cask of Amontillado," thought to be Poe’s best short story. In that story Poe created a family motto suggesting that the family history is filled with acts of revenge: "Nemo me impune lacessit" (No one attacks me with impunity). Find Petrushevskaya's story somewhere and read it. It feels positively ancient, as though this were a story written at the dawn of time.

The twist in the nature of marriage and family comes from the search for a safe place in a society where food, lodging, dignity are in short supply. Petrushevskaya is controlled She has seen it all and still gives us art. I don’t know which of these stories I like the best. She deserves all the awards and all the adulation. She is extraordinary.





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Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

Hardcover, 240 pages Expected publ: March 7th 2017 by Riverhead Books ISBN13: 9780735212176

People are on the move in Hamid’s latest book, south to north and east to west. This strange small novel definitely has the feel of a season of sense8, the Netflix Original production about shifts in consciousness, space, and time. Hamid’s characters, Nadia and Saeed, experience the bending of time and place, as when they leave their own war-torn country on the Asian subcontinent, a "passage both like dying and like being born."

Hamid’s female character Nadia, who insists on being draped in a black cloak or abaya, is more risk-taking and forward-thinking than Saeed. Nadia, not religious, wears the abaya to deflect attention, and it works, usually. Sometimes she does draw the anger or ire of men, when she is riding a powerful motorcycle or working in a store, but she doesn't back down, staring at the men steadily, aware and awake but not showing fear.

Perceptions of the abaya change in the course of the novel. Once a means of conformity and of escaping notice, in the west and in the future the abaya becomes a statement of nonconformity and defiance. Nadia likes this gesture even better.

Saeed, on the other hand, is good, kind, compassionate, nonviolent: he does not enjoy a tangle and avoids rather than confronts. He’d learned to pray from his father, much as one is taught to think critically or handle difficulty. Praying became “a lament, a consolation…a hope” that steadied and centered him.

Throughout the novel these alternate approaches to life gently grate on the two young lovers who had not decided to spend their lives together until they found they had no option. The genuine love they feel for one another feels like displacement, since the families of each are lost.

The refugee life, landing on Mykonos and somehow being smuggled to London, is hazy in process, but not in content. The danger, the hunger, the uncertainty, the resistance from light-skinned natives…these feel some years in the future, despite our current history, because electricity is becoming scarce, and times are harsh. Time in this novel is intentionally fluid and hard to reckon.

One day when Nadia sees on her phone a woman in a black abaya reading something on her phone, “she wondered how this could be, how she could both read this news and be this news.” Time was bending around her: she might be from the past reading about the future or she might be from the future reading about the past. She might be two Nadias…going in different directions.

Hamid also dislocates the reader in space, in one paragraph describing Nadia and Saeed in London and in the next describing a family in Mexico, just miles from the Pacific on the U.S. border, facing a paradoxically dry environment so close to water. No explanation is given for this wild shift west, as far west as one can get before entering again the east.

What happens in the novel is that time moves away from us. Hamid imagines our future, folding time and location. Remember Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being in which time is folded? Ozeki makes a statement about physics, love, and life on earth, and I think Hamid might be pointing to this also. His characters love one another, but the stresses of their needs wear them out. They find sometimes that it is just easier to try to slide through the cracks alone, though sometimes one wouldn’t survive alone. Think electrons. Think quantum theory.

The lifetime Hamid describes in this novel feels like it could be now and also a long time in the future: a Muslim country torn apart, population movement via smugglers, a Greek island, Europe. But interspersed we are also getting news from Japan, South America, Northern Africa. Something big has happened. The policies of control at first are harsh and then loosen, so we suspect a big event. Borders are no more and groups of people try to decide the best way to govern, to protect, to provide.

In one of the narrative shifts, Hamid points to a woman of advanced years and Asian descent living in Palo Alto. The woman lives in the same house she’d lived in since childhood, the house having passed to her from her parents. She’d been married more than once, had children, all while living in the house and yet now she felt distant from her neighborhood. Everything had changed around her while she stayed still. She was a migrant, too, Hamid suggests, because time had made her own insular unchanging world anachronistic. "We are all migrants through time."

This was a difficult book to understand through listening. I had the Penguin Random House production read by the author (thank you PRH Audio). Hamid read the book as though it were poetry, with stylized stops and breaths and some distance from the material. At times I felt totally involved, understanding it cognitively, but his sudden shifts to different parts of the world seemed intentionally dislocating.

The final quarter of the novel really threw me. I listened to it five or more times and within a few sentences my mind was wandering each time. There must be something in there that sends me off, not computing. I downloaded a print copy (Thank you Riverhead & Edelweiss). This work is a good candidate for Audible's Whispersync option.

This novel breaks new ground for Hamid. You are going to find yourself mulling his meaning as you examine our recent past, live through our near term, and contemplate our future. Below find a clip of the audiobook.





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The Girl from the Metropol Hotel: Growing Up in Communist Russia by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, translated by Anna Summers

Paperback, 176 pages Pub February 7th 2017 by Penguin Books ISBN13: 9780143129974

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya was born in Moscow in 1938. The Girl from the Metropol Hotel is a short memoir of the time after her twenty-seven-year-old mother finished university and returned to her grandparents' house after four years away to bring Ludmilla back to Moscow. Ludmilla was on the streets by then, having ‘escaped’ the poverty of her grandparents’ upbringing in Kuybyshev.

On the street in Kuybyshev, Petrushevskaya took cold-eyed account of what she could sell to earn enough money to eat. She sang, and recited poetry. After one particularly moving rendition of one of Gogol’s short stories, a weeping woman in a large empty apartment offered her a green cardigan, which she took, a little perplexed, and not especially grateful. She wore it every day.

Petrushevskaya is said by some to be one of Russia’s greatest living writers. I had never heard of her. I always have some confusion in my own head about a repressive regime and the awards it grants: do the things a regime praises have the same currency out of country? In this case, I believe so, as she has been living outside of Russia for decades. It is said that in Russia Petrushevskaya was blacklisted in the 70s, was published in the 80s, and awarded in the 90s.

I think the citizenry must make their decision, and whomever is read and praised among the citizenry is a good choice for longevity of reputation, particularly in Russia. Russians have a brilliant literary tradition, including important satiric writers who were long-suppressed. Russians know all about the importance of language and how it can move one.

The same way Petrushevskaya looked upon her chances as a child on the streets is the kind of voice she uses in this memoir. She is matter-of-fact and does not at all curry our sympathies for a cold and hungry childhood. Everyone she knew was the same. There was no feeling sorry, just being more clever, more lucky, more resilient. To live by one’s wits requires keen attention, which must be how her writer’s eye developed. Whatever had value in a certain scene is something worth remembering.

Petrushevskaya is also known as a playwright, and there is a bit of a playwright’s multiplicity of voice in her memoir as well. She is able to see points of view and where they diverge, defining conflict. She has been writing from Eastern Europe and America since the 1990’s, though she recently began composing new lyrics for songs she likes and is singing on a cabaret circuit, that sometimes includes major venues like Moscow House of Music, around Russia.

Three books of stories have received wide acclaim, and The New Yorker published three. Her stories are said to be known for a fairytale quality, urban legend, or perhaps dark reports from a mystical, allegorical fantasy world. The books titles might give readers some idea of her grim realism: There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband, and He Killed Himself: Love Stories, and There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby , and her latest to be translated, There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In.

Moments of real pathos in this memoir are written (and spoken in the audio version) with no pathos. Like anyone who has experienced the trauma of revolution or war, if one manages to survive, one often just gets on with it—with the business of living. Not another second will be spent wasted by looking back and stemming one’s forward progress with regret.

The audio was narrated by Kate Mulgrew, produced by Penguin Random House. Anna Summers did the translation and has written an Introduction which gives readers some background, in case, like me, you’d never heard of Petrushevskaya.

Below please find a short excerpt of Kate Mulgrew's reading of the memoir:


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Reagan's War by Peter Schweizer

Steve Bannon, now a senior advisor to President-Elect Trump, has a film on his resume that excited some folks, called In the Face of Evil. The film was apparently based on a book by Peter Schweizer—this book in fact. It took some doing, but I managed to get my hands on a copy of the film and I was surprised. It didn’t seem particularly kind to Ronald Reagan, but painted him as a failed actor with a single obsession in his entire life: the destruction of the communist political system. Now, with echoes of Reagan resounding in Trump's tweets ("Let the arms race begin!"), I wonder if the film doesn't tell us what Bannon might be advising Trump to do.

The film used set-ups for shots that one will recognize from old film classics like Metropolis (dark, brooding, shots of creepy overlords), Citizen Kane (dark, brooding shots of politicians with creepy amounts of power), and a couple others, so it seemed like a weird montage by a newbie director who wanted to remind viewers of more important films than his own.

After watching the film, I then wondered about the book: was it as ambiguous about Reagan’s obsession as I felt the film was? Schweizer’s book reads like ad copy from the 1950s, not a book on political affairs published in 2002, and the book precisely illustrates my unease with supposed ‘histories:’

"Along with their children Michael and Maureen, Ron and Jane [Wyman] lived in a beautiful home with a pool on Cordell Drive. He owned a splendid ranch near Riverside, and when he and Jane weren’t at the studio lot, they could be found playing golf at the prestigious Hillcrest Country Club with Jack Benny and George Burns. At night they often dined at the trendy Beverly Club."

Reagan was an executive committee member of the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of Arts, Sciences, and Professions (HICCASP) which was accused in 1946 of being a communist front. Reagan instantly supported release of a statement denying support for communists which was opposed by the majority, leading to infighting and Reagan’s resignation. He was shortly elected to lead the Screen Actor’s Guild and became an FBI informant against his fellows in SAG. Wyman divorced him for “mental cruelty” when the two “engaged in continual arguments on his political views.”

Reagan became enamored of Arthur Koestler’s disillusionment with communism in 1948, when he read Koestler’s book, Darkness at Noon and gradually conceived of

”the opportunity to combine his love of movies with his newfound mission to undermine communism. Why not use Hollywood films to undermine the Soviets?”

Ah, the wheels turn, grinding out opportunities. From 1959 through 1963 Reagan honed and developed his anti-communist message, and by the time he gave his “rendezvous with destiny” speech [also called “A Time for Choosing”] in front of a national audience in support of Barry Goldwater at the Cocoanut [sic] Grove, Los Angeles in 1964, he’d been delivering versions of the speech for two years already.

What I take away from this book and my haphazard attempts to fact-check is that it is detailed, fluently-written--even absorbing if one is interested in Reagan's intellectual prowess--but also narrowly-focused, one-sided, un-nuanced propaganda supporting Reagan’s monomaniacal zeal for democracy’s strength in light of the encroachment of communist ideas. Certainly watching the film of the book would take less time, and you would have to ask yourself at the end of it…what kind of men are these that praise Reagan’s strength in defying Russia before, and praise Trump’s cozying up to Russia now?

Is it the clarity of a single motivating idea, and appreciation of strongman attitudes and propaganda techniques that captures Schweizer's and Bannon’s imagination and support? Perhaps communism was the real bugbear, not Russia, and now that Putin is clearly a world-class oligarch in the tradition of democracies and colonial empires the world over, Putin is no longer the threat, but the partner.

There is no doubt that Reagan's arms race and inflexibility 'broke' the less-strong Russian economy. Perhaps Trump hopes to push Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea to the wall in the same way, through the threat of weaponry escalation. A bloodless kind of war, played economically. The deep cynicism needed for this tack misreads our opponents and reflects how the conservative viewpoint in America has developed under Republicans and the Koch brothers' influence.

I’d love to see the insights of others about the book or on Bannon’s film, In the Face of Evil. I hesitate to recommend either one, however, not finding the central ideas sufficiently complicated enough to explain or deliver justice in today’s complex environment. I learned to think differently, growing up, and to seek less autocratic solutions.



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Secondhand Time by Svetlana Alexievich, translated by Bela Shayevich

I was eleven or perhaps twelve years old when I learned that ignorance is no excuse for anything.

That revelation completely changed the way I viewed the world. I ran to my parents, separately, I remember, my eyes wide. I said to each of them, “Ignorance is no excuse!” It won’t save anyone from the repercussions of whatever they are ignorant of. You can die as a result of ignorance or you can participate in something evil as a result of ignorance.

As I remember it, my parents did not say anything. There is much I would think as a result of my eleven-year-old coming to me with such a revelation, and I am not sure I would know what to respond, either. But it was a big moment, and it came from reading a novel.

Now I wonder which novel gave me such an insight, but I cannot remember. I was an ordinary schoolgirl, with no special access to literature. I read too much, my sisters said, and most of them were bodice-rippers…

This book reminds me of that moment of realization. The insights into what man is and how he responds to national, political, and personal trauma come fast and hard in this work. Alexievich begins by recording voices from the Gorbachev years: “Those were wonderful, naïve years…” Both for and against Gorbachev, the voices record people’s naiveté. They had an excuse, the lack of reliable, comprehensive news coverage being one of them, but it would not save them from their future nor their past.

There is simply nothing to compare with this fabulous reconstruction of the lives of people under communism and after. Alexievich records the stories of people under the dictatorship of the people, and there is so much nuance, so much pain, fear, crazy love, faith, and delusion tied in with people’s understanding of those years that it becomes as clear a record of what humanity is that we have.

“Changing the nature of man” was on the table. From the sounds of some voices, it succeeded on every measure. But if nature can be changed, we question again that "nature." Naomi Klein tells us man is not hopelessly greedy but it is hard to see that when greed is rewarded and protected. The Soviet Union, Russia, has gone through enormous social upheaval in the last one hundred years, and Alexievich manages to give us a window through which we can begin to see what happened to people. It is breathtaking.

Among the voices are ordinary folk, high Kremlin officials, members of the brigades who spent their days shooting “enemies of the people.” We see what they were thinking at the time and what they are thinking now. Because governance the world over has many similarities, constraints, and imperatives, everyone who can read should see how governance actually plays out, no matter what we believe.

Alexievich has taken memory and made literature. For me, it will be one of the most meaningful books I have ever come across. I listened to the Penguin Random House Audio version of this, narrated by a full cast. It was beautifully done, and I highly recommend this method of consumption.

An interesting piece written by Sophie Pinkham in the New Republic magazine gives us some insight into how Alexievich may have gone about constructing her work. I disagree with Pinkham's conclusions, but her dogged research into the creation of the work itself reveals how this work has become Art.


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The Thistle and the Drone by Akbar Ahmed

Ahmed starts out reframing the way the West views the Muslim world. Instead of looking at interactions in the world as a “clash of civilizations,” he posits that we should be looking at the Muslim diaspora as a set of tribal communities in conflict with their central governments. While some may think this is accepted thought already, it certainly was not when we went into Iraq in 1990, nor in 2003. Ahmed makes a compelling case with examples extending from Albania and Turkey to China and Indonesia, highlighting different models of organization and center-periphery relationships that apply throughout this huge area.

Once the framing is stated, it almost seems obvious, which is perhaps the strongest argument for reading this book. Ahmed goes further to explain how the West has exacerbated regional tensions by inserting themselves into this conflict under the aegis of “the war on terror,” and turned the fight into a global affair against westernization and globalization as defined by Tom Friedman. The unintentional “bug splat” of drone strikes, or the civilian deaths coincident with targeted killings of terrorists, means tribal leaders have a moral responsibility to fight back, aligning with whomever has the strength and willingness to see that fight through. As long as the drone strikes and collateral damage continues, the fight will continue.

The author uses the metaphor of the drone to represent Western technology and power and points out that the thistle captures the essence of tribal societies. The thistle is prickly, hardy, and very hard to uproot. It has an unusual beauty, and it roots in poor soil. Long after all is destroyed, the thistle will abound. Ahmed tells us that the West was used in some cases by “central governments who cynically and ruthlessly exploited the war on terror to pursue their own agenda against the periphery.” We know it is true.

”It is in the interest of the United States to understand, in all the tribal societies with which it is engaged, the people, the leadership, history, culture, their relationship with the center, their social structures, and the role Islam plays in their lives, These issues are, in face, the subject matter of anthropology…Without this understanding, the war on terror will not end in any kind of recognizable victory as current military actions and policies are only exacerbating the conflict."

Ahmed has met Presidents Bush and Obama in his role as academic and Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. “Bush’s administration, I felt, was spectacularly wrong because it was imposing a prefabricated frame of different cultures and societies…Obama’s administration was spectacularly unsure…Both administrations were driven by issues almost wholly on a political level, neglecting the moral and social dimensions and their implications.” Ahmed’s insights may be one of the reasons President Obama did not bomb Syria when the conflict began there. But much damage had been and continues to be done to the relationship tribal groups have with the United States. When the U.S. government put human and civil rights to the service of security, any admiration the U.S. had garnered began to erode.

Ahmed is a huge fan of America’s founding fathers, and the U.S. Constitution. He points out that America itself has wrestled with the center-periphery issue itself in dealing with Native American Indians. Benjamin Franklin wrote that Europeans could learn a great deal from tribal societies: when a Native American elder was offered the opportunity to have several of his tribe educated at a local Virginia college, the elder thanked the government and replied:

"Our Ideas of this Kind of Education happen not to be the same with yours…Several of our Young People were formerly brought up at the Colleges of the Northern Provinces; they were instructed in all your Sciences; but when they came back to us, they were bad Runners, ignorant of every means of living in the Woods, unable to bear either Cold or Hunger, knew neither how to build a Cabin, take a Deer, or kill an Enemy, spoke our Language imperfectly; were therefore neither fit for Hunters, Warriors, or Counsellors; they were totally good for nothing… however…if the Gentlemen of Virginia will send us a dozen of their Sons, we will take great Care of their Education, instruct them in all we know, and make Men of them."

The rise of “instant terror experts” that arose in and around the think tanks sprinkling Washington after 9/11 fueled a distorted view of Islam and seeded Islamophobia throughout the U.S., mistakenly defining Islam as the enemy in the global war on terror. Ahmed gives the U.S. Army credit for gaining a greater understanding of the importance of tribal culture as the war in Afghanistan dragged on, but the strategy of working with tribes as a partner came too late: “The United States did not have the time, the resources, or the temperament to create an effective and neutral tribal administration…”

The solution, according to Ahmed, is using the tribal structure and code to repair “mutations into violence:”

"If the tribal code promotes the notion of revenge, then it just as surely advocates the resolution of conflict through a council of elders based on justice and tradition…While the state must express its ideas of nationhood by providing education and other benefits to its peoples, the leaders of the periphery need to encourage their followers to participate in the processes of change and take advantage of them. The state must understand that its components have different customs and traditions, and it needs to acknowledge them, granting communities on the periphery the full rights and privileges enjoyed by its other citizens…however good the intentions on both sides, there is still the matter of how the each sees the other…each side must appreciate the perception the other side has of it.

"...People on periphery have been traumatized beyond imagination in recent years…They face widespread famine and disease and are voiceless and friendless in a hostile world…They have been robbed of their dignity and honor…Yet the world seems indifferent to their suffering and is barely aware of its scale…The test is to see a common humanity in the suffering of others.”

Ahmed is an academic and he writes fulsomely, with many examples and vignettes. The argument is strong and logical enough to be stated simply in a few pages, though, and we quickly recognize the value of this recast of the conflict in which we are embroiled. I really appreciate his taking the time to write his thesis and I come away with a fresh perspective and appreciation of conflict and amity in our world.

This book is Part III of a trilogy examining relations between America and the Muslim world. It is self-contained, however, individuals may find it worthwhile to look at Ahmed's previous work, Journey into Islam and Journey into America. Colonel David Kilcullen, author of The Accidental Guerrilla blurbs praise on the back: "...required reading..."


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The Complete Guide to Contemporary World Fiction by M.A. Orthofer

Orthofer lives in New York currently and was founder in 1999 of the complete review, a website dedicated to reviews of recent literature from around the world. In 2002 Orthofer included a blog, The Literary Saloon, which carries news from interviews, reviews, and notes on awards, publication, items of interest from around the internet. Orthofer has been updating it nearly every day.

The reach of Orthofer’s interests is nothing short of astounding. In this compendium of contemporary world literature he tries to include short mention of the work of leading litterateurs around the world and includes dates of publication and translation when a work is mentioned. This is an indispensable guide for those interested in world literature for it introduces readers to new authors and commonalities among authors either in genre or style that allow us to find what suits our own voracious reading habits.

This work can be read for itself, but it is more likely to be used as a reference text for readers interested in contemporary world literature. It can be downloaded as an ebook or referenced from the hardcopy. Continents are broken into constituent parts and each countries’ authors are mentioned with reference to their major works. While I have always thought myself interested in “world literature,” the range of this work makes me realize how parochial my reading has been, mostly limited to the overseas imaginings of writers of English. I note a recent entry in The Literary Saloon claims there has been a huge outpouring of translations of contemporary Arabic literature, a trend surely long awaited.

North American literature is not included in this work because the author is pointing to the need for American readers to vary their diet and expand their horizons:

”Because American authors provide an enormous amount and variety of work, American readers are arguably spoiled for choice even without resorting to fiction from abroad…In almost every other country, foreign literature occupies a central and prominent position, but in the United States it seems to sit far more precariously on the fringes…foreign literature can offer entirely new dimension and perspectives…great literature knows no borders.

When I founded the Complete Review (complete-review.com) in 1999, one of my goals to to take advantage of the Internet’s tremendous reach and connectivity…Ironically, though, one of the shortcomings of this and most other Internet resources is its tremendous scope…[This book] provides an entry point and more general overview various nations’ literatures, as well as a foundation to help readers navigate what is available on the Internet.”
—from the Introduction

Orthofer has attempted something most of us might consider impossible, and he has done a convincing job of it. If it lacks anything, it is up to us to help straighten it out. I highly recommend everyone have a look at this book to see what you are missing. If it seems overwhelming, I sympathize. Imagine how Orthofer felt when he began.

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The New Tsar: The Rise & Reign of Vladimir Putin by Steven Lee Myers

During the election pre-season in America, I was as surprised and intrigued at the support for Donald Trump as the rest of the thinking universe (not the pundits, of course). As I laughed at his unscripted policy-free speeches and intentionally note-worthy off-the-cuff remarks, I remember thinking I would love to see the effect of his ‘shock and awe’ campaign on someone like Putin. I thought Trump would be too unpredictable and outspoken for Putin. I am ready to take that back. In a weird kind of way, both men, neither political operatives at the start of their careers, are a similar kind of not-liberal, not-conservative, whatever-works nationalist kind of politician. And both have created a cult of personality to facilitate a kind of one-man rule.

Myers allowed me to catch this glimpse of Putin at his start in government as an ordinary man unused to and previously uninterested in political power. When he began in the Sobchak Leningrad government, he may or may not have been involved in skimming from contracts he arranged with the newly burgeoning private sector after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. He certainly was in a position to do so, and many of the people he awarded contracts did so: he formed firm friendships and nurtured loyal apparatchiks in Leningrad that reappear throughout his political career. But it is also true that Russia in the early 1990’s was a wild place with many crime lords jockeying for power. Putin’s family was targeted at least once. Putin did not at that time appear to have the trappings of new wealth, though we learned only recently of monies in his name from the Panama Papers. It is possible that his wealth accumulated from later dealings.

It has always been difficult to understand why Putin was reputed to enjoy such wide public support in Russia, but I realize now that our media reporting emphasized bad judgment and outcomes while Russian media outlets emphasized good intent and nationalism. Myers gives a far more nuanced picture of Putin growing into his role as president—prime minister—president again in this book. If Putin didn’t begin as a friend to oligarchs, he gradually relaxed into the role. He began as a man with he stated goal of “making Russia great again.” He could see that some people were gaming the system by purchasing national reserves of commodities improperly priced and selling them at more realistically priced international values. This was not illegal at the time, just morally suspect. Rather than trying to fix the system of laws that allowed this rape of mineral and energy resources to continue, Putin selectively applied legal and taxation rules on the books to hamper, entangle, or otherwise inhibit the activities of people who did not work closely with him.

Myers charts the hardening of Putin’s character, from his shock and dismay upon learning that Yeltsin had chosen him as a political successor to his chagrin upon learning that his chosen successor, Medvedev, had both an opinion and a weakness that didn’t partner Putin well. And what was very clear in Myers’ telling was the perception of U.S. foreign policy decisions by Russians and Putin. By the time Edward Snowden comes on the scene late in the book, we laugh at Putin’s pleasure in pointing out political dissidence and jail is not just a Russian thing.

”Ask yourself, do you need to put such people in jail, or not?”

Putin was more confident during his second presidency and yet the moment he assumed power the second time his poll ratings began to fall. It was the moment citizens realized that there was really no conversation, no political discussion going on. It only takes twenty years for a political climate to change irrevocably: ask Hillary Clinton. In twenty years, young people with no historical memory bring a new clarity to what is happening right now, with no regard to what came before. Pussy Riot called out Putin; Sanders’ supporters are calling out Clinton.

Putin operated, and operates now, by relying on a close and loyal group of political “friends” from his time in the FSB and his time working for Sobchak in Leningrad. Loyalty is so prized that it would not surprise me to learn that some of the political murders committed during Putin’s reign were not “ordered” by himself. It seems entirely possible to me that elements in a large bureaucracy might prove their loyalty by eliminating static that was damaging to the leader. The problem with a large bureaucracy is that it can take on a character of its own and is not easy to change.

A really strange event occurred early in Putin’s first presidency: the bombing of the apartment buildings in Moscow and the sacks of FSB-sourced explosives found in the apartment building in Ryazan. These incidents have never been satisfactorily explained, and could be an example of a bureaucracy grinding out [imperfect] solutions to perceived problems that impact Putin & Co. In a case like that, or in the case of sheer incompetence (also an enduring feature of large bureaucracy), it is not hard to see Putin keeping mum out of loyalty to those he is protecting. Bill Browder’s account of his time making money hand-over-fist in the 1990’s in Russia, Red Notice, mentioned that powerful figures known to Putin wanted the real estate on which those apartment buildings were built and were meeting resistance. Some actions, like poisoning political opponents or shooting reporters in the the stairwells of their buildings, are simply too crude, destructive, and beneath the dignity of someone in power to imagine they are a “command.” Whatever the truth of the matter, this did not have to originate in the Kremlin to be horrifying in its motivation. It does appear, however, that it was condoned by the Kremlin since a good explanation was never uncovered.

One of the things that motivates Putin is the expanding power of NATO in Europe. Putin still thinks in terms of great powers and feels he is being hemmed in by Western Europe nibbling away at his satellite countries. It is hard not to sympathize. Certainly that is happening, and will continue to happen in a Clinton presidency, further exacerbating Putin’s bellicosity, and sense of infringement and inferiority.

Russia is a huge country. “Too big, really” says Ian Frazier in his big book Travels in Siberia. Putin says its size and different cultures is the reason there cannot be a representative democracy like that in America. Since even America doesn’t seem to the have the process working very well at the moment, it is difficult to pretend to know what difficulties arise when trying to restore the kind of power that was shattered by the overthrow of the tsar in the twentieth century in Russia. The only thing I would concede is that ruling Russia must be a very difficult job, particularly when one is looking backward. One must look ahead, not backward, when one is leading, it seems to me.

I feel like I have gotten a terrific education reading this book and am much better able to parse news coming out of Russia, Europe, and the Middle East today. I can now put Putin into the context vis-a-vis U.S. diplomatic relations. Clinton must be the last person Putin would want to see be elected president in the United States, and in some ways Trump is as unpredictable as Putin has claimed he has tried to be. But I am not recommending a vote for Trump. I think a better choice might be neither of these two.



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Red Notice by Bill Browder

Paperback, 416 pages Published October 20th 2015 by Simon & Schuster (first published January 1st 2015)

Bill Browder has a fascinating tale to tell, of his family background as the grandson of a noted Communist, of his math-whiz father and mother, of his physicist brother. He was the black sheep of the family…until he became a billionaire in his thirties by investing in undervalued Russian oil stocks. His first foray into Russia, to advise the Murmansk Trawler Fleet on privatization, must go down in the annals as a classic of West meets East. The whole story of Browder’s rise to wealth, with its moments of terrifying vertigo as markets collapsed with the Asian economic crisis in 1997, is propulsive and gripping. But more was to come, and no one could imagine the way the saga unfolded.

A red notice is issued by Interpol for the provisional arrest and extradition of an individual for whom an arrest warrant has been issued in the requesting country. Russia requested a red notice from Interpol with regard to Bill Browder, charging him in absentia with tax evasion among other crimes including the murder of Sergei Magnitsky, a Browder lawyer who perished in a Russian jail after medical interventions were withheld. This book tells the story of how Magnitsky’s oppressors became international pariahs, had their U.S.-based assets frozen and visas revoked or refused, a result of The Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act passed in the United States in December 2012.

Browder’s Hermitage Capital Management hedge fund still operates, though after his expulsion from Russia Browder was obliged to expand his investment purview, opening Hermitage Global which focused on emerging markets. Hermitage Capital Management almost from its inception was an activist fund which exposed criminal wrongdoing by majority shareholders in undervaluing or “stealing” company assets in order to allow profits to flow to corrupt bureaucrats and their businessmen partners. Browder would purchase a minority share in a [often large oil] company, and then expose how the shares were undervalued, prompting many investors to jump into the market for the shares, enriching Browder. One year Browder paid $230 million in income taxes to the Russian state on $1.3 billion in profits. It is just this sum which was later the subject of Russia’s state investigation.

Putin and his circle including Medvedev are implicated in Browder’s story, though Browder shows how Putin was initially outraged at the theft of assets from state coffers, back at the beginning of Browder’s hedge fund successes. Actually, the whole setup—the issuing of vouchers to every Russian for “ownership” of state assets—is a fascinating history that requires further investigation. This compelling story of Browder and Magnitsky does what good nonfiction is meant to do: it makes you hungry for more depth, more history, more info on Putin, Pussy Riot, and Russia itself.

Browder’s writing is best in the beginning, when he tells of his early interest in East European stocks and how he came to look at the investment banking scene. It is pure Michael Lewis-style disbelief at the life of a Wall Street banker. We revel, then, when he sets off on his own, scaring up seed money and taking chances. Browder also shares his personal life, his expensive (and often working) vacations, including resort names, which allowing us a little vicarious vacationing ourselves.

If Browder’s gee whiz writing style began to grate a little by the end, and become a little less believable coming from a much older and wiser billionaire, I put it down to his awareness of his role in creating the disaster that resulted in the need for the Magnitsky Act. There may be something inherently corrupting about making vast amounts of money, albeit perfectly legally, by exploiting the discrepancies in unfair or exploitative valuations as a result of societal and political dislocations. There appears to be no shortage of real oppression in Russia today, and laws have not been robust enough to protect people from exploitation. It looks like a place where we can see naked human nature on display. I thank Browder for the introduction.


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Second Chance (2007) and Strategic Vision (2012) by Zbigniew Brzezinski

Hardcover, 240 pages Published March 6th 2007 by Basic Books (first published 2007);
Hardcover, 224 pages Published January 24th 2012 by Basic Books (first published January 2012)

First published in 2007, the title ‘Second Chance’ refers to the possibility that the United States would be able to recognize and seize its historical moment as the world’s only superpower to do the moral and necessary thing: to lead the world towards greater amity, less divisional politics and severe wealth disparities, and to prepare for the changes climate change will unleash.

Brzezinski was National Security Advisor to Jimmy Carter 1977-81 and went to academia (Harvard, Columbia, Johns Hopkins) since. This book looks at three U.S. presidencies after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. Brzezinski was a Sovietologist by education and is never so articulate and convincing as when he is discussing the intentions and pressures of Russian society.

Brzezinski begins with the intellectual disarray that accompanied the end of the Cold War, something America had been waging for some forty years. He notes the rise of the “mixture of opinions, beliefs, slogans, and pet formulas…that expressed a pre-disposition…for relatively flexible formulations based on a broadly shared, loosely defined set of convictions”: the globalization of Clinton I and the neoconservatism of Bush II. Brzezinski discusses and debunks the neocon attempts to articulate foreign policy: “without 9/11, the [neocon] doctrine probably would have remained a fringe phenomenon, but that catastrophic event gave it the appearance of relevance.”

Bush I enlisted the help of Arab states to oppose Saddam Hussein’s aggression against Kuwait, and began to set in motion a process to address the Israeli-Palestinian issue which, along with American troops on religious ground in Muslim lands, fed resentments in the Middle East .

“A second term might have given Bush I the time to become a truly innovative president, the shaper of a new historical era. Certainly, his record in handling the agony of the Soviet empire deserves the highest plaudits, and it is doubtful that his predecessor, Ronald Reagan, would have performed as skillfully. But on the Middle East, a stunning military victory was diminished into a mere tactical success whose strategic legacy gradually became negative…In brief, George H.W. Bush’s greatest shortcoming was not in what he did but in what he did not do.”

Clinton I is characterized by Brzezinski as a cheerful, idealistic president embracing globalization but primarily concerned with domestic concerns, unwilling to involve the country in adventures outside the borders. Clinton I had a casual style of leadership on the kaffesklatsch model featuring prolonged meetings with spontaneous participation by a wide variety of White House officials whose personal influence was “fluid.”. Only when forced to acknowledge widespread large scale violence in Yugoslavia did he belatedly put together a NATO coalition to oppose it. Clinton I had the smarts, the smooze, and the talent to put the United States into its role as “leader of the free world,” but he did not have the temperament nor discipline for it.

The presidency of Bush II had a “catastrophic” effect on America’s standing in the world. The simplicity with which Bush I elucidated his Manichean worldview, “If you are not with us, you are against us,” shows his complete unawareness of the complexity of world alliances and nations’ decision-making realities. He squandered his opportunity to lead the world by risking the goodwill of every nation by operating on gut instinct rather than through reasoned consideration, turning his adventurism in Iraq into a global disaster that plagues us still.

“…the war on terrorism took on the menacing overtones of a collision with the world of Islam as a whole…the blend of neocon Manichaeanism and President bush’s newfound propensity for catastrophic decisiveness caused the post-9/11 global solidarity to plunge from its historical zenith to its nadir.”

Thus, we turn to strategists like Brzezinksi when things go very badly wrong and we need to know how to extricate ourselves from the holes which we have dug for ourselves. We can see his point, that world leadership is desirable and needed to smooth the differences in opinions among diverse countries. It might as well be the United States, since we are [still] the world’s only superpower. Our internal divisions, however, preclude our ability to solve even the smallest issues we face domestically, negating any privilege wealth and might may accord us.

Brzezinki’s point in writing this book in 2006-7 was that America could still manage to lead if it could manage some restraint and regulation in domestic affairs, and put our values to good use. The book he wrote in 2011-12, Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power , is far more strident and apocalyptic, with far less optimism that the world would look anything like it had for the past several hundred years. It is a new century, and America is in decline.
-------------------

Is American leadership necessary? This was the question I set out to answer when I began looking the analyses of foreign policy experts. One of these experts is Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter (1977-1981). Brzezinski was instrumental in the 1978 Camp David Peace Accords signed by Anwar Sadat and Menachim Begin.

Brzezinski has written many books suggesting initiatives and directions for American foreign policy since he left office, most notably his book Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower in which he describes the successes and failures of three administrations (Bush I, Clinton I, and Bush II) to pull Russia into the European community after the failure of the Soviet state, to address the festering Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and to begin to address widening disparities in wealth & influence among the world’s partners. He has long felt that the world’s remaining superpower could help steer increasingly contentious countries to solutions we will need on problems which will soon arise for all of us in a world changed by climate. Without leadership, the world might not be able to orient our direction to solutions that lessen the burdens of inequality.

In Strategic Vision, written before the reelection of President Obama for a second term in 2012, Brzezinski sounds far more apocalyptic than he ever has, suggesting that unless we take control of our internal political mayhem, the corruption of our financial and political systems, and the widening gap between the wealthy and the rest, we may find the world has moved on, without leadership, to a bunch of special interest nationalities, all seeking to preserve their own interests in an interdependent world.

Naturally, I didn’t like this book as well because it posits there are no roads back once we have missed our opportunities. New opportunities come when old ones are exhausted, but the central question is whether or not we are ready to create opportunities to steady and lessen the rancor developing throughout the world to pressures all of us will be subject to very shortly (debilitating changes wrought by climate change). The American populace seems more awake now than at any other time in recent memory, with outside candidates for president railing at the corruption in the system. We have enormous pressures for change within our own society as a result of political gridlock for precious years. Perhaps the political will is finally solidifying to make the changes necessary. Now we just need to choose a president who can be effective with so many internal and external challenges to their leadership.

Brzezinski is a Sovietologist by education and is extraordinarily fluent, fascinating, and lucid on the subject of changes Russia has undergone and that are ongoing in Russia. It is worth reading the book for that portion alone. He makes a special attempt to incorporate Obama’s pivot to Asia in this book, examining how the strengths and weakness of the Asian and south Asian economies and political systems affect the global balance of power, pointing to India and China as the most populous and potentially influential power centers. He makes a point about China that is worth reiterating: as a country with a homogeneous population and long history of central control, it has been extraordinarily effective in creating an extremely strong national identity. That nationalism is something quite new in the experience of other national entities, riven as they are by populations with different religions and races. China’s sense of itself in the world is just developing: its leaders are patient, but its people are ambitious. They face enormous resource and population pressures and difficulties in modifying their one-party system. We don’t know how this will play out in years to come, but currently China has a stake in the U.S. managing to get the corruption of our financial system under control. It doesn’t want to see us fail in this, not right now. We shouldn’t want it to fail, either.

Brzezinski talks about Obama as president, praising Obama’s speeches as candidate and as president, but noting that Obama never spoke to the American people directly about the challenges we face. Part of the job of a leader is to educate its populace, and to ask it to sacrifice for the common good. Obama failed dismally in not raising for public discussion the corruption of special interest money in election financing, the pressures of climate change on our aging infrastructure, the need for restraint in corporate governance. I feel painfully that missed opportunity, but there is some indication in the early presidential election results that some people have gotten the message anyway, no thanks to a hot-air media which is never so happy than when repeating its own predictions and inaccuracies.

Brzezinski writes of the central position of Turkey and its ambitions, and supports the notion that it would eventually be welcomed into the EU. He still holds out hope that Russia would rein in its divisive tendencies, leading to a conception of the West that looks like the entire North of the globe, including all of North America, through the Mediterranean, and encompassing Russia. This is a large leap, especially in light of events of recent years, but I like seeing how Brzezinski got there.



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America and the World: Conversations on the Future of American Foreign Policy by Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft, Narrated and Moderated by David Ignatius

Hardcover, 304 pages Published September 9th 2008 by Basic Books (first published September 8th 2008)

In the spring leading up to the 2008 election, this conversation between two former National Security Advisors, Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinksi moderated by veteran foreign policy journalist David Ignatius, touched on the state of the world and how America should interact. Both men believe in American exceptionalism, not merely because of our enormous luck in geography and resources, but because our diverse population has given us strength. The development of our democracy followed a path that is not replicable in the rest of the world, but it has given us the resilience we needed to develop a strong sense of the value of personal initiative. Both men conclude that what matters most, what guides our hand in foreign policy, are values. In 2008, both men agreed that Obama and Hillary Clinton embodied those values.

These two highly respected foreign policy analysts are known as “realists” on different sides of the political spectrum but they both recognize the need to balance realism and idealism in a national leader. We are again at the crossroads to choose a national leader, and the candidate who most effectively balances realism with idealism will win.

In eight years much has changed, but much has stayed the same. At that time the two men discussed the withdrawal from Iraq: Brzezinski was more precipitous in his recommendation for an immediate draw down, Scowcroft believed we “broke it, we own it,” though neither man thought it was wise to invade Iraq in the first place. But both men placed as the most important foreign policy issue needing addressing is resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian issue. Imagine. Still. “And you know, the moment Israel and Palestine are reconciled, they have a chance together of becoming the Singapore of the Middle East.” (Brzezinski). “Lebanon is one of the most fragile states in the world. But for a long time, Beirut was the entrepột and Paris of the region. Lebanon was a fragile, carefully balanced multipolar state….I think it is possible for people who don’t agree on all the same things to live together and prosper.” (Scowcroft)

Brzezinski often refers in his dialogue to disparities in wealth in America and in the context of nations and how dangerous this is becoming. He sees in that disparity larger issues rooted in the need for restraint and recognition of the dignity of all individuals, no matter their race, religion, or social group. Both men recognize that fostering a "culture of fear" in our rhetoric will sideline more critical issues that need to be addressed, like climate change. "…America can only respond to [critical issues] if it manages to shape a whole series of differentiated coalitions that are dedicated to a collective response." [May I point out here that young Americans are doing this despite the stodgy intransigence of their parents—to address opportunity and wealth inequality and climate change. Occupy was not a one-off fringe movement, we belatedly realize at our peril.]

Both men talk about the speed of communication and the spread of ideas as something that is accelerating access to information and change, making it more difficult for nations to defend widely unpopular polices.

"Americans tend to a kind of universal activism. Europeans are more preoccupied with what they are and would like to nurture and preserve it. Maybe by combining the two, we can achieve a close transatlantic communication that would be healthy for both of us…In the more developed parts of Europe there is a real absence of the kind of social iniquities and disparities that exist in the United States. These disparities are not healthy. I don’t think they are in keeping with our values…I think we have a lot to learn from Europeans, who in that respect have moved towards a more just and genuinely democratic society than ours." (Brzezinski)

"One of the fundamental differences between Europe and the United States is that Europe has developed in such a way that they’ve had to get along with each other. As a result of geographical limitations, they’ve increasingly lived in larger urban units and therefore had had to have rules for behavior, rules for managing people’s interaction with each other. People who couldn’t stand that kind of confining regulation tended to come over to the United States.
As communities on the U.S. east coast started to develop the same need to manage people’s interactions, those who chafed under regulation moved to our open and empty west. As a result, the U.S. has developed a much stronger tendency to resent government. Hence the motto that government is best that governs least." (Scowcroft)

Scowcroft raises something I have never explicitly thought about before in terms of global politics: that population and resource pressure in China is something that may eventually cause them to cast a hungry eye on Russia.

"When you look at the border between China and Russia, the demographics and the demands on natural resources are such that there’s something almost unnatural about the map in that part of the world. On one side of the border is a huge space, as large as the rest of Asia, inhabited by thirty-five million people. On the other side, the rest of Asia, inhabited by three and a half billion people, one and a half billion of whom are expanding dramatically, getting wealthier, richer, more powerful, more modern. Is that an enduring situation?"(Scowcroft)

There is much, much more: they talk of Putin and the pressures within Russia, some of which have broken out into action in the years since this book was written. It was a bit sketchy on our relationship with China and Asia generally, partly because these men were in office before China was really a major force in our economy and politics. They talk of the need for talks with Iran, which also happened in the years since this book was written. All in all, it was ravishingly interesting, and not so distant that it feels like history.


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American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers by Perry Anderson

Hardcover, 284 pages Published April 14th 2015 by Verso (first published 2013)

An old friend of mine who is a life-long Marxist and an academic recently reconnected, and when he read that I have been mulling over the way the United States has been conducting its foreign policy, he suggested I read this book. British historian and political essayist Perry Anderson is a Professor of History and Sociology at the University of California in Los Angeles and a former editor of the New Left Review.

Anderson bounds through American foreign policy in the twentieth century, masterfully sketching the outlines of “Washington’s drive for global hegemony.” Anderson is persuasive, especially since many of us now are not intimately familiar with the periods he discusses and he can leave out messy and contradictory words, actions, policies, and intentions of the actors and their administrations. Anderson looks at the results of policies rather than stated intent (not a bad thing in itself) and reviews recent literature published by former foreign policy administrators (Kissinger, Brzezinski, Kagan), and academics (Mead, Layton).

Anderson quotes Truman’s Secretary of State Dean Acheson (1949-53) as saying (not for public consumption): “…Congress is too damn representative. It’s just as stupid as the people are; just as uneducated, just as dumb, just as selfish.” This point has been made an infinite number of times by those frustrated with the process of democracy, and, I might add, is heard often these days among observers of the American election for president. I sympathize with Acheson, frankly, but neither he nor I would choose a different system, or a different country.

It is enlightening for any student of a particular discipline to encounter someone with quite different ideas, especially if one is dissatisfied with current thinking on a topic. What really astonished me was that I had never heard of several of the folks he mentions as “those to honour”: Christopher Layne, David Calleo, Gabriel Kolko. What this tells me as a reasonably informed citizen is that folks with different viewpoints are sidelined and not covered, much like the coverage of the western press in conflict areas (see my review of The Jihadis Return by Patrick Cockburn). We just don't hear dissenting voices. Anderson also mentions Chalmers Johnson, Andrew Bacevich, and Noam Chomsky in his select group of those to honor, all of whom I have heard. But I dislike Bacevich for the very reason I tend to dismiss Anderson himself.

Both Bacevich and Anderson are academics, and academics tend to talk among themselves and pat themselves on the back for their wise pronouncements or otherwise shrilly denounce colleagues for holding different opinions. But they pontificate to themselves. Their arguments bear almost no relation to actual diplomacy, or the day to day scrum of running a country. Unless their ideas are brought into the White House with an administration, there is no chance these folks are going to be listened to because their bombast and hurled insults make their comments hard to hear.

Anderson makes the point that “the literature of grand strategy forms a domain of its own, distinct from diplomatic history or political science…individuals moving seamlessly back and forth between university chairs or think tanks and government offices.” Thus the administration also talks to itself. It does seem to be so, and no matter that I personally revile Anderson’s and Bacevich’s style of heated rhetoric and detestable arrogance which makes it difficult for me to read their ideas, they are talking about something in which I am deeply interested, and which has ramifications for the way I vote for America's leaders.

Anderson, who sneers at the “thinkers” of his title, discusses Obama’s role as “executioner-in-chief,” and quotes Ben Rhodes, formerly Obama speechwriter, now National Security Advisor: “What we’re trying to do is to get America another fifty years as leader.” This is also Hillary Clinton’s stated goal. This idea is exactly what I am wondering about. Is American primacy and leadership in the world in the American populace’s best interests, or in the world’s best interests? The answer is not as obvious as it might seem. It may appear to be so, but I can’t help thinking that despite our enormous wealth and resources, we cannot have all the answers for the rest of the world. We don’t even have the answers for our own country. Surely “primacy” is not the point. Or is it? What does that even mean? Does it mean we get to extract resources to support our own wellbeing? Does it mean we must bolster or support the rest of the world? What are our obligations as leader? What are our obligations as an ethical people, even without "primacy"? If I could be sure that the adage "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely" was not exampled many times in human history, I might be willing to go along with the leadership idea. But it isn't just leading always, is it?

Despite my difficulty reading this discussion which mentioned so many works I have not read, and so many people of whom I have not heard, I did order Christopher Layne’s The Peace of Illusions: American Grand Strategy from 1940 to the Present to see if I can understand slightly more. My next post has video clips of Thomas P.M. Barnett discussing what should influence U.S. Global Strategy in the future. Barnett gave a talk in 2015 in Washington, D.C. to strategists in the military, and published the talk on YouTube in January 2016.


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