Foreign affairs 2017 09-10

tend to come away appalled by the Celebrating 34 Years of Independent Publishing conclusions but sometimes grudgingly impressed by the erudition on display. “Groundbreaking. . . . Of course, isis foot soldiers lack the Barr offers conceptual clarity, theo- scholarly sophistication of the leaders. But retical insights, even they drench themselves in religion. and the welcome Two sociologists from the University of ability to combine Waterloo who conducted online interviews rigorous analysis of isis foreign ighters last year reported with an encyclo- that faith was “a primary motivator” and pedic knowledge “the dominant frame” through which of populists past the ighters saw their entire existence. ”and present. Soufan, however, passes over almost all discussion of religion and tends to —Amy Risley, pathologize religious sentiment in glib Rhodes College tones. While Zarqawi was leeing U.S. forces in Iraq, Soufan writes, his “behavior hc $75 $37.50 for Foreign Affairs readers! became increasingly neurotic.” As signs of this neurosis, Soufan cites Zarqawi’s TEL: 303-444-6684 • www.rienner.com habit of quoting Islamic Scripture and imitating the Prophet Muhammad, “down The Herbert Scoville Jr. Peace Fellowship to cleaning his teeth with a twig, scent- invites recent college and graduate school ing his body with musk, and keeping to alumni to apply for six to nine month fellowships what he believed were the [Prophet’s] in Washington, DC, focusing on arms control, waking and sleeping hours.” It’s not clear peace, and international security issues. Founded why Soufan sees these as signs of a mental in 1987 to develop and train the next generation disorder rather than as manifestations of of leaders on a range of peace and security issues, intense religious zeal. Zarqawi evolved the program has awarded 176 fellowships to date. from a petty thug into a master terrorist only after he grew devout. The devotion Scoville Fellows work with one of more than two seems to have changed his life, as it did dozen participating public-interest organizations. for most of his followers. They may undertake a variety of activities, including research, writing, public education, and Soufan points to the worldly transgres- advocacy, and may attend policy briefings, sions of individual terrorists to cast doubt Congressional hearings, and meetings with policy on the sincerity of their religious devo- experts. Many former Scoville Fellows have tion. Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the lead taken prominent positions in the field of planner of the 9/11 attacks, visited prosti- peace and security. tutes in the Philippines, Soufan reports; Mohammed Atta, one of the 9/11 pilots, The next application deadline is October 2, 2017 for the spring “pounded shots of vodka before boarding 2018 semester. For complete details, see www.scoville.org or contact American Airlines Flight 11.” To Soufan, such sins nullify not only the men’s profes- (202) 446-1565 or [email protected]. sions of faith but even their faith-based explanations for actions they took—such 139

Graeme Wood as lying airplanes into buildings—that Turkmani, who served as top strategists in made little sense except in the context of isis’ early years. Soufan stresses Bakr in their religious beliefs. particular and relies on an oft-cited cache of captured documents, irst reported by This is an analytic blunder common to Der Spiegel, that revealed Bakr’s plan to secular people. Devout Christians some- declare a caliphate and spread it across times commit adultery; observant Jews Syria with a combination of religious sometimes break the Sabbath. Those more missionary work and Stasi-like population intimately acquainted with the nature of control. Soufan claims that the members religious belief know the role of human of the caliphate’s executive council are frailty. They recognize that sin is not a “predominantly former servants of nulliier of belief but a fortiier: sinners, Saddam” and that isis’ leader, Abu Bakr al- not saints, require redemption—or, as the Baghdadi, is surrounded and controlled Gospel of Luke puts it, “They that are by “Baathist minders.” whole need not a physician.” Isis promises absolution; those who feel no need for But as Craig Whiteside of the U.S. absolution show up in smaller numbers. Naval War College recently showed, the ex-Baathists were recruited and used “Perhaps Zarqawi, [Khalid Sheik mostly to ill military roles during isis’ Mohammed], and the 9/11 hijackers would embryonic stage, with the stipulation not go so far as to say that God is a stupid that they be “Salai irst, former military idea,” Soufan concedes. But what, he oicers second, and then former Baathists.” asks, “motivates people like [them], if not Their levels of religious commitment religious fervor?” His answers: “nation- were indistinguishable from those of alism, tribalism, sectarianism.” Sectarian- other isis leaders. Those who joined or ism can, of course, be a form of religious allied with isis but retained aspects of fervor. Soufan’s other two hypotheses are their Baathist identity were sidelined baling. On behalf of what nations or or purged. For every former Baathist tribes do today’s multinational, multi- running isis, there were multiple other ethnic jihadist groups ight? veteran jihadists untainted by any associa- tion with Saddam. By the time Baghdadi BAATH TIME established the caliphate in mid-2014, most of the former Baathists who had If there is one country lurking behind joined isis were dead or would be soon. isis, Soufan believes it is Saddam’s Iraq. Soufan and other analysts maintain that He suggests, following the lead of several isis cynically uses religion for political others, that isis is a crypto-Baathist ends. That might be precisely backward: organization rather than a religious one the secular Baathist politicians were used that incorporated former Baathists for for religious ends. speciic purposes—and after they had repented. The argument begins by noting THE JOY OF JIHAD that isis has used the tactics of terror and population management and that In June, the bbc’s Quentin Sommerville “former oicers in Saddam Hussein’s and Riam Dalati published a moving sprawling security establishment” joined multimedia piece that reconstructed the isis and put their talents to use. These lives of a few isis ighters whose corpses included Haji Bakr and Abu Muslim al- 140 f o r e i g n af fai r s

True Believers had been found, rotting and picked over Indeed, Soufan’s policy prescriptions by dogs, on the shore of the Tigris River are vague. He urges oicials to under- near Mosul, Iraq. The photographs on stand jihadist ideology better and iden- the mobile phone of one of the ighters tify the currents of Salaism that have revealed details of their training and fed it. This is strange advice given his their personal lives. They were barely lack of interest in religion elsewhere in men. Their beards were wispy, and their the book. Needless to say, understand- recreations adolescent. They smiled and ing Salaism won’t help much if isis is joked with friends. The religious side of secretly Baathist. Alas, it is not. their existence was evident: they followed their imam; they memorized Scripture; The suggestion that policymakers they aspired to die in the path of God. try to understand isis’ ideology better is nonetheless a sound one. One of the Jihadism has democratized and has key developments in the group’s rise is ceased to be solely a project for elite the way it has leveraged local political militants such as bin Laden and Zawahiri. conlicts—Sunni grievances against One consequence for counterterrorism Shiite-dominated governments in Iraq is that mapping organizational charts and and Syria—to create religious confron- command structures is less critical than tation. The group is now in a shambles understanding the stories of young men compared with two years ago—but it such as the ones whose bodies were is strong compared with just four years found near Mosul. Once, one could ago, when it could still be mistaken for follow the words and deeds of bin Laden, a jv team. Its loss of territory has not Zawahiri, Adel, and perhaps a dozen been accompanied by a proportional others and obtain a highly accurate loss in its ability to inspire. The land picture of global jihad. Now, the puppet may be gone, but the dream will remain, masters matter less and the interior and there will continue to be dreamers lives of the ighters matter more. That in dozens of countries, ready to die for means studying how they understand the cause. There is still time to learn and practice their religion, and how more about what the dream is and who they develop camaraderie and purpose. is dreaming it.∂ There is a perverse joy in jihad, a feeling of belonging and brotherhood, of happiness and fulillment. (Soufan declares that in isis territory, “practi- cally anything remotely enjoyable—in- cluding a picnic in the park—is banned.” In fact, isis features picnics in its propaganda, and the citizens look like they enjoy life in the caliphate; that is the point of the propaganda.) If even a counterterrorism expert of Soufan’s caliber can omit this part of isis’ appeal, the group will remain mysterious and diicult to counter. September/October 2017 141

Return to Table of Contents Kleptocracy in Although the political establishment, America including the justices of the Supreme Court, may cling to a legal notion of Corruption Is Reshaping corruption, ordinary Americans’ more Governments Everywhere visceral understanding is in line with an anticorruption Zeitgeist that has swept Sarah Chayes the world in the past decade. In Brazil, huge, ongoing street protests over the The Corruption Cure course of two years have bolstered the BY ROBERT I. ROTBERG. Princeton federal police force and a crusading jurist, University Press, 2017, 400 pp. Sérgio Moro, as they have investigated and brought to justice high-ranking D“ rain the swamp!” the U.S. perpetrators in a web of corruption Republican presidential candi- scandals. Their work has already led date Donald Trump shouted at to the impeachment of one president, campaign rallies last year. The crowds Dilma Roussef, and her successor, Michel roared; he won. “Our political system Temer, is also in the cross hairs. A similar is corrupt!” the Democratic candidate movement has shaken Guatemala, where Bernie Sanders thundered at his own a un-backed commission has helped rallies. His approval rating now stands prosecutors bring charges against dozens at around 60 percent, dwaring that of of oicials, including Otto Pérez Molina— any other national-level elected oicial. who was the country’s president until Although many aspects of U.S. politics 2015, when he resigned and was arrested may be confusing, Americans are on corruption charges. Earlier this year, clearly more agitated about corruption South Korean President Park Guen-hye than they have been in nearly a cen- met the same fate. tury, in ways that much of the political mainstream does not quite grasp. The In countries as varied as Bulgaria, topic has never been central to either Honduras, Iraq, Lebanon, Malaysia, major party’s platform, and top oi- Moldova, Romania, and South Africa, cials tend to conlate what is legal with where governments haven’t been top- what is uncorrupt, speaking a com- pled, citizens have nonetheless shown pletely diferent language from that of remarkable collective energy in pro- their constituents. testing corruption. Taken together, these disparate movements add up to SARAH CHAYES is a Senior Fellow in the a low-grade worldwide insurrection. Democracy and Rule of Law Program at the Elsewhere, taking the pulse of their Carnegie Endowment for International Peace people, governments such as China’s and the author of Thieves of State: Why have launched top-down initiatives Corruption Threatens Global Security. targeting crooked oicials. Despite paying lip service to the problem of corruption for decades, leaders in rich, developed countries have never treated it as more than a second-order foreign policy concern. 142 f o r e i g n af fai r s

Kleptocracy in America After all, corruption is hard to measure The book ofers authoritative per- and easy to brush away with arguments spectives on a variety of devices that about difering cultural norms and the diferent regimes have applied to the value of “facilitation payments” in greas- task of ighting corruption. But Rotberg’s ing bureaucratic wheels. But lately, it analysis fails to spell out a reality that has become harder to deny that corrup- his own most fundamental conclusion tion lies at the root of many irst-order suggests: corruption is not so much a global problems, such as the spread of problem for governments as it is an ap- violent religious extremism or the civil proach to government, one chosen by strife and mass casualties witnessed in far too many rulers today. His sugges- South Sudan and Syria—not to mention tions may be helpful to countries that the refugee crises that have followed have already undergone some sharp on their heels. Corruption also plays a transitions fueled by anticorruption major role in the one truly global sentiment, such as Brazil, Burkina existential threat: the destruction of Faso, Guatemala, South Korea, Tuni- the environment. sia, and Ukraine. The Corruption Cure, however, is less helpful when it comes When speaking about the causal to hard-boiled kleptocracies, such as relationship between corruption and Angola and Azerbaijan. Rotberg also such issues, I’m often asked questions downplays the role of developed countries along these lines: “OK, corruption’s a in facilitating such regimes’ corrupt bad thing, but is there anything that practices. And he sidesteps the rather can be done about it? Are there ex- pressing reality of developed coun- amples of countries that have pulled tries—including the United States— themselves back from the brink?” The beginning their own unmistakable political scientist Robert Rotberg has slides toward kleptocracy. surely ielded the same questions count- less times during his distinguished CLEANING HOUSE career. He has now published a com- prehensive and detailed response. To ight corruption, a good domestic legal framework is “at least a start,” Rotberg His book’s answer to the second writes, as long as it clearly deines illegal question is important: some places behavior and its consequences. In the have indeed dramatically reduced exemplary case of Singapore, anticorrup- corruption. A few names on that list tion laws include “stif monetary ines are familiar success stories, such as and ive-year terms of imprisonment Hong Kong and Singapore. Others— for convicted ofenders.” Civil servants Botswana, Georgia, Rwanda—might found guilty of corrupt acts can “lose surprise some readers. Rotberg exam- their jobs, their beneits, and their pen- ines these cases, alongside those of sions.” Apart from punishing acts of both poorer performers and longtime corruption after the fact, Singaporean paragons such as Denmark and Fin- law also does what the U.S. Constitu- land, in order to igure out what works. tion was at least partly designed to do: His conclusions are scattered through- prevent corruption before it takes place. out the book and then tabulated at the (That was the purpose of the Emoluments end in a single 14-step program. September/October 2017 143

Sarah Chayes Clause, which prohibits U.S. oicials tion prevention and public education, as from receiving gifts from foreign well as the investigation of wrongdoing. governments—and which is currently Within a few years of its launch, the the subject of renewed attention owing icac was investigating numerous cor- to three lawsuits charging that Trump ruption networks, in which so-called has violated it.) In Singapore, Rotberg triad gangs worked hand in glove with writes, public servants are prohibited the police. The commission’s prevention from “borrowing money from or inan- department visited government agencies, cially obligating themselves to any person with whom they did or could have oicial dealings,” whether or not they have corrupt intentions. Botswa- na’s expansive legislation in this area deines an illegal emolument as “any gift, beneit, loan, or reward; any oice, employment or contract, any payments or discharges of obligations or loans; [or] ‘any other service,’” Rotberg writes. But too often, Rotberg notes, such laws are just words on paper; what really matters is whether and how they are enforced. Another remedy he examines is anticorruption commissions. In Hong Kong in the 1970s, the Independent Commission Against Corruption (icac) made signiicant inroads against long- standing traditions of illicit gift giving and proiting from oicial positions. To help the commission carry out its enforcement responsibilities, legislation placed the burden of proof in cases of unexplained wealth on the accused. The commission’s independence was bolstered by a generous ixed annual budget and by the fact that the group reported directly to the colonial governor dispatched from the United Kingdom—an oicial who, Rotberg writes, was considered incorruptible because of his allegiance to London. The icac was also subject to oversight by a group of prominent citizens and elected oicials. And the commission was charged with corrup- 144 f o r e i g n af fai r s

Kleptocracy in America analyzed their permitting and inspection tion commissions have been worse than processes, and recommended improve- inefective: they have been weaponized ments. Later, it helped reform the stock to punish opponents of corrupt regimes. exchange and the professional ethics In Malawi, for example, Rotberg reports code for lawyers. that local observers “believed that the 2004–2006 anticorruption blitz was But such commissions are no panacea, essentially an exercise in political persecu- either, Rotberg inds. In many countries, tion,” since some of its main targets were including several in Africa, anticorrup- September/October 2017 145

Sarah Chayes ranking members of the opposition party. way The Corruption Cure frames its Transparency measures, such as eponymous problem. Rotberg, like so many authors before him, depicts making asset declarations mandatory corruption as an inchoate, corrosive for public oicials, also appear on the force that seeps into governments that list of measures taken by several of readers might presume are otherwise Rotberg’s “most improved” countries. sound. The metaphor he keeps reach- So do the streamlining of bureaucratic ing for is a medical one. Corruption is procedures (to remove red tape that “an insidious cancer,” a “plague” that might otherwise require a bribe to cut “infects,” “metastasizes,” and “cripples.” through) and increasing the salaries of Cure the disease, as the title of the civil servants (to reduce the material book suggests, and the healed body need to demand or accept bribes). Norms politic can go out and play. and standards promoted by international institutions can sometimes help, too. In But where does the sickness come Georgia, Macedonia, and Montenegro, from? In explaining how such a mal- eligibility requirements for eu member- ady might take hold, Rotberg resists ship, which all three seek, have catalyzed the temptation to moralize, venturing signiicant reforms. (Montenegro’s eforts that corrupt oicials may be behaving so far, however, seem aimed more at rationally. “By adopting a conscious checking boxes than at genuinely trans- strategy of self-enrichment through forming the way authorities behave.) corrupt behavior, they merely . . . act within the often zero-sum expecta- The list of efective measures also tions of their class and their condition,” contains several drastic steps, including he writes. staf purges at agencies widely seen as thoroughly corrupt. Rotberg reports Yet that portrait of widespread but that when Mikheil Saakashvili came to uncoordinated opportunism miscasts power in Georgia in 2008, “the new the nature of contemporary corruption. reformers discharged the entire staf of Rather than a weakness or a disorder, it the ministry of education and recruited is the efective functioning of systems new employees by competitive exami- designed to enrich the powerful. Rotberg nation”; they also sacked 15,000 police gestures at this fundamental reality oicers. In President Paul Kagame’s toward the end of the book, when he Rwanda, it was “all 503 members of the paraphrases an assessment made by Rwandan judiciary, from top to bottom,” Guatemala’s un-backed anticorruption who got the ax, in 2004. And almost commission: That country’s ruling immediately after her 2006 election as Patriotic Party “was more a criminal Liberia’s president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf gang than a political party. Its role was ired “virtually all” the civil servants who to ‘rob the state,’” Rotberg writes. In had worked in the prior regime’s Minis- Guatemala, elites “constituted a criminal try of Finance. organization—a kleptocratic conspiracy capable of capturing a national revenue THE MAFIA STATE stream, a maia running a state.” The drastic nature of such measures This is what corruption looks in at reveals a fundamental weakness in the least 60 countries where I have researched 146 f o r e i g n af fai r s

the problem: the deliberate operating The Internship system of sophisticated networks bent Program on self-enrichment and remarkably successful at achieving it. For oicials in The Council on Foreign Relations is seek- these places, corrupt acts often do not ing talented individuals who are consider- represent rational responses to a permis- ing a career in international relations. sive environment, as Rotberg would Interns are recruited year-round on a semester have it; rather, they are a professional basis to work in both the New York City and requirement. If you are a police oicer Washington, D.C., ofices. An intern’s duties in Afghanistan or Nigeria, a customs generally consist of administrative work, agent in Uzbekistan, or a top adminis- editing and writing, and event coordination. trator in the Honduran environment The Council considers both undergraduate ministry, you owe your superiors certain and graduate students with majors in Interna- things: a cut of your harvest of small tional Relations, Political Science, Economics, bribes, certainly, and perhaps some duly or a related ield for its internship program. signed and stamped paperwork green- A regional specialization and language skills lighting activities that violate regulations. may also be required for some positions. In Those who do not perform these allot- addition to meeting the intellectual require- ted tasks are demoted or sidelined—if ments, applicants should have excellent they’re lucky. Sometimes they are shot. skills in administration, writing, and re- It’s the old Maia choice: plata o plomo, search, and a command of word processing, “silver or lead.” Take the money or take spreadsheet applications, and the Internet. a bullet. To apply for an internship, please send a résumé and cover letter including the se- These networks come in diferent mester, days, and times available to work forms in diferent countries. They can to the Internship Coordinator in the Hu- be highly structured or fairly difuse, man Resources Ofice at the address listed with varying degrees of internal rivalry below. Please refer to the Council’s Web and disrupting daily life where they site for speciic opportunities. The Coun- hold sway. Depending on the sources cil is an equal opportunity employer. available to them, they capture difer- ent revenue streams, including luxury Council on Foreign Relations tourism, oil sales, or high-end agricul- Human Resources Ofice tural exports, such as succulent dates 58 East 68th Street, New York, NY 10065 from Tunisia, green beans from Kenya, tel: 212.434 . 9400 fax: 212.434 . 9893 or the opium whose harvest absorbs [email protected] http://www.cfr.org much of the labor force in southern Afghanistan each spring. The networks 147 weave together categories that people in developed countries tend to keep separate in their minds: public sector and private sector, black markets and stock markets, professional and personal. Consider the roles played by the Karzai family in post-9/11 Afghanistan,

Sarah Chayes which I had the opportunity to observe If their activity “destroys develop- at close quarters when I ran a nongov- mental prospects” and is “antithetical to ernmental organization established by economic growth and social betterment” President Hamid Karzai’s older brother in their country, as Rotberg puts it, that Qayum. Karzai served in oice for nearly is of no concern whatsoever. Bettering 13 years. Qayum acted as a behind-the- their country’s prospects is not their scenes power broker, with a stake in a objective. Making money is. consortium that won millions of dollars in contracts from the U.S. government. SWAMP THING Another brother, a self-proclaimed apolitical businessman, owned a cement Although Rotberg’s disease metaphors factory and part of the country’s largest elide this reality, his suggested anticor- private bank, which was later found to ruption program is entirely shaped by operate like a Ponzi scheme. And a third it. The irst of his 14 steps for a country brother served as both a local oicial ighting corruption is that it “seeks, elects, and a main facilitator of the region’s or anoints a transformative political prodigious opium traic. leader.” In other words, reforming a severely corrupt country requires noth- In countries such as Azerbaijan, the ing short of regime change. In this sense, overlap between the public and private The Corruption Cure ofers a critical warn- sectors is even more complete, with the ing: once you’ve toppled your government, ruling family controlling no fewer than make sure you pick a new chief of state 11 banks and sprawling consortia that on the basis of his or her concrete inten- net the vast bulk of public procurement. tions with respect to corruption. Don’t In Egypt, the military’s control over the be distracted, for example, by a prospec- economy has vastly expanded under tive leader’s identity as a political out- the presidency of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. sider or stance on religious law: look The kleptocracy over which Honduran closely at the actual content of his or President Juan Orlando Hernández is her anticorruption platform. striving to gain control remains some- what more loosely structured: private- For although regime change may be sector actors, government oicials, and necessary to anticorruption reform, it is drug traickers exchange favors and clearly not suicient. Corruption net- often overlap but maintain a certain works are deceptively resilient. Many degree of separation. have survived dramatic eforts to uproot them, ranging from the imprisonment In such networks, the role of mem- of their leaders to violent revolts against bers who hold public oice is to craft their power. Sometimes they have coun- laws and regulations and tailor their tenanced their own decapitation, sacriic- enforcement in ways that serve the ing a Hosni Mubarak (in Egypt) or a network’s aims. In return, they get to Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali (in Tunisia) loot public cofers or siphon of gov- to the mob in order to rebound better. ernment revenues; they also get cuts In other cases, such as China, they have of the bribes extorted at the street level tried to stay a step ahead of the public or shares in the companies that their by initiating high-proile but self-serving practices beneit. anticorruption measures. 148 f o r e i g n af fai r s

Kleptocracy in America By focusing heavily on personal otherwise, his victory and ascent to the leadership, Rotberg implicitly acknowl- White House did not represent regime edges such phenomena without directly change; they represented very much grappling with their implications. He thus more of the same, with a president who circles around a crucial question: What has invited top corporate executives not is the relationship between kleptocracy merely to provide advice or draft legisla- and democratic practice? Modern democ- tion but also to actually join his team. racy, after all, was developed as a means Such a presidency will only cement the of guaranteeing government in the public system rigging Trump once decried. interest. And yet an uncomfortable number of the leaders of Rotberg’s “most For Americans, as for the people of so improved” countries are authoritarians. many of the countries Rotberg discusses, If irm leadership from the top is so the expulsion of one individual at the top critical to reform, is it even possible for will not be enough to repair the damaged a democracy that has grown systemically republic. Americans should not fool corrupt to change course? themselves into thinking that all they must do is see Trump impeached or get The United States has become a out the vote for a standard Democratic testing ground for that question. The or Republican alternative in 2020. The country’s slide into a kind of genteel network that Trump is anchoring in kleptocracy began many years ago, Washington is exploiting a system that arguably in the 1980s, when deregula- Americans have all allowed to evolve tion fever hit. The lobbying profession and from which they have averted their exploded, and industries began writing eyes. That network is empowered now legislation afecting their sectors; public and will prove resilient. services such as incarceration and war ighting were privatized; the brakes on TURNING THE TIDE money in politics were released; and presidents began illing top regulatory I am a bit skeptical of “tool kit” approaches positions with bankers. An economy of to ixing such deep-seated problems. But transactional exchanges took hold in if a committed reformer (or, ideally, a Washington. network of reformers) were able to capi- talize on the widespread indignation at Last year was a watershed in this the United States’ brand of kleptocratic process. In June, the Supreme Court governance and gain power, he or she dramatically narrowed the legal deini- should focus less on punishing overt tion of bribery when it overturned the corruption after the fact than on estab- corruption conviction of former Virginia lishing behavioral norms that would head Governor Bob McDonnell. Meanwhile, of such wrongdoing before it takes supporters of the Democratic presiden- place. This reform movement would tial candidate Hillary Clinton—including bring an end to the practice of writing many progressive advocates of campaign the rules of the political and economic inance reform—could be heard defend- games in ways that favor those who ing the propriety of questionable foreign have already amassed excessive power in donations to the Clinton Foundation. both domains. It would craft and enforce Although Trump’s supporters may think the rules so as to aford a digniied living September/October 2017 149

Sarah Chayes to those who perform underappreciated outside ailiations, to spend a certain tasks (schoolteachers, those who care minimum amount of time interacting for the elderly, small farmers) or who with ordinary constituents, and to have chosen to build their lives around work for more stringent campaign nonmonetary values. inance, conlict-of-interest, and over- sight legislation and enforcement. A policy program to achieve that Voters could use such pledges as a base kind of change would begin with placing line for rating the performance of their sharp curbs on campaign contributions representatives. and ending the anonymity that many signiicant political donors enjoy. Most important, would-be reformers Shifting to public-only inancing for must develop an inspiring vision that campaigns may seem radical, but that elevates values other than material would be the best solution. Lobbying growth and the accumulation of money— regulations must be tightened and a vision that celebrates being satisied iercely enforced. Conlicts of interest with having enough, for example, or the must be deined more broadly. Ethical efort to repair battered people and breaches must be swiftly sanctioned in things, or the nurturing of the beauty a rigidly nonpartisan fashion, so as to around us. They must seek to transform change the incentive structure that the way Americans understand and currently rewards impropriety and not measure the success of their society.∂ simply single out isolated ofenders. Recent events have demonstrated that the gentleman’s agreement governing the ethical practices of oiceholders is toothless in the face of a determined violator. Unfortunately, it is now clear that the U.S. Oice of Government Ethics needs disciplinary, not just advisory, powers. In general, federal regulatory agencies must be provided with more resources and indepen- dence, not less. But behavioral norms are not just a matter of legislation. They are a matter of culture, and those who would seek to improve the integrity of the U.S. government must address the cultural shifts that have made the slide toward American kleptocracy possible. For example, they could devise a detailed integrity pact and pressure elected oicials across the political spectrum to sign it. It could include a pledge to release all tax ilings and disclose all 150 f o r e ig n af fai r s

Return to Table of Contents What Kills were Germany’s partisan unions and Inequality Japan’s family-controlled conglomer- ates; the U.S. Teamsters, the United Redistribution’s Violent History Kingdom’s Society of Engineers, and France’s Federation of Building Indus- Timur Kuran tries all survived. A generation after the war, only a quarter of West Germany’s The Great Leveler: Violence and the History professional associations dated back to of Inequality From the Stone Age to the the prewar era, whereas a full half of the Twenty-irst Century United Kingdom’s did. Olson’s indings BY WALTER SCHEIDEL. Princeton had a disturbing implication: in politically University Press, 2017, 528 pp. stable countries, narrow coalitions of business lobbies hold back economic World War II devastated the growth through self-serving policies, economic infrastructures and only a major military defeat or a of Germany and Japan. It grisly revolution can overcome the lattened their factories, reduced their resulting ineiciencies. rail yards to rubble, and eviscerated their harbors. But in the decades that Back when Olson was writing, few followed, something puzzling happened: economists cared about economic inequal- the economies of Germany and Japan ity in advanced countries; unemployment grew faster than those of the United and sluggish investment were the problems States, the United Kingdom, and France. of the day. To the extent that experts Why did the vanquished outperform did focus on inequality within coun- the victorious? tries, they did so with respect to the late industrializers, where migration from In his 1982 book, The Rise and Decline poor villages to richer cities was accen- of Nations, the economist Mancur Olson tuating income disparities. Even there, answered that question by arguing that however, inequality was considered a rather than handicapping the economies temporary side efect of development; of the Axis powers, catastrophic defeat the economist Simon Kuznets argued actually beneited them, by opening up that it dissipated with modernization. space for competition and innovation. In both Germany and Japan, he observed, Had Olson considered inequality, he the war destroyed special-interest groups, might have noticed that World War II including economic cartels, labor unions, had two other curious economic conse- and professional associations. Gone quences. First, the devastation reduced inequality—not just in the defeated TIMUR KURAN is Professor of Economics and countries but also in the victorious coun- Political Science and Gorter Family Professor of tries, and even in neutral ones. Second, Islamic Studies at Duke University. Follow him these reductions proved temporary. on Twitter @timurkuran. Around the 1970s, developed economies started becoming less and less equal, defying Kuznets’ celebrated hypothesis. Such puzzles lie at the heart of The Great Leveler, an impressive new book September/October 2017 151

Timur Kuran by the historian Walter Scheidel. wealth-leveling revolutions unlikely, Scheidel proposes that ever since forag- powerful government institutions have ing gave way to agriculture, high and staved of the risk of state collapse in rising inequality has been the norm in the developed world, and modern politically stable and economically func- medicine has kept pandemics at bay. tional countries. And the only thing that However welcome such changes may has reduced it, he argues, has been some be, Scheidel says, they cast “serious sort of violent shock—a major conlict doubt on the feasibility of future level- such as World War II or else a revolu- ing.” Indeed, he expects economic tion, state collapse, or a pandemic. After inequality to keep rising for the each such shock, he writes, “the gap foreseeable future. between the haves and the have-nots had shrunk, sometimes dramatically.” The Great Leveler should set of loud Alas, the efect was invariably short lived, alarm bells. Scheidel is right to call on and the restoration of stability initiated the world’s elites to ind ways to equal- a new period of rising inequality. ize opportunities, and to do so before driverless cars, automated stores, and Today, the risk of violent shocks has other technological advances compli- fallen considerably. Nuclear deterrence cate the task. The bloody history he has made great-power war unthinkable, the decline of communism has rendered

recounts suggests that reducing inequal- ity will be diicult, even in the best of circumstances. But he also exaggerates his case; there are reasons to believe that societies can reform without an instigating catastrophe. THE MARCH OF INEQUALITY Jumping across civilizations and eras, The Great Leveler inds example after example of periods of rising inequality punctuated by cataclysmic events that suddenly lattened distributions of income and wealth. The range of evidence is breathtaking. Scheidel tracks the distri- bution of wealth between 6000 bc and 4000 bc through indications of physical well-being, such as skeletal height and the incidence of dental lesions; signs of conspicuous consumption, such as

Timur Kuran lavish burials; and evidence of entrenched complete authority over war booty and hierarchies, such as temples. He estimates decided how to divide it among their inequality in the Roman Empire by soldiers, their oicers and aides who had looking at the assets of top oicials been drawn from the elite class, the state and inluential families, as reported in treasury, and themselves.” censuses. He measures Ottoman inequal- ity by turning to records of estate settle- In the modern world, too, authoritar- ments and oicial expropriations. For ian states with ruling cliques preserve premodern China, luctuations over political power and acquire immense time in the number of tomb epitaphs, wealth through violence; consider China, which only the rich could aford, serve Egypt, Russia, and Saudi Arabia. Where as a proxy for the shifting concentration these difer from premodern states is of wealth. Specialists in particular eras that they share power with giant private and regions will undoubtedly quibble companies. Premodern China had no with some of Scheidel’s assumptions, equivalent of the e-commerce company inferences, and computations. But no Alibaba, nor did premodern Egypt have reasonable reader will fail to be convinced anything like the Bank of Alexandria, one that inequality has waxed and waned of the country’s largest inancial institu- across time and space. tions. The owners of such companies include billionaires who have become Scheidel also seeks to explain what wealthy without relying on violence (or at causes inequality. Thomas Piketty, in least without relying on violence directly, his best-selling Capital in the Twenty-irst since they may support it indirectly by Century, answered the question by arguing paying taxes to repressive states). But that the rate of return on investment Scheidel downplays the role that private generally exceeds the rate of economic companies play in creating and perpetu- growth, causing people with capital to ating inequality in modern autocracies, get even wealthier than everyone else. an error that leads him to make unduly Scheidel accepts this mechanism but pessimistic forecasts about the future. adds others. The most basic one involves predation. Until recently, the only way Giant corporations also play massive to become fabulously rich was to prey roles in advanced democracies. In these on the fruits of others’ labor. Cunning countries, the military and the police people grabbed power and then accumu- are constrained by various institutions, lated wealth through taxation, expropria- and politicians must maintain popular tion, enslavement, and conquest. They support to stay in power. But it is one also monopolized lucrative economic thing for citizens to have the right to sectors, largely for the beneit of them- boot out a corrupt administration and selves and their relatives and cronies. quite another for them to exercise that Exercising all this power—and holding right. The U.S. tax system has plenty on to it—required maintaining a mili- of loopholes that beneit the wealthiest tary capable of overpowering challeng- 0.1 percent of Americans, but the other ers, which itself served as an instrument 99.9 percent, through their choices at of further predation. In ancient Rome, the ballot box, have efectively allowed Scheidel writes, “commanders enjoyed those privileges to persist. Recognizing this oddity, Scheidel suggests that voters 154 f o r e ig n af fai r s

What Kills Inequality act against their own interests because through reconstruction. In the United of the power of elites. And so inequality States, the Supreme Court put an end keeps rising—until, that is, a shock sends to whites-only party primaries in 1944, it back down. no doubt partly because public opinion had turned against excluding African INEQUALITY, INTERRUPTED Americans who had shared in the wartime sacriices. France, Italy, and Japan all World War II reduced inequality mainly adopted universal sufrage between 1944 by obliterating assets that belonged and 1946. The war efort also stimulated disproportionately to the rich, such as the formation of unions, which kept factories and oices. As Scheidel notes, rising inequality at bay by giving work- a quarter of Japan’s physical capital was ers collective-bargaining power and by wiped out during the war, including pressuring governments to adopt pro- four-ifths of all its merchant ships and labor policies. Mass mobilization for up to one-half of its chemical plants. Even the purpose of mass violence thus con- though France was on the winning side, tributed to mass economic leveling. two-thirds of its capital stock evaporated. The war also depressed inancial assets By this logic, modern wars fought such as stocks and bonds, and it deval- by professional soldiers are unlikely to ued surviving rental properties almost have a similar efect. Consider the wars everywhere. In victorious and defeated in Afghanistan and Iraq: although some countries alike, the rich lost a greater U.S. veterans of these conlicts have share of their wealth than did the rest returned embittered, they constitute of the population. too small a constituency to command sustained attention, and few Americans But it wasn’t just destruction that feel compelled to support substantial lowered inequality; progressive taxes, transfers of wealth to citizens who which governments levied to fund the enlisted voluntarily. war efort, also helped. In the United States, for example, the top income tax Revolutions, The Great Leveler rate reached 94 percent during the war, explains, act a lot like wars when it and the top estate tax rate climbed to comes to redistribution: they equalize 77 percent. As a result, the net income access to resources only insofar as they of the top one percent of earners fell by involve violence. The communist revo- one-quarter, even as low-end wages rose. lutions that rocked Russia in 1917 and China beginning in 1945 were extremely The mass societal mobilizations that bloody events. In just a few years, the the war required also played a critical revolutionaries eliminated private owner- role. Nearly one-quarter of Japan’s male ship of land, nationalized nearly all population served in the military during businesses, and destroyed the elite through the conlict, and although the share was mass deportations, imprisonment, and lower in most other countries, nowhere executions. All of this substantially was the number of enlisted men small leveled wealth. The same cannot be by historical standards. During and after said for relatively bloodless revolutions, the war, veterans and their families formed which had much smaller economic efects. preorganized constituencies that felt For example, although the Mexican entitled to share in the wealth created September/October 2017 155

Timur Kuran Revolution, which began in 1910, did who pursue egalitarian policies. Scheidel lead to the reallocation of some land, doesn’t go into much detail about why, the process was spread across six decades, but the problem is largely one of coor- and the parcels handed out were gener- dination. According to the theory of ally poor in quality. The revolutionaries collective action (popularized by Olson, were too nonviolent to destroy the elite, as it happens), the larger a coalition, the who regrouped quickly and managed to harder it is to organize. This means that water down the ensuing reforms. In the because of numbers alone, the bottom absence of mass violence concentrated 50 percent will always have a harder in a short period of time, Scheidel infers, time mobilizing around a common goal it is impossible to meaningfully redis- than will the top 0.1 percent. It’s not tribute wealth or substantially equalize just that the incentives to free-ride are economic opportunity. larger in big groups; in addition, prior- ities within them can be more diverse. Indeed, Scheidel doubts whether Most Americans agree on the need for gradual, consensual, and peaceful paths education reform, but that majority to greater equality exist. One might disagrees hopelessly on the details. imagine that education lowers inequality by giving the poor a chance to rise above Yet another obstacle to reform lies their parents’ station. But Scheidel points in eforts to discourage the bottom out that in postindustrial economies, 50 percent from mobilizing. Across the elite schools disproportionately serve world, elites have promoted ideologies the children of privileged parents, and that focus the poor’s attention on non- assortative mating—the tendency of economic lash points, such as culture, people to marry their socioeconomic ethnicity, and religion. They also spread peers—magniies the resulting inequalities. conspiracy theories that attribute chronic Likewise, one might expect inancial inequalities to evildoers, real or imagined. crises to act as another brake on wealth Today’s populist politicians—both the concentration, since they usually hit the right-wing and the left-wing varieties— superrich the hardest. But such crises demonize particular groups, thereby tend to have only a temporary efect delecting attention from genuine sources on elite wealth. The 1929 stock market of economic inequality. For U.S. crash, which permanently destroyed President Donald Trump and France’s countless huge fortunes, was the Marine Le Pen, it is immigrants; for U.S. exception to the rule. The crisis of Senator Bernie Sanders and France’s 2008—which most wealthy investors Jean-Luc Mélenchon, it is corporations. recovered from in just a few years— Even elites who disavow populism delect was much more typical. attention from the real problems. Many American academics, for example, cham- Scheidel argues that the democratic pion airmative action, which tends to process cannot be counted on to reduce favor the wealthiest minorities and makes inequality, either. Even in countries with no real dent in inequality. Given all free and fair elections, the formation these barriers to reform, Scheidel’s of bottom-up coalitions that support pessimism can seem well founded. redistribution is rare. Indeed, the poor generally fail to coalesce around leaders 156 f o r e ig n af fai r s

What Kills Inequality EQUALITY IN PEACE? peacefully gave up this privilege, along with several others that Ottoman elites But Scheidel’s own narrative also ofers had enjoyed for centuries. A few years cause for hope: as The Great Leveler later, he reformed the judicial system, acknowledges, some countries have setting up secular courts available to found ways to reduce inequality without people of all faiths as an alternative to a catastrophe. In the 1950s, Scheidel Islamic courts, which, by discriminating reports, South Korea undertook land against commoners and non-Muslims, redistribution in order to mollify its had long contributed to inequality. peasants and discourage them from allying with communist North Korea. In all these cases, the beneiciaries of During the same period, Taiwan, fearing entrenched privileges, recognizing a an invasion from mainland China, ush- looming existential threat, chose to ered in similar reforms to consolidate undertake reforms. Today’s populist domestic support. Both places thus surge does not yet pose a serious threat managed to promote equality peace- to the fortunes of the very rich. But if fully, in order to prevent violence that Scheidel’s forecast of ever-worsening would have proved far costlier for elites. inequality materializes, that might Scheidel explains away these cases by change. The trigger could come from, noting that World War II and the Korean say, a takeover in some G-7 country by War empowered the masses and soft- radical redistributionists. At that point, ened the elites. Yet he also notes that elites might form political coalitions to Mesopotamian rulers from 2400 bc to pursue top-down reforms now consid- 1600 bc repeatedly provided debt relief ered hopelessly unrealistic. In times of to counter potential instability. Although peace and stability, as Olson recognized these resets did nothing to right the in The Rise and Decline of Nations, elites structural sources of inequality, they form self-serving coalitions to increase managed to keep economic disparities their wealth. Faced with the possibility within bounds. of losing all, they might do the same to stave of a more drastic redistribution. Scheidel could also have mentioned an instructive case from the Ottoman As with any collective action, free- Empire. From the fourteenth century riding could get in the way. Certain onward, Ottoman sultans regularly superrich individuals might choose to expropriated their subjects, including let other elites bear the burdens involved merchants, soldiers, and state oicials. in lessening inequality, such as funding In the empire’s heyday, the sixteenth a new bipartisan coalition, and if there century, abrogating that privilege would were enough free riders, the overall efort have been unthinkable. But beginning in would fail. Yet the very nature of rising the late eighteenth century, the economic, inequality would lessen the disincentives technological, and military rise of Europe to cooperate: the more wealth gets con- caused the sultanate to worry that keeping centrated at the top, the smaller the that privilege in place would hold back number of people who must get organ- economic growth, encourage secessions, ized to form a movement committed and set the stage for foreign occupation. to slashing inequality. In the United And so in 1839, Sultan Abdulmecid I States today, there are just over 100 September/October 2017 157

Timur Kuran decabillionaires—people with 11-digit considers extreme poverty. That pro- net worths; if only half of them formed portion has now fallen to ten percent. a political bloc aimed at raising estate Countries that entered the early stages taxes to equalize educational opportuni- of industrialization just a few decades ties, the efort would likely gain traction. ago, from India and Malaysia to Chile and Mexico, now export high-tech There is another reason to scale goods. For anyone who inishes reading down the pessimism, and it has to do The Great Leveler in a state of despair, with the relative salience of various these massive and rapid transformations, types of inequality. The Great Leveler achieved in a remarkably peaceful era, focuses on inequality within nations, ofer grounds for hope.∂ paying little attention to inequality among nations. But the latter is becoming increasingly relevant to human happi- ness. Just as mass transportation made national disparities matter to people whose frame of reference had previ- ously been limited to their own local communities, so the Internet is height- ening the relevance of international disparities. It means more to today’s Chinese, Egyptians, and Mexicans than it did to their grandparents that they are generally poorer than Americans. Technologies that give people in the developing world greater contact with people in the developed world—from video chat to online universities—promise to make such global diferences matter even more, thus reducing the signii- cance of the national inequality on which Scheidel focuses. The good news is that global in- equality has lessened dramatically since World War II, even as income and wealth have become more concentrated within individual countries. With economically underdeveloped countries growing more rapidly than developed countries—in large part thanks to falling trade barriers in the developed world—the gaps between people in diferent countries has narrowed. As late as 1975, half of the planet’s popu- lation lived below today’s poverty line of $1.90 a day, which the World Bank 158 f o r e ig n af fai r s

Return to Table of Contents The Nuclear proponents acknowledge. Humankind, Option Smil recounts, has experienced three major energy transitions: from wood Renewables Can’t Save the and dung to coal, then to oil, and then Planet—but Uranium Can to natural gas. Each took an extremely long time, and none is yet complete. Michael Shellenberger Nearly two billion people still rely on wood and dung for heating and cooking. Energy and Civilization: A History “Although the sequence of the three BY VACLAV SMIL. MIT Press, 2017, substitutions does not mean that the 552 pp. fourth transition, now in its earliest stage (with fossil fuels being replaced A round the world, the transition by new conversions of renewable energy from fossil fuels to renewable lows), will proceed at a similar pace,” sources of energy appears to Smil writes, “the odds are highly in inally be under way. Renewables were favor of another protracted process.” irst promoted in the 1960s and 1970s as a way for people to get closer to nature and In 2015, even after decades of heavy for countries to achieve energy indepen- government subsidies, solar and wind dence. Only recently have people come power provided only 1.8 percent of global to see adopting them as crucial to pre- energy. To complete the transition, venting global warming. And only in the renewables would need to both supply last ten years has the proliferation of the world’s electricity and replace fossil solar and wind farms persuaded much fuels used in transportation and in the of the public that such a transition is manufacture of common materials, such possible. In December 2014, 78 percent as cement, plastics, and ammonia. Smil of respondents to a large global survey expresses his exasperation at “techno- by Ipsos agreed with the statement “In optimists [who] see a future of unlimited the future, renewable energy sources energy, whether from supereicient will be able to fully replace fossil fuels.” [photovoltaic] cells or from nuclear fusion.” Such a vision, he says, is “nothing but Toward the end of his sweeping new a fairy tale.” On that point, the public history, Energy and Civilization, Vaclav is closer to Smil than to the techno- Smil appears to agree. But Smil, one of optimists. In the same 2014 Ipsos survey, the world’s foremost experts on energy, 66 percent agreed that “renewable sources stresses that any transition to renewables of energy such as hydroelectricity, solar would take far longer than its most ardent and wind cannot on [their] own meet the rising global demand for energy.” MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER is President and Founder of Environmental Progress. Follow Smil is right about the slow pace of him on Twitter @ShellenbergerMD. energy transitions, but his skepticism of renewables does not go far enough. Solar and wind power are unlikely to ever provide more than a small fraction of the world’s energy; they are too difuse and unreliable. Nor can hydroelectric September/October 2017 159

Michael Shellenberger power, which currently produces just complex. “To generalize, across millennia, 2.4 percent of global energy, replace fossil that higher socioeconomic complexity fuels, as most of the world’s rivers have requires higher and more eiciently used already been dammed. Yet if humanity inputs of energy is to describe indisput- is to avoid ecological catastrophe, it must able reality,” Smil writes. That striving ind a way to wean itself of fossil fuels. for more energy began with prehuman foragers, who craved energy-dense foods, Smil suggests that the world should such as oils and animal fats, which contain achieve this by sharply cutting energy two to ive times as much energy by mass consumption per capita, something as protein and ten to 40 times as much environmental groups have advocated as fruits and vegetables. The harness- for the last 40 years. But over that period, ing of ire let prehumans consume more per capita energy consumption has risen animal fats and proteins, allowing their in developed and developing countries intestinal tracts to shrink (since cooked alike. And for good reason: greater energy food requires less digestion) and their consumption allows vastly improved brains to grow. The inal outcome was standards of living. Attempting to reverse the human brain, which demands twice that trend would guarantee misery for as much energy by mass as the brains much of the world. The solution lies of other primates. in nuclear power, which Smil addresses only briely and inadequately. Nuclear Around 10,000 years ago, humans power is far more eicient than renew- gradually started to shift from foraging able sources of energy and far safer and for food to farming and began to tap cleaner than burning fossil fuels. As a new forms of energy, including domes- result, it ofers the only way for humanity ticated animals for plowing, wind for to both signiicantly reduce its environ- powering mills, and human and animal mental impact and lift every country waste for fertilization. Permanent farms out of poverty. allowed human societies to grow in size and power. “Even an ordinary staple ENERGY’S HISTORY grain harvest could feed, on the average, ten times as many people as the same Few scholars dominate a ield of inter- area used by shifting farmers,” Smil notes. disciplinary study the way Smil does Yet those societies’ individual members that of energy, on which he has published saw little beneit. Smil records the remark- over 20 books. Energy and Civilization able fact that “there is no clear upward synthesizes his canon, ofering a broad trend in per capita food supply across picture of the evolution of Homo sapiens, the millennia of traditional farming.” the rise of agriculture, and the very recent A Chinese peasant ate about as much emergence of a high-energy industrial in 1950, before the arrival of synthetic civilization. fertilizers and pumped irrigation, as his fourth-century ancestor. The core of Smil’s argument is that the history of human evolution and That’s in part because for most of development is one of converting ever- human history, societies increased their larger amounts of energy into ever food and energy production only when more wealth and power, allowing they were forced to, by factors such as human societies to grow ever more 160 f o r e i g n af fai r s

The Nuclear Option Death panels: a solar farm in Yinchuan, China, April 2017 CHINA STRINGER NETWORK / REUTERS rising population or worsening soils. fossil fuels is not yet complete. In India, Even in the face of recurrent famines, 75 percent of the rural population still farmers consistently postponed attempts relies on dung for cooking, despite a push to increase production, because doing by the Indian government and interna- so would have required greater exertion tional agencies to replace it with liqueied and longer hours. petroleum gas. And as Smil points out, thanks to population growth, humans Then, as farming became more today use more wood for fuel that at productive in England in the seventeenth any other time in history. and eighteenth centuries, farmers were freed up to move to the city and work The transition from a low-energy, in manufacturing. Urbanization and biomass-dependent agricultural life to industrialization required a far larger a high-energy, fossil-fuel-dependent leap in energy consumption than the industrial one came at a high human and one involved in moving from foraging environmental cost but also delivered to agriculture. The shift was made possible signiicant progress. As terrible as indus- by a rapid increase in coal mining. Coal trial capitalism, particularly in its early ofered roughly twice as much energy forms, could be for factory workers, it was by weight as wood and by the mid- to usually an improvement over what came late nineteenth century provided half before it, as Smil documents in a series of all the fuel consumed in Europe and of delightful boxes peppered throughout the United States. Despite the obvious the book that feature obscure old texts beneits, the transition from biomass to reminding the reader of the brutality of September/October 2017 161

Michael Shellenberger daily life before and during the Industrial Many advocates of renewables argue Revolution. “Ye gods, what a set of men that hydroelectric power can solve this I saw!” wrote the second-century Roman problem. They suggest that upgraded scholar Lucius Apuleius, describing Roman dams could supplement the unreliable mill slaves. “Their skins were seamed all electricity from solar and wind power, over with marks of the lash, their scarred yet there are not nearly enough dams in backs were shaded rather than covered the world to hold the necessary energy. with tattered frocks.” In a study published in June in the The shift from wood to coal was, Proceedings of the National Academy of especially in its early years, painful for many workers. In another box, Smil Sciences, a team of energy and climate quotes from “An Inquiry Into the Condi- researchers found that the most promi- tion of the Women Who Carry Coals nent proposal for shifting the United Under Ground in Scotland,” published in States to completely renewable energy 1812. “The mother sets out irst, carrying had inlated estimates of U.S. hydro- a lighted candle in her teeth; the girls electric capacity tenfold. Without the follow . . . with weary steps and slow, exaggerated numbers, there is no renew- ascend the stairs, halting occasionally to able energy source to replace the power draw breath. . . . It is no uncommon thing generated from the sun and the wind to see them . . . weeping most bitterly, during the long stretches of time when from the excessive severity of labor.” the sun doesn’t shine and the wind Yet as cruel as coal mining could be, over doesn’t blow. time it helped liberate humans from agricultural drudgery, increase productiv- Moreover, all three previous energy ity, raise living standards, and, at least transitions resulted in what’s known as in developed nations, reduce reliance on “dematerialization”: the new fuels pro- wood for fuel, allowing reforestation and duced the same amount of energy using the return of wildlife. far fewer natural resources. By contrast, a transition from fossil fuels to solar or WHY RENEWABLES CAN’T WORK wind power, biomass, or hydroelectricity would require rematerialization—the use Smil argues that moving to renewable of more natural resources—since sunlight, sources of energy will likely be a slow wind, organic matter, and water are all process, but he never addresses just how far less energy dense than oil and gas. diferent such a move would be from past energy transitions. Almost every Basic physics predicts that that remate- time a society has replaced one source rialization would signiicantly increase of energy with another, it has shifted to the environmental efects of generating a more reliable and energy-dense fuel. energy. Although these would not be (The one exception, natural gas, has a uniformly negative, many would harm larger volume than coal, but extracting the environment. Defunct solar panels, it does far less environmental damage.) for example, are often shipped to poor Replacing fossil fuels with renewables countries without adequate environmental would mean moving to fuels that are safeguards, where the toxic heavy metals less reliable and more difuse. they contain can leach into water supplies. Given that Smil has done more than anyone to explain the relationship between 162 f o r e i g n af fai r s

The Nuclear Option energy density and environmental population.” But he goes on to claim that impact, it’s surprising that he spends so the environmental consequences of little time on this problem as it relates dramatically increasing global energy to renewables. In 2015, Smil published consumption are “unacceptable.” He an entire book, Power Density, on the might be right if the increase were general subject, showing how large cities achieved with fossil fuels. But if every depend on dense fuels and electricity. country moved up the energy ladder— Renewables, he concluded, are too difuse from wood and dung to fossil fuels and unreliable to meet the vast material and from fossil fuels to uranium—all demands of skyscrapers, subways, and humans could achieve, or even surpass, millions of people living and working Western levels of energy consumption close together. Yet he fails to mention while reducing global environmental this obstacle when discussing the fourth damage below today’s levels. energy transition in his new book. That’s because far more energy is THE POWER OF THE ATOM trapped in uranium atoms than in the chemical bonds within wood, coal, oil, In both Energy and Civilization and Power or natural gas. Less than half an oil barrel Density, Smil introduces the concept of full of uranium can provide the average “energy return on energy investment” amount of energy used by an American (eroei), the ratio of energy produced over his or her entire life. By contrast, it to the energy needed to generate it. But takes many train cars of coal to produce Smil again fails to explain the concept’s the same energy—with correspondingly implications for renewable energy. In larger environmental efects. Power Density, Smil points to a study of eroei published in 2013 by a team of Renewables also require far more German scientists who calculated that land and materials than nuclear power. solar power and biomass have eroeis of California’s Diablo Canyon nuclear power just 3.9 and 3.5, respectively, compared plant produces 14 times as much elec- with 30 for coal and 75 for nuclear power. tricity annually as the state’s massive The researchers also concluded that for Topaz Solar Farm and yet requires just high-energy societies, such as Germany 15 percent as much land. Since those and the United States, energy sources vast ields of panels and mirrors even- with eroeis of less than seven are not tually turn into waste products, solar economically viable. Nuclear power is power creates 300 times as much toxic thus the only plausible clean option for waste per unit of energy produced as developed economies. does nuclear power. For example, imag- ine that each year for the next 25 years Taking the rest of the world into (the average life span of a solar panel), account strengthens the case for nuclear solar and nuclear power both produced power even further. Since two billion the same amount of electricity that nuclear humans still depend on wood and dung to power produced in 2016. If you then cook their supper, Smil notes that “much stacked their respective waste products more energy will be needed during the on two football ields, the nuclear waste coming generations to extend decent life would reach some 170 feet, a little less to the majority of a still growing global than the height of the Leaning Tower September/October 2017 163

Michael Shellenberger of Pisa, whereas the solar waste would economically viable, engineers will need reach over 52,000 feet, nearly twice the to make a “breakthrough” in reducing the height of Mount Everest. construction times of new nuclear power plants. But a comprehensive study of Nuclear power is also by far the safest nuclear power plant construction costs way to generate reliable energy, accord- published in Energy Policy last year found ing to every major study published over that water-cooled nuclear reactors (which the last 50 years. Even the worst nuclear are far less expensive than non-water- accidents result in far fewer deaths than cooled designs) are already cheap enough the normal operation of fossil fuel power to quickly replace fossil fuel power plants. plants. That’s because of the toxic smoke And where nuclear power plant builders released by burning fossil fuels. Accord- have shortened construction times, such ing to the World Health Organization, as in France in the 1980s and South Korea the resulting air pollution from this and more recently, they did so not by switch- burning biomass kills seven million people ing to diferent designs—a sure-ire every year. Nuclear power plants, by recipe for delays—but rather by having contrast, produce signiicant pollutants the same experienced managers and only when radioactive particles escape as workers build the same kinds of units a result of accidents. These are exceed- on each site. ingly rare, and when they do occur, so little radioactive material is released that Despite his skepticism, Smil does vanishingly few people are exposed to leave the door open to nuclear power it. In 1986, an unshielded reactor burned playing a role in the future. But he over- for over a week at the Chernobyl nuclear looks the fact that an entirely nuclear- power plant, the world’s worst-ever nuclear powered society would be far preferable accident. Yet the who has estimated that to a partially nuclear-powered one, as among the emergency workers at the it would have no need for fossil fuels or scene, only about 50 died, and over the large, wasteful, and unreliable solar or course of 75 years after the disaster, the wind farms. radiation will cause only around 4,000 premature deaths. In the 1960s and 1970s, some of nuclear power’s opponents regarded The real threat to the public comes the technology as dangerous because from irrational fears of nuclear power. it would provide humanity with too The Fukushima nuclear accident in much energy. In 1975, the biologist Japan in 2011, for example, did not Paul Ehrlich wrote in the Federation lead to any deaths from direct radiation of American Scientists’ Public Interest exposure. Yet public fear led Japan’s Report that “giving society cheap, abun- prime minister to intervene unneces- dant energy at this point would be the sarily, prompting a panicked and need- moral equivalent of giving an idiot child lessly large evacuation, which led to a machine gun.” “It’d be little short of the deaths of over 1,500 people. disastrous for us to discover a source of cheap, clean, and abundant energy To his credit, Smil acknowledges because of what we would do with it,” nuclear power’s environmental and the energy guru Amory Lovins told health beneits, but he goes on to Mother Earth News in 1977. suggest that for nuclear power to be 164 f o r e i g n af fai r s

The Nuclear Option Smil does not share those extreme Breakthroughs in information and views, but he is concerned about the communications technology are leading to efects of excessive energy use. In Energy forms of dematerialization unimaginable and Civilization, as in his other books, he just a decade ago. Consider smartphones. skewers hyperconsumerism with relish, They require more energy to manufacture lambasting, for example, the “tens of and operate than older cell phones. But by millions of people [who] annually take obviating the need for separate, physical inter-continental lights to generic beaches newspapers, books, magazines, cameras, in order to acquire skin cancer faster” and watches, alarm clocks, gps systems, maps, the existence of “more than 500 varieties letters, calendars, address books, and of breakfast cereals and more than 700 stereos, they will likely signiicantly reduce models of passenger cars.” “Do we really humanity’s use of energy and materials need a piece of ephemeral junk made in over the next century. Such examples China delivered within a few hours after suggest that holding technological prog- an order was placed on a computer?” ress back could do far more environmental he asks. damage than accelerating it. As entertaining as Smil’s outbursts Despite Smil’s omissions and over- are, restricting high-energy activities sights, Energy and Civilization is a wise, would do more harm than good. Cutting compassionate, and valuable book. Smil down on jet travel would crimp trade, helps readers understand the relation- investment, and international political ships among the energy density of fuels, cooperation, all of which would slow the shape of human civilization, and global economic growth and prevent humanity’s environmental impact. The poor nations from catching up to rich lesson Smil does not draw, but that lows ones. And although consumer culture inevitably from his work, is that for does generate a rather ridiculous array modern societies to do less environmental of breakfast cereals, it also delivers life- damage, every country must move toward saving drugs and medical devices. more reliable and denser energy sources. In recent decades, governments have A high-energy society also allows spent billions of dollars subsidizing continuing technological advances that renewables, with predictably under- often reduce humanity’s environmental whelming results. It’s high time for impact. Fertilizers and tractors, for countries to turn to the safer, cheaper, example, have dramatically increased and cleaner alternative.∂ agricultural yields and allowed poorer soils to return to grasslands, wetlands, and forests and wildlife to return to their former habitats. For that reason, a growing number of conservationists support helping small farmers in poor nations replace wood with liquid fuels and improve their access to modern fertilizers and irrigation techniques in order to both feed the world’s growing population and reverse deforestation. September/October 2017 165

Return to Table of Contents Terror in the Terroir isis in Iraq or Syria or in one of the so-called caliphate’s “provinces” in The Roots of France’s Jihadist Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Mali, or Yemen. Problem When they return home, they form terrorist cells. The French-Belgian Jytte Klausen jihadist network, largely made up of returning isis fighters, has proved Terror in France: The Rise of Jihad in the West the largest and deadliest of Europe’s BY GILLES KEPEL. Princeton terrorist gangs, killing 162 people in University Press, 2017, 220 pp. multiple attacks in Brussels and Paris in 2015 and 2016. Since the start of 2015, jihadists have killed over 300 people and injured Kepel’s aim in Terror in France is to thousands more in a string of grue- place the recent burst of jihadism in his some attacks in European cities. The country in the context of the political assailants have driven trucks and vans upheaval that France has undergone in into crowds, detonated suicide bombs, recent years. He primarily blames Islamist carried out mass shootings, and used fundamentalism for the terrorist threat knives and axes to attack, even behead, but sees it as just one part of a larger their victims. By and large, the attackers rise in identity politics. In his view, this have been locals, but they have often broader trend presents a profound threat received ideological support and practi- to French society, as it is incompatible cal instructions from members of the with traditional French ideals. For this Islamic State (also known as isis). reason, the book is not really about jihad “in the West,” despite its English sub- In his new book, the French politi- title. (The title of the French version cal scientist Gilles Kepel argues that of the book translates as The Genesis of among European countries, France has French Jihad.) Rather, Kepel ofers an experienced the worst of this new wave impassioned indictment of religious and of terrorism. Although the phenomenon nationalist extremism in French politics, of Islamist extremism “is not exclusively which, despite the recent election of French,” he writes, “the French case is the centrist Emmanuel Macron to the stronger and deeper” than the cases of presidency, remains deeply divided. other countries. Some 6,000 people, around 1,800 of them from France, have THE RISE OF IDENTITY traveled from western Europe to join Kepel identiies two main causes of the JYTTE KLAUSEN is Lawrence A. Wien jihadist surge in France: the Internet Professor of International Cooperation at and the emergence of “ethnoreligous Brandeis University and a Local Afiliate at the issures in the social fabric,” which he Center for European Studies at Harvard believes are breaking the French Republic University. apart. “The departure [of young French- men] for Syria to engage in jihad and undergo martyrdom there is the natural and concrete sequel of their virtual indoctrination,” he writes, although he 166 f o r e i g n af fai r s

Terror in the Terroir does not provide much evidence to turned tough on immigration in order support this idea. He highlights the to take votes away from the National online publication, in 2005, in Arabic, Front. In the 2012 presidential election, of The Call for a Global Islamic Resistance, some 700,000 newly registered voters a long historical analysis of terrorist from immigrant backgrounds—what tactics written by the al Qaeda member Kepel calls “the ‘post-colonial’ immi- Abu Musab al-Suri. Kepel mentions grant vote”—supported the Socialist Suri’s manifesto at least 20 times. But candidate, François Hollande. (French as he acknowledges, there is little chance law prohibits polls from registering that many French jihadists have ever people’s religion but not their former read it. Nevertheless, he suggests that nationalities.) Kepel predicted in Terror Suri’s ideas inspired a new generation in France that when Hollande failed to of French terrorists. help these supporters, they would turn to identity politics and the Muslim Kepel argues that France is particularly voters among them would start sup- susceptible to online jihadist propaganda porting candidates running on explicitly because of a breakdown of allegiance to Muslim platforms. the once fundamental French principles of secularism and colorblindness. On the Kepel devotes an entire chapter to political left and right alike, a defection the failure of economic reform and the from core French republican virtues has efects of globalization on the French created “ruptures” within the nation and population, in particular the descen- given rise to a new form of identity dants of immigrants. But he does not politics. On the left, multiculturalism argue that economic stagnation or the and an insistence on respect for difer- inability to integrate immigrants has ence are usurping laïcité, the traditional driven terrorist recruitment. Instead, he French republican ideal of civic secular- blames dangerous forms of Islam. He ism. (Anti-Semitism, long present on points to the emergence of ultraconser- the French right, now taints the left as vative Salai enclaves, which have bred well.) On the right, xenophobia and a new generation of violent Islamists. ultranationalism have pushed voters Salai preachers advocate a “whole-life” into the arms of the populist, anti- version of Islam that isolates Muslim immigrant National Front, the party communities and encourages confronta- led by Marine Le Pen. Although their tion with the inidel French state, which adherents consider themselves adver- Salaists regard with “suspicion, fear, saries, Kepel sees “right-wing ethnic or indiference,” Kepel writes. And lax nationalism and Islamism as parallel government supervision of mosques has conduits for expressing grievances.” allowed non-Francophonic imams to preach on the evils of French society. Successive presidents have stoked these ires, Kepel argues. Nicolas Sarkozy, Kepel accepts that the French right for example, played on both Muslim and has fueled the rise of Muslim identity nationalist identities simultaneously. On politics by lending credence to the view the one hand, he gave Muslim organiza- that Muslims are unwelcome in France. tions the oicial recognition they had But he charges the French left with “crimi- been calling for, while on the other, he nal blindness” for failing to understand the September/October 2017 167

Jytte Klausen threat posed by identity politics to the Olivier Roy. In an essay titled “Jihadism French Republic and for casting French Is a Generational and Nihilistic Revolt,” Muslims as victims of Islamophobia. He published in Le Monde just two weeks calls this tendency “Islamo-gauchism” after a jihadist group had killed 130 people (Islamic leftism). Kepel also decries the in a series of suicide bombings and appearance of new Muslim political parties mass shootings in Paris that November, that aim to mobilize Muslims to vote and Roy argued that most experts, including stand for oice, which he lumps together Kepel, had misunderstood the jihadist with Islamists, Salaists, and jihadists movement. France’s problem with angry under the label of “communitarianism.” young Muslims had nothing to do with Salai fundamentalism, Roy maintained. American readers may be surprised The new generation of extremists wasn’t to see bloc votes regarded as suspicious genuinely interested in religion; its and even illegitimate, but many French members knew hardly anything about intellectuals are deeply distrustful of Islam. In Roy’s words, France was deal- communitarianism, the catch-all label ing “not with the radicalization of Islam for any acknowledgment of religious but with the Islamization of radicalism.” or ethnoracial identity as a source of Groups of young men from poor urban civic engagement. communities were turning to Islamist extremism in a nihilistic rejection of Macron’s election seems to run society. In the process, they were abandon- counter to Kepel’s predictions about ing their parents and the wider Muslim the imminent collapse of the republic. community. “They have no place in In his campaign, Macron emphasized the Muslim societies that they claim universalism and secularism and airmed to defend,” Roy wrote. his allegiance to the eu and to tradi- tional French republican values—and The French edition of Terror in France won decisively. (Kepel is a committed appeared shortly after Roy’s essay. As supporter of Macron.) But there was Kepel made the rounds on French talk enough ambiguity in the election results shows promoting his book, he called Roy to support Kepel’s view that all is not an “ignoramus” and derided him for not well. In the second round, 20.7 million speaking Arabic. (Kepel trained as an voters turned out for Macron, but 10.6 Arabist and wrote his Ph.D. dissertation million voted for Le Pen, and 12 million on Islamist movements in Egypt.) Then eligible voters stayed home or submitted Kepel published a critique of Roy in blank ballots, the highest abstention Libération, a left-leaning newspaper. rate in decades. Making a pun on Roy’s last name, which is pronounced like the French word for RELIGIOUS WARS “king,” roi, the headline read, “Le roi est nu” (The King Is Naked). Roy responded Kepel’s views have made him a deeply in L’Obs, a weekly magazine, by accusing controversial igure in France. (They Kepel of seeking fame and money at the have also earned him jihadist death cost of his intellectual integrity. threats, leading the government to provide him with 24-hour security.) In 2015, a Kepel and Roy’s disagreement public fracas broke out between Kepel resembles the long-standing debate and another French political scientist, 168 f o r e i g n af fai r s

Terror in the Terroir Under siege: a victim of the Bataclan theater attack, Paris, November 2015 PHILIPPE WOJAZER / REUTERS among scholars of migration over both decry the dislocation and stagnation whether push factors, such as wars and caused by globalization and blame succes- natural disasters, or pull factors, such sive French governments for failing to as economic opportunities, do more to address these problems. Where they part explain why, when, and how people ways is over the role of religion, which move. Roy focuses on the push toward Roy mostly dismisses and Kepel regards extremism, which he believes comes from as far more signiicant than economics. social exclusion and the discrimination experienced by second-generation immi- One signiicant pull factor is social grants. Kepel, on the other hand, sees pressure. To become a jihadist, you have growing extremism as the result of the to already know one. Members of a group pull exercised by Salai preachers. tend to see themselves as similar to other members and are therefore predisposed Despite their diferences, Kepel and to value the same ideas and behaviors. Roy agree that push factors matter. Most jihadists, however, do not emerge They both point to the failure of the from the public housing projects in the French government to provide oppor- banlieues, or suburbs, on the outskirts of tunities for the children of immigrants. Paris, where isolated Muslim groups have Poor housing and an underfunded traditionally proliferated. In recent years, educational system have landed many the fastest-growing jihadist enclaves young men on the street, without jobs have cropped up in the south of France. or any realistic prospects of setting up In one of the most interesting passages their own households. Kepel and Roy in Terror in France, Kepel discusses the September/October 2017 169

Jytte Klausen small town of Lunel, near the Mediter- with violent tendencies and a desire ranean coast, which has fallen prey to for perverse heroism who are unfamil- competing forms of extremism. In 2014, iar with mainstream Islamic teachings. it sent more young men to ight for isis In their reading, the Prophet was saying per capita than any other town in France; that a Muslim who picks up a gun to that same year, the National Front ight for Allah is guaranteed a fast track became the town’s largest political party. to heaven. As Kepel acknowledges, French Kepel and Roy also disagree over jihadists also do not usually come from how the French government should Salai homes. The Kouachi brothers, deal with extremism within religion. who shot and killed 12 people at the Kepel argues that it should tackle the oices of the satirical newspaper Charlie problem directly by enforcing the prin- Hebdo in January 2015, were French ciple of laïcité, which banishes most citizens of Algerian descent who grew religion from the public sphere. Accord- up as Catholics. Their friend Amedy ing to Roy, rather than suppressing Coulibaly, who in the days after the Islam in public, the government should Charlie Hebdo attack killed ive people make more room for mainstream Islam in a string of shootings in Paris, was a to express itself. Doing so, he thinks, French citizen of Malian descent who would restrict the space available to came from a secular background. These jihadist recruiters. After the London men encountered jihadist networks transport bombings in 2005, the British not in the banlieues but in the prisons government tried that approach, paying of the French state. imams and theologians opposed to jihadist violence to tour mosques and Although young men clearly reach provide “faith-inspired guidance” to jihadism in complex ways, Roy goes young Muslims. The problem with that too far by dismissing the role of religion experiment was that when some of the altogether. He suggests that because government-funded preachers proved many terrorists use drugs, watch por- less moderate than expected, the British nography, and eat non-halal food, they government found itself in the unten- are not truly Muslim. But smoking able situation of having to express marijuana and breaking dietary restric- opinions on what was good Islam and tions do not matter to someone about what was bad. to commit the ultimate sacriice for Allah. Isis, for example, hands out FIGHTING BACK amphetamines to its ighters to im- prove their stamina. Jihadists justify As the British government’s struggles their religious transgressions by citing with jihadism have shown, the problem a saying of the Prophet Muhammad is not conined to France. In fact, both that however much a Muslim prays, if Kepel and Roy exaggerate the extent he acquiesces to the inidels, he won’t to which jihadism in France is speciic get to paradise. Most Muslims see to that country. Jihadists everywhere the adage as an injunction to do good tell the same stories about how and why deeds. But it serves as a convenient they joined this or that jihadist group way for recruiters to convert people abroad and returned to “do something” 170 f o r e i g n a f fa i r s

back home. Isis’ and al Qaeda’s propa- The Fellowship Program ganda outlets pump out the same narra- tive, with some localized content, to all The Council on Foreign Relations is seeking potential Western recruits. It seems to applicants for the following 2018–2019 work well enough everywhere. fellowship programs: There is also scant evidence that October 31, 2017, deadline: France is particularly vulnerable to jihadism. In March, a report prepared  International Affairs Fellowship (IAF) by a committee created by the French Senate to investigate radicalization in  IAF for Tenured International Relations the country listed 17,393 people who Scholars had been classiied by the French gov- ernment as possible terrorist threats.  IAF in Canada In the United Kingdom, which has roughly the same population as France,  IAF in Japan the government said in May that it had identiied some 23,000 jihadist extrem-  IAF in International Economics ists living in the country as potential terrorist attackers. December 15, 2017, deadline: Moreover, many of the perpetrators  Stanton Nuclear Security Fellowship of recent terrorist attacks in France came from abroad. The November 2015 attacks The fellowship program offers unique oppor- in Paris were carried out by teams of tunities for mid- to senior career professionals assailants who had driven down from focusing on international relations and affords Brussels. The network included some fellows the opportunity to broaden their Frenchmen who had relocated to Brussels, perspective of foreign affairs and to pursue French-speaking Belgians, and two work in a policymaking setting or an Iraqis who had apparently never traveled academic environment. to France before. Dutch, German, and Swedish militants were involved on the Program details, eligibility requirements, and edges of the network, as well. None of application deadlines can be found online at the men was the product of speciically www.cfr.org/fellowships. French dysfunctions. Council on Foreign Relations This means that there are practical Fellowship Affairs steps all European governments can tel 212.434.9740 take to reduce the likelihood of future [email protected] attacks. Most important, they must ix the methods by which security agencies evaluate and monitor people and groups they consider dangerous. Thousands of people have embraced the idea of martyrdom, most of them young men. Not all will carry out a terrorist attack, so governments need to distinguish 171

Jytte Klausen the truly dangerous from the merely information diicult or impossible. noisy. This is a massive task, and author- Those laws were largely designed to ities can manage it only with the help protect citizens’ privacy and keep them of families, neighbors, local mosques, safe from police excesses. But those and community groups. Law enforce- concerns are becoming increasingly ment should reach out to these commu- outdated. Only by breaking down the nities not because there is much hope silos of law enforcement will European of changing the minds of extremists states be able to prevent large, luid (that approach has failed repeatedly) terrorist networks from carry out more but because only those close to poten- mass attacks. tial terrorists can help the authorities identify and stop them before they act. Taking these steps would not solve Europe’s terrorist problem. But doing It is painful that many of the so would reduce the number of attacks perpetrators of recent attacks were and, by breaking up dangerous jihadist already known to the police or security networks, make those that are carried agencies. Often, they slipped through out less lethal.∂ the cracks because governments did not have the resources to monitor every threat. In the short term, governments need to hire more analysts, social work- ers, and probation oicers to keep track of the men and women who have been lagged as dangerous. But simply hiring more people will not solve the problem if diferent law enforcement agencies fail to communi- cate with one another. In the United States, the 9/11 Commission found that repeated failures by the cia and the fbi to share information with each other played a large role in the coun- try’s inability to prevent the 9/11 attacks. European countries, especially France and Germany, face the same problem. For example, Anis Amri, who drove a truck into a crowded Christ- mas market in Berlin last December, killing 12 people, was already on the German terrorist watch list and was being considered for deporation. But the decentralized nature of German law enforcement meant that the authorities had no idea where he was. Legal restrictions often make sharing 172 f o r e i g n a f fa i r s

Return to Table of Contents Recent Books they look. Democratic breakthroughs are diicult to pull of, she concedes, Political and Legal but the human yearning for freedom is impossible to extinguish. G. John Ikenberry The H-Word: The Peripeteia of Hegemony BY PERRY ANDERSON. Verso, 2017, Democracy: Stories From the Long Road to 208 pp. Freedom In this short, engaging book, Anderson BY CONDOLEEZZA RICE. Twelve, traces the term “hegemony” from its 2017, 496 pp. ancient Greek origins to the contem- porary era. Thinkers of all the major At a moment when so many schools of international relations theory democracies appear belea- have used the term. Realists employ guered, Rice’s book presents it in describing the long sequence of an inspiring dose of hope. The stories order-building projects that the Euro- that the former U.S. secretary of state pean great powers pursued in their tells all advance a central message: the bids for mastery. Marxists use it to desire for political rights and self-rule characterize the way leading capitalist is deeply rooted in the human condi- societies project their power. For tion. But the book’s focus is political liberals, “hegemony” often refers to struggle and the contingent character the distinctively open and rule-based of democratic movements: history, Rice international orders established by the makes clear, does not end. She weaves United Kingdom in the nineteenth her own biography into the book, century and the United States in the relecting on her experiences as an twentieth. Across these intellectual African American woman in institu- traditions, the impulse is similar: to tions dominated by white men and as describe a kind of preeminence that a diplomat with a front-row seat to difers from empire by resting as post-Soviet political transitions in much on consent and inluence as on eastern Europe and to Russia’s failed force and outright domination. An- experiment with democratization. derson, however, dismisses the argu- She also details ights for democratic ments of theorists (including this change in the Middle East and in reviewer) who have emphasized the Colombia, Kenya, Poland, and Ukraine. “liberal hegemonic” features of the Elections are not enough, she demon- Western postwar order as mere window- strates: aspiring democracies need dressing for American empire. But he bedrock political institutions that ofers his views about world order create opportunities for people to only indirectly, from the relative exercise power. Authoritarian regimes safety aforded by explaining other are gaining ground today, but Rice is people’s ideas without clearly articu- not convinced they are as strong as lating his own. September/October 2017 173

Recent Books The Emergence of Globalism: Visions of democracy over the last two centuries as World Order in Britain and the United a series of “waves”: periodic moments States, 1939–1950 when many countries jumped more or BY OR ROSENBOIM. Princeton less simultaneously on the democratic University Press, 2017, 352 pp. bandwagon. In this landmark study, Gunitsky goes further and illuminates During and after World War II, intellec- the deep connections between global tuals and scholars in the United Kingdom shifts in power and waves of domestic and the United States engaged in a regime change. His book reveals how a vigorous and wide-ranging debate about series of geopolitical disruptions in the the future of world order as the global twentieth century created “hegemonic calamity forced the Western world to shocks” that triggered movements across grapple with elemental questions about the globe toward or away from democ- the character of modernity and the nature racy. In the aftermath of the two world of democracy. This impressive book wars and after the end of the Cold War, provides the best intellectual history yet the United States and western Euro- of that tumultuous era. Some theorists, pean states became hegemonic powers such as Raymond Aron, David Mitrany, and catalyzed independence movements and E. H. Carr, reimagined the role of and democratic transitions. The rise of the state. Others, such as Owen Latti- German power in the 1930s spurred more and Nicholas Spykman, contem- shifts toward fascism elsewhere, and the plated the efects of geography and emergence of Soviet power in the 1940s regionalism. Clarence Streit pondered led to a raft of communist insurgencies the possibilities of a union of democra- and Soviet-backed regimes. No book cies, Friedrich Hayek and Lionel Robbins has made a stronger case that the fate debated the limits of welfare capitalism of democracy is tied to the rise and fall and economic federalism, and H. G. of great powers and the leadership of Wells and Michael Polanyi explored liberal hegemonic states. the transformative roles of science and technology. Rosenboim argues that what All Measures Short of War: The Contest for united these disparate thinkers was their the Twenty-irst Century and the Future of shared conviction that the scale and scope American Power of world politics were rapidly changing BY THOMAS J. WRIGHT. Yale and that new ideas about political author- University Press, 2017, 288 pp. ity and cooperation were needed. Aftershocks: Great Powers and Domestic If the U.S.-led liberal international order Reforms in the Twentieth Century erodes, what will take its place? In this BY SEVA GUNITSKY. Princeton smart book, Wright argues that the world University Press, 2017, 304 pp. is slowly inching back to its normal state of great-power competition and zero- The political scientist Samuel Hunting- sum conlict. What many observers saw ton famously depicted the spread of as a post–Cold War global victory of liberalism and multilateral cooperation 174 f o r e i g n a f fa i r s

Recent Books was, in Wright’s realist interpretation, Liqueied natural gas (lng) can be just the temporary dominance of the shipped to any country with a terminal United States and its ideas. China and capable of receiving it. As Grigas’ book Russia were never on a path toward ably explains, fracking has had eco- liberal democracy; they were simply nomic and environmental efects that waiting until they were strong enough will become more profound over time. to push back against the West. Wright So, too, will the geopolitical conse- contends that the triumphalist liberal quences, as the increasing supply of narrative omits the fact that for large lng puts pressure on Qatar, Russia, parts of the non-Western world, ethnic and other gas exporters and makes it and nationalist traditions have been less costly for countries such as China strengthened and not weakened by the and India to reduce their dependence forces of globalization. In the coming era on coal to meet their growing needs for of geopolitical competition, he warns, electricity. A truly global market in lng multilateral cooperation will recede and is emerging and rearranging an energy the United States will lose its grip on economy built on long-term bilateral global institutions. Curiously, despite this contracts. In particular, lng will reduce bleak prognosis, Wright argues against a the heavy dependence of many Euro- U.S. grand strategy of ofshore balancing pean countries on Russia’s monopolistic or of managing regional spheres of Gazprom for gas supplies. inluence. He argues instead for a strategy of “responsible competition,” in which What We Owe: Truths, Myths, and Lies Washington would seek to preserve the About Public Debt international liberal order and would step BY CARLO COT TARELLI. Brookings up its diplomacy, alliance maintenance, Institution Press, 2017, 180 pp. and deep engagement with the world. Economic, Social, and Cottarelli, who once headed the Fiscal Environmental Afairs Department of the International Monetary Fund, has put together a Richard N. Cooper primer on public debt, primarily in relatively rich countries. He sets out to The New Geopolitics of Natural Gas debunk a number of common miscon- BY AGNIA GRIGAS. Harvard ceptions about government borrowing, University Press, 2017, 416 pp. especially the idea that unless a gov- ernment pays of its debts, it is iscally In the past decade, the development unsound or is somehow cheating future of hydraulic fracturing (or fracking) generations. He draws on extensive in a competitive energy market has scholarly research about debt, much of produced an abundance of relatively it carried out by imf staf, and presents cheap natural gas in the United States. his indings in comprehensible, non- technical language. The book reports on how high public debt (relative to gdp) must be, and under what circumstances, September/October 2017 175

Recent Books before it becomes a drag on economic been poor, partly because of weak- growth. Cottarelli also includes an nesses in the laws. However, the more informative discussion of the various pernicious problem, he notes, is lax ways to reduce the burden of public enforcement of the rules that govern debt, along with their often painful side the gatekeepers who make it possible efects, focusing on Greece and his for kleptocrats to squirrel away ille- native Italy. This is essential reading for gally acquired assets: banks, of course, all those concerned about current high but also lawyers, brokers, and real levels of public debt—and for those estate irms. who are not concerned but should be. The Despot’s Guide to Wealth Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at Management: On the International the Speed of Thought Campaign Against Grand Corruption BY ANDREW W. LO. Princeton BY J. C. SHARMAN. Cornell University University Press, 2017, 504 pp. Press, 2017, 274 pp. In this long, rambling, and frustrating Forty years ago, the U.S. Congress but still fascinating work, Lo turns to made it illegal for Americans to bribe neurobiology, psychology, and ecology foreign oicials. It took decades, but to gain insight into the behavior of the rest of the world’s rich countries buyers and sellers of inancial prod- eventually followed suit and instituted ucts. The book doubles as a kind of similar laws. More recently, many intellectual history of the global inancial countries began to establish a legal system and the innovations that have basis for recovering illegally acquired shaped it. Lo argues that modern eco- assets in their jurisdictions and return- nomics mistakenly draws inspiration ing them to the countries from which from the static quality of the laws of they were stolen, usually placing condi- physics—think of the artiicial Homo tions on their use. This informative economicus of economics textbooks, book documents the sparse success of with his unchanging preferences from such recovery schemes, with special which he maximizes utility—rather emphasis on the United States, Switzer- than from the ield of biology, which land, the United Kingdom, and Australia, explores the adaptability of systems to listed roughly in order of how much changing physical, technological, and they’ve accomplished. Sharman also social environments. The book abounds discusses several celebrated attempts with interesting anecdotes drawn from to get back money stolen by some of the many ields, including the author’s world’s biggest kleptocrats, including own experiences. (Readers learn, for Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, example, that in an experimental setting, Sani Abacha of Nigeria, Hosni Mubarak students who have studied banking are of Egypt, and Muammar al-Qaddai more likely to cheat at a game than of Libya. In the author’s view, the those who have not.) Lo concludes with overall track record of recovery has some concrete suggestions for how to better align the incentives of market 176 f o r e i g n a f fa i r s

Recent Books actors and regulators with the goal of Military, Scientiic, and a sustainable, resilient, and eicient Technological inancial system. A Farewell to Ice: A Report From the Lawrence D. Freedman Arctic BY PETER WADHAMS. Oxford The Mirror Test: America at War in Iraq University Press, 2017, 256 pp. and Afghanistan BY J. KAEL WESTON. Knopf, 2016, The surprisingly rapid melting of the 585 pp. icecap of the Arctic Ocean has been widely reported. In this book, Wadhams, Illusions of Victory: The Anbar Awakening an oceanographer, describes in simple and the Rise of the Islamic State terms the basic physics of what has been BY CARTER MALKASIAN. Oxford happening and why and puts forward a University Press, 2017, 280 pp. brief history of the role of ice on earth. He goes on to conjecture about some of War and the Art of Governance: Consolidating the consequences of the almost certain Combat Success Into Political Victory continuation of Arctic melting, including BY NADIA SCHADLOW. Georgetown both some economic advantages (such as University Press, 2017, 344 pp. increased ocean navigability) and some disastrous outcomes: the release of meth- The U.S. military has little ane hydrates trapped under Arctic ice, diiculty winning battles, but which would aggravate climate change, once it begins to occupy terri- and the relative cooling of Europe that tory, it gets into trouble, no matter how might result from a southward shift of benign its intentions. Both Weston the Gulf Stream. Wadhams also dis- and Malkasian saw this phenomenon cusses Antarctica, where, in contrast to irsthand as civilians working closely the Arctic, the sea ice seems to be grow- with the U.S. military in Afghanistan ing. The book would have beneited from and Iraq. Weston details his experi- more material on the land-based ice in ences with U.S. marines and Iraqis in Greenland, which is distinct from the sea Fallujah, trying to make the city func- ice around Greenland and which inlu- tion, and then relects on a similar stint ences sea levels. in the Afghan city of Khost, close to the Pakistani border. He attempts to come to terms with the human impact of the wars, visiting the graves of 31 marines whose helicopter was brought down in a mission for which Weston feels responsible. This is a book of bitter and mournful relections, of lives lost, and of failures to think through the September/October 2017 177

Recent Books consequences of individual actions. The be ighting enemies than addressing the “mirror test” in the title refers to the security and welfare of foreign popula- moment at which a wounded veteran is tions, which they see as a job for civilian allowed to look at his or her “new self.” agencies. But civilians unfortunately Weston’s aim is to force the United lack the capacity to cope with the many States to take a hard look in the mirror problems resulting from a military occu- after the “heedless, needless” wars of pation, so the task of maintaining order the post-9/11 era. has to be led by ighting forces. Schadlow describes the refusal within the U.S. Malkasian’s book is shorter and more military to accept that truth as “denial analytic but written in the same spirit. syndrome.” Yet past campaigns ofer His focus is Iraq’s Anbar Province. In some evidence that good outcomes can 2007, after many false steps, U.S. counter- result from energetic, military-led gov- insurgency strategy appeared to hit its ernance eforts—for example, the ones stride as Anbar’s predominantly Sunni that followed World War II. Schadlow’s residents turned on the al Qaeda forces survey of 15 cases of postconlict mili- that had controlled the area for years. tary governance, starting with the after- Al Qaeda’s defeat in Anbar became a math of the Mexican-American War, is model, with the hope that the U.S. meticulously researched and presents success there might be replicated in readers with clear lessons. I would urge Afghanistan. Sadly, in 2014, with the policymakers in the Trump administra- tribal forces of Anbar divided, Baghdad tion to read it, but that might be unnec- insensitive to Sunni interests, and the essary: Schadlow recently joined the U.S. role in Iraq subsiding, the jihadists staf of the National Security Council. of the Islamic State (or isis) launched their own “surge” and took the province. The Causes of War and the Spread of Peace In making sense of those developments, BY AZAR GAT. Oxford University Malkasian emphasizes the importance Press, 2017, 320 pp. of tribal politics, the resolve of local leaders, and the ruthlessness of the Gat addresses two of the biggest ques- jihadists. The takeaways from the U.S. tions in international relations: Why experience in Anbar, he concludes, are do wars still occur? And is the world the importance of preparing for the long becoming more peaceful? His answer to term once military forces commit to the second question is close to the one an intervention abroad, the need for a ofered by the cognitive scientist Steven continuing presence on the ground, and Pinker, whose optimistic thesis holds that a sober appreciation that, no matter how violence has declined over the course of well the military plans and prepares, it human history and will continue to do all might come apart. He concludes by so. Gat, however, does not promise that warning not to overestimate Washing- the trend will continue—a wise move, ton’s “ability to change foreign lands.” in light of recent events. After opening chapters on prehistoric war, which Gat Schadlow explains why the United describes as vicious and ubiquitous, his States struggles with that task: the military does not like the idea of gov- erning. Military leaders would rather 178 f o r e i g n a f fa i r s

Recent Books book goes on to argue for the importance in campaigns with the legion from Algeria of modernization in dampening violent to Indochina to Madagascar, to explore urges, which it does by making peace the legion’s character, role, and ights. seem so much more attractive. With the rise of U.S. power, the modernization The United States process took a distinctly liberal turn and served as the basis for optimistic post– Walter Russell Mead Cold War visions of a peaceful future. That optimism has been dented. Gat is The Ideas Industry: How Pessimists, less than conident that benign trends Partisans, and Plutocrats Are Transforming will continue, noting the challenge posed the Marketplace of Ideas by more authoritarian forms of modern- BY DANIEL W. DREZNER. Oxford ization, exempliied by China, and the University Press, 2017, 360 pp. risks to peace from societies that have turned against modernization altogether, especially in the Middle East. At the Edge of the World: The Heroic In this iconoclastic look at “the ideas Century of the French Foreign Legion industry” formed by universities, nonproit think tanks, for-proit BY JEAN-VINCENT BLANCHARD. consultancies, newspapers, magazines, and online sources of news and analysis, Bloomsbury, 2017, 272 pp. Drezner ofers an engaging perspective on the state of the U.S. foreign policy world. The French Foreign Legion was estab- He also makes a spirited, if not totally lished in 1831 at a time of disorder in convincing, defense of his own discipline France. At irst it was composed of only of political science and takes some well- foreigners (French citizens were able to aimed swipes at the pretensions of join after 1881), and a recruit had to ofer economists. Few in the United States only a name and a healthy body to join. are better placed to describe this world: The legionnaires’ loyalty was largely to Drezner is a tenured professor at a major one another, but France fashioned the university (Tufts), a widely admired recruits into an efective force available columnist for The Washington Post, and a for tough situations, especially in the former think tanker. Drezner believes that French colonies. A mythology developed despite its problems, the world of Ameri- around the legion, promoted in books and can intellectual debate is in reasonably movies in which the legionnaire appeared good shape. Vigorous competition among as a brooding but brave outcast, wearing a intellectuals for attention and inluence, trademark kepi and accepting the hazards Drezner argues, ensures that new ideas of war to escape a murky past. Blanchard’s get a hearing and that well-established scholarly but entertaining book shows that ones can be toppled. Although every the mystery and romance associated with component of the marketplace of ideas the legion had some basis in reality. faces both inancial and intellectual Blanchard uses the career of Marshal challenges, it continues to grow, and both Louis-Hubert Lyautey, who was involved September/October 2017 179

Recent Books elite and popular audiences continue to The Making of Black Lives Matter: A engage in the argument over the United Brief History of an Idea States’ place in the world. BY CHRISTOPHER J. LEBRON. Oxford University Press, 2017, 216 pp. The Financial Diaries: How American Lebron takes a deep, compelling dive into Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty the intellectual and cultural background of the Black Lives Matter movement. The BY JONATHAN MORDUCH AND concrete demands of the movement for safer and less violent law enforcement are RACHEL SCHNEIDER. Princeton important, he argues, but the movement University Press, 2017, 248 pp. lows from a deeper source: the quest of African Americans to live rich lives in a Morduch and Schneider carried out a society that all too frequently devalues fascinating research project: they and a black humanity and blocks black achieve- team of associates worked with more than ment. In his view, the political push for 250 U.S. households over a year collect- black rights has always been the external ing detailed information about how much aspect of a movement whose center is the they earned, how much they spent, and inner, spiritual struggle of black Ameri- why they made the decisions they did. cans to assert and protect their dignity What the authors found was that income in a harsh environment. A vital element for lower- and lower-middle-income of the struggle, Lebron argues, involves households often varies from month to maintaining the capacity to love white month, and those variations are respon- people even in the midst of injustice—a sible for much of the emotional stress and position that evokes Martin Luther King, economic diiculty such families experi- Jr., and the Christian roots of the African ence. For retail workers whose hours American political tradition. For Lebron, and schedules change, or waiters whose to lose that capacity would mean a dimin- tips go up and down depending on the ished self; in his view, the Black Lives season, or sporadically employed people Matter movement derives its deepest who endure gaps between temporary meaning from simultaneously struggling jobs, the erratic nature of their income against injustice and ighting the corrosive compounds the problems of poverty. efects of that injustice on its victims. The book’s portrayal of its subjects often seems too earnest and one-dimensional: Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed the poor are always sincere strivers; big Campaign corporations are invariably greedy. If there were any alcoholics or drug addicts BY JONATHAN ALLEN AND AMIE among the families who blew their money on substance abuse, the authors PARNES. Crown, 2017, 480 pp. don’t tell readers. The book recycles and repeats its core ideas more than needed. As Americans struggle to come to terms Nevertheless, its main point is impor- with the consequences of the remarkable tant and holds up well: policies aimed presidential election of 2016, Allen and at alleviating poverty need to look harder Parnes take a comprehensive look at the at increasingly erratic income streams. 180 f o r e i g n a f fai r s

Recent Books dysfunctional campaign of Hillary Clinton that Eisenhower was in fact deeply that failed to stop Donald Trump’s improb- engaged in the ight against McCarthy able march to the White House. It is a and even orchestrated a series of at- gripping read about a dispiriting team. tacks, culminating in the famous Army- One of the interesting phenomena of McCarthy hearings of 1954, that ulti- recent American elections has been the mately destroyed McCarthy and his increasing mismatch between the quality movement. The story draws attention of the reportage and the quality of the to Ike’s darker side: deliberate perjury candidates; rarely in the long annals of by government witnesses was part of the political history have so many good books strategy that brought McCarthy down. been produced about such mediocre Love of covert operations was a central igures. Anyone with an interest in the feature of Eisenhower’s “hidden hand” U.S. political process will want to consult approach to foreign policy. In suggesting this book, but in the end, it is hard to that the same tendencies helped defeat believe that the root causes of Clinton’s McCarthy, Nichols reminds readers that failure lay with the team she assembled. Eisenhower’s legacy is more complex and Future historians seeking to understand shadowy than some of his more earnest her defeat will learn less from tales about defenders care to admit. squabbling among her aides than from the story of the troubled American polity Western Europe outside the bubble they inhabited. Ike and McCarthy: Dwight Eisenhower’s Andrew Moravcsik Secret Campaign Against Joseph McCarthy BY DAVID A. NICHOLS. Simon & The Politics of Opera: A History From Schuster, 2017, 400 pp. Monteverdi to Mozart BY MITCHELL COHEN. Princeton The rise in President Dwight Eisenhow- University Press, 2017, 512 pp. er’s reputation is one of the most striking trends in the historiography of U.S. Toscanini: Musician of Conscience politics. Mocked and scorned by liberals BY HARVEY SACHS. Liveright, 2017, as an inarticulate bumbler during his 944 pp. presidency, Eisenhower has had his strategic gifts, strong values, and prudent F or centuries, opera was not only statesmanship come into clearer relief the most prestigious form of with the passage of time. One of the Western music but also the most deep stains on his reputation, and a key political. Cohen observes that the invention reason why so many liberals disliked him of opera coincided with the emergence so strongly in the 1950s, was the percep- of the modern nation-state, and the art tion that he avoided confrontations with form’s subsequent evolution has mirrored Senator Joseph McCarthy, the lamboy- changes in state power. Many of the great- antly demagogic anticommunist. In Ike est operas raise profound questions of and McCarthy, Nichols argues persuasively September/October 2017 181

Recent Books political philosophy. Claudio Monteverdi’s forced him to lee to the United States. operas portray the ruthless political Yet he won in the end when, after the intrigue that the composer saw around war, the octogenarian returned to Italy him in small Italian courts. Operas by to inspire a new generation. His life Jean-Baptiste Lully and Jean-Philippe stands as a lesson that artists can be Rameau explore how absolutist monarchs, the most visible conscience of an era. such as the Bourbon kings for whom the two composers wrote, can wield their Hitler’s American Model: The United power for moral ends. Mozart’s three States and the Making of Nazi Race Law great Da Ponte operas trace subtle shifts BY JAMES Q. WHITMAN. Princeton in eighteenth-century society and ques- University Press, 2017, 224 pp. tion whether a social hierarchy headed by aristocratic men is truly consistent Historians of the twentieth century with Enlightenment values. This subtly often represent the New Deal–era United insightful book helps readers experi- States and Nazi Germany as polar oppo- ence these timeless masterpieces anew. sites. This unsettling book demolishes that orthodoxy. It carefully documents Composers have not been the only how the tradition of racist laws in the igures in the opera world to take on United States inspired and instructed politics; conductors have as well, includ- Adolf Hitler and Nazi lawmakers in ing Arturo Toscanini, one of the great- fashioning their own racist policies. est in history. From the moment in Many forget that as late as the 1930s, 1886 when Toscanini, then a 19-year- the United States remained one of the old cellist and chorus master, stepped world’s most salient models of legally in as a last-minute substitute and con- institutionalized racism. Nazi lawyers ducted Verdi’s Aida from memory, he closely studied Jim Crow laws imposing excelled not just at Italian operas but segregation, denying equal citizenship, also at those by Beethoven, Wagner, banning nonwhite immigration, and and many others. Other books have criminalizing miscegenation. Hitler analyzed his exceptional musical inter- himself praised the United States for pretations and traced his impact on the its record on race relations, not least way we listen to music today. This long for its westward expansion through the biography updates Sachs’ two previous conquest and extermination of Native books on Toscanini and seeks to be the Americans. Whitman is admirably careful inal word on the conductor’s life and not to exaggerate the inluence of the times. Much of the book concerns his U.S. model on Nazi Germany: he recog- intimate personal life, which was at times nizes that twentieth-century American risqué. Yet the author also emphasizes southern racism was decentralized rather Toscanini’s role as the most prominent than fascist and incapable of inspiring antifascist musician of the mid-twentieth mass murder on the industrial scale of century. His courageous opposition to the Holocaust. Indeed, Nazi jurists Francisco Franco, Adolf Hitler, and criticized their American counterparts Benito Mussolini made headlines world- for their hypocrisy in publicly denying wide. Eventually, violent assaults on him in Italy, along with Hitler’s success, 182 f o r e i g n a f fai r s

Recent Books yet locally practicing systematic racism. negotiate lent France clout. For those Whitman reminds readers of the subtle who prize global cultural diversity, ironies of modern history and of the need this is a hopeful tale. to be constantly vigilant against racism. Exception Taken: How France Has Deied Faster, Higher, Farther: The Volkswagen Hollywood’s New World Order Scandal BY JACK EWING. Norton, 2017, BY JONATHAN BUCHSBAUM. 352 pp. Columbia University Press, 2017, In 2015, a scandal rocked Volkswagen, 424 pp. the world’s largest automobile com- pany, when investigators found that it Today, global capitalism pervades had equipped its diesel-engine cars nearly every nook and cranny of with computer code that allowed them national economies. Some believe to evade antipollution regulations. resistance is futile. Yet Buchsbaum Nitrous oxide is responsible for asthma, describes the French government’s heart attacks, and other health risks, surprisingly successful defense of and Volkswagen’s “defeat devices” hid French cultural identity in the face of emission levels that were up to 20 winner-take-all globalization. His times as high as the legal limits. In book traces in precise but engaging the end, the fraud cost the company detail France’s preservation of its over $10 billion in ines and restitu- cinema industry. By the early 1990s, tion. This book by a reporter who U.S. ilms controlled 60 percent of the covered the story has the vices and French market, and that proportion virtues of a journalistic account. It is was rising steadily. Since then, the repetitive, peddles cheap stereotypes French state has systematically de- of Germans and business executives, ployed its power to reverse that trend. and struggles to develop a bottom line: At the center of this efort has been a indeed, readers never learn exactly program of domestic state subsidies to who in the company knew about the ilmmakers, theaters, and television fraud. Yet the book is nonetheless quite stations, all linked to maintaining readable—and worth reading for its quotas for French-produced content. insights into global corporations and Stif opposition from Hollywood fol- efforts by governments to regulate lowed, as did a concerted U.S. efort them. Readers learn how assiduously to get the World Trade Organization to the German government protects its ban such subsidies and liberalize trade big businesses from national and eu in ilms. French diplomats and regula- regulations, how easily large organiza- tors went on the ofensive, forming tions can be directed to harmful and alliances with other countries, notably illegal purposes, and how essential Canada, and successfully pushed for academic scholars and independent the establishment of an international government regulators are to the legal right to cultural sovereignty. Eu protection of the public interest. regulations and Europe’s ability to September/October 2017 183

Recent Books The Holocaust: A New History volume history of the Holocaust will have trouble inding one better than this. BY LAURENCE REES. PublicAfairs, 2017, 552 pp. The Holocaust has become an iconic Western Hemisphere event in modern history, known to almost everyone across the globe. It is Richard Feinberg also one of the most widely studied: an interested reader can now choose Better Neighbors: Toward a Renewal of among a dozen good general histories Economic Integration in Latin America and tens of thousands of specialized volumes. Rees has compiled a readable, BY CHAD P. BOWN, DANIEL moving, and comprehensive overview LEDERMAN, SAMUEL of this scholarship, enlivened by vivid PIENKNAGURA, AND RAYMOND irst-person reminiscences. He highlights three critical points of historiographic ROBERTSON. World Bank, 2017, consensus. First, the mass killing was 199 pp. not inevitable. Although Adolf Hitler was a vicious anti-Semite, the extermi- If the Trump administration adopts nation of the Jews was not his initial the economic protectionism that conception of the Final Solution. Nor the U.S. president threatened to did the mass murder result from a single, pursue during his 2016 campaign, the clear decision. Rather, it evolved out countries of Latin America could respond of incremental bureaucratic escalation with “open regionalism”—bringing and adaptation during wartime and their economies closer together while was pursued unevenly. Second, the deepening their integration into other Jews were neither the only group nor inviting global markets. Although crafted even the irst one that the Nazis tar- prior to the U.S. election, the message geted for industrial extermination. of this volume by World Bank econo- They pioneered concentration camps mists is even more pertinent today. It to house political and war prisoners ofers a warning to those who imagine and invented the technique of gassing that Latin America has no alternative individuals in showers to liquidate to U.S. markets and so can be readily disabled people. Third, neither the bullied into unilateral trade concessions. Jews nor the Germans were passive. The authors recognize that advocates Many, perhaps most, concentration of open regionalism—hardly a new camp guards simply followed orders, concept—have failed to raise intra- but some went to special lengths to be regional exports beyond 20 percent of inhumanly cruel, and a few others total exports. But a cold shoulder from engaged in acts of humanity. And con- the Trump administration might act as trary to common misunderstandings, a catalyst. The authors recommend Jews organized deiance and armed further trade liberalization, especially opposition, most notably in the Warsaw between Mexico and countries in ghetto. Readers looking for a single- Central and South America, and argue 184 f o r e i g n a f fai r s

Recent Books that the region’s governments should Although it promised inancial relief, harmonize their countries’ rules and the legislation was a blow to the regulations, expand their investments island’s sovereignty. in regional infrastructure and logistics, and, most controversial, remove barri- Argentina’s Economic Reforms of the 1990s ers to the migration of workers across in Contemporary and Historical Perspective national borders. BY DOMINGO CAVALLO AND SONIA Puerto Rico: What Everyone Needs to Know BY JORGE DUANY. Oxford University CAVALLO RUNDE. Routledge, 2016, Press, 2017, 208 pp. 296 pp. Duany, a Puerto Rican intellectual From the early 1980s through the early now based at Florida International years of this century, Domingo Cavallo University, was an inspired choice to served in a series of top economic policy write a primer on an island that an posts in the Argentine government. important 1901 U.S. Supreme Court Making use of his insider perspective, ruling described as “belonging to the Cavallo and his co-author—his daugh- United States, but not a part of the ter, also an economist—seek to explain United States.” Duany reviews Puerto the extreme volatility of the Argentine Rico’s political history, its economic economy. They divide Argentine eco- booms and busts, and, most brilliantly, nomic history into two long eras: the its bountiful cultural production. He Golden Age (1870–1914), when govern- argues persuasively that, although it ments pursued a market-driven open lacks full sovereignty, Puerto Rico economy and spent productively, but meets most of the criteria for being with restraint, on education and infra- considered a nation-state, including a structure; and 1945–90, a period marked shared territory, language, and his- by irresponsible populism, distortive tory. A national identity has survived state interventions, iscal deicits, and through the Spanish language and runaway inlation. During the 1990s, through distinctly Puerto Rican art Cavallo struggled mightily to disman- and culture, despite the imposition of tle the populist legacy, but ultimately, U.S. commercial capitalism. But the the authors lament, “politics crushed island’s economy is performing poorly, policies, and corporatism and special a result of fiscal mismanagement, interests prevailed.” Why did the Argen- relatively high labor costs, and the tines fail to learn the right lessons from loss of federal tax subsidies. Mean- their repeated calamities? Reasonably, while, the population has declined the Cavallos blame unresolved divisions because of massive emigration. In among stubborn political factions, distrib- 2016, the U.S. Congress enacted the utive tensions (debtors versus creditors, Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, workers versus capitalists, rural inhab- and Economic Stability Act to deal itants versus city dwellers), impossibly with the island’s severe debt crisis. complex and unstable rules, and weak institutions (including a corrupt and politicized judiciary)—in short, a devastating shortage of civic culture. September/October 2017 185

Recent Books This is a compelling book, although its The Fate of the Furious omissions suggest another problem: few Argentines are willing to accept DIRECTED BY F. GARY G RAY. some blame for their national tragedies. Universal Pictures, 2017. The FBI in Latin America: The Ecuador Files The 15-minute opening sequence of The BY MARC BECKER. Duke University Fate of the Furious, the eighth installment Press, 2017, 336 pp. of the blockbuster Fast and Furious ilm franchise, paints an alluring portrait of Before the creation of the cia, in 1947, Havana: the city’s bright sunlight, color- U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt drenched architecture, exuberant youth, turned to J. Edgar Hoover’s fbi to and ethos of innovation and openhearted gather intelligence in Latin America. generosity. The hero of the series, Dom During World War II, some 700 fbi (played by Vin Diesel), best sums up the agents worked the region—45 in deining premise of the Havana segment Ecuador alone. Mining previously when he explains what led him to choose overlooked fbi archives, Becker, an to honeymoon in Cuba: “The same things expert on Ecuadorian history, inds that bring everyone to Cuba: culture, that the fbi reports from that period people, beauty.” In the sequence’s dra- contain valuable primary-source infor- matic climax, Dom wins a hard-fought mation on Ecuadorian politics. Since drag race against a tough local competi- political activists tended not to be tor, by a nose. The loser is gracious: very good archivists of their own “You won my car, and you earned my activities, the fbi agents ironically respect.” Dom’s response is equally became the region’s historians—and magnanimous: “Keep your car: your not bad ones at that, Becker recog- respect is good enough for me.” In that nizes, especially as the agents gained instant, the ilm astutely captures the experience in the ield. Roosevelt was essence of relations between the United concerned about Nazi iniltration of States and Cuba: a striving for mutual Ecuador, but Becker inds that Hoover’s respect. After enjoying the biggest agents focused more on local leftists. worldwide opening-weekend box-oice Nevertheless, Becker gives the fbi agents revenues of all time, the ilm—the irst points for not exaggerating external major Hollywood production to be shot inluences, appreciating the weaknesses in Cuba since the revolution in 1959— of the Ecuadorian Communist Party, grossed over $1 billion globally in the and acknowledging the role of poverty two months following its release. Cuba’s and inequality in fostering political tourism bureau could never dream of dissent. Becker also notes that the avail- afording such powerful advertising. able archival record does not reveal any Despite U.S. President Donald Trump’s fbi attempts to actively iniltrate or harsh anticommunist rhetoric, the disrupt the activities of leftist political new administration’s Cuba policies parties in the country. appear unlikely to stem travelers’ interest in visiting the irresistible island. 186 f o r e i g n a f fai r s

Recent Books Eastern Europe and Former one book to read on the subject, this Soviet Republics should be it. Robert Legvold Rappaport’s account takes a very diferent tack. Hers is an almost day- Russia in Revolution: An Empire in Crisis, by-day, street-level portrait of life 1890 to 1928 amid the violence, disorder, and drama BY S. A. SMITH. Oxford University during and between the revolutions of Press, 2017, 448 pp. February and October 1917 (which are together referred to as the Russian Caught in the Revolution Revolution). She constructs her story BY HELEN RAPPAPORT. St. Martin’s out of hundreds of eyewitness accounts Press, 2017, 464 pp. by foreigners who found themselves in Russia’s capital—either by choice or Was Revolution Inevitable? Turning Points because they were trapped when the of the Russian Revolution paths of escape closed. They included British volunteer nurses, American EDITED BY TONY BRENTON. socialites on goodwill missions, and journalists, bankers, businessmen, and Oxford University Press, 2017, 384 pp. diplomats from many countries. Their diaries and correspondence represent a The centenary of the 1917 Russian treasure-trove that Rappaport deftly Revolution has brought forth a mines. Her book transports the reader number of excellent new histo- into the melee, conveying what it felt ries, including these three, which difer like to be in surging crowds of strik- from one another in striking ways but ing workers as a Cossack cavalry all feature superb insight into one of charged, sabers drawn; to take cover the last century’s turning points. Smith’s as machine guns blazed atop build- book is the most comprehensive of the ings; to witness infuriated mobs turn three. Indeed, in many respects, it is on the police; to experience the sharp the most expansive history of the 1917 contrast between the uninterrupted revolution available. Smith traces the extravagance of the privileged few revolution in detail, as well as its prelude and the exploding misery of most and aftermath. Every step of the way, others as the war’s costs mounted; he draws in the many diferent elements and to observe overheated workers’ of the period—not just the political meetings and quarrelsome govern- tumult but also the changing character ment sessions alongside the British of Russian society, economic develop- writer W. Somerset Maugham, who ments, cultural trends, and the impact was living in Petrograd and working of a turbulent international context. as a spy for the United Kingdom. Throughout, Smith fairly and intelli- gently arbitrates the great debates But what if none of those things among historians over how to interpret had ever happened at all? Brenton the revolution. Were readers to look for assembles a team of premier historians to wrestle with the twists of fate that might have averted the Bolshevik September/October 2017 187

Recent Books Revolution or altered its subsequent reader behind-the-scenes access to course. They examine 14 such moments, Politburo meetings, Gorbachev’s private stretching from the assassination of conversations with aides, and his give- Russian Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin and-takes with foreign leaders. “His in September 1911 to the radical surge strengths made everything possible,” in the Bolshevik regime’s ruthlessness Taubman concludes, “but his weak- in 1922. Dominic Lieven tackles the nesses undermined his whole project.” counterfactual likelihood that, had it The irst half of this sweeping judgment not been for the onset of World War I, refers to the nobility of Gorbachev’s foreign powers, particularly Germany, hopes, his stalwart idealism, his mod- would have intervened to strangle the eration and aversion to the use of force, revolution. Richard Pipes untangles the and his forbearance (except when it confusion surrounding the “Kornilov came to Boris Yeltsin, whom Gorbachev afair,” the abortive August 1917 mili- came to loathe). But in leading his country tary coup that, he argues, “made the out of the Soviet era, Gorbachev was Bolshevik seizure of power all but ultimately hobbled by his determination inevitable.” Erik Landis wonders to plunge ahead without a clear sense of whether, had the Bolshevik regime what came next and by the stubborn heeded Leon Trotsky’s plea to cease misapprehension that he could reconcile grain requisitioning in 1920, rather political forces that were irreconcilable. than a year later, the massive violence that ensued might have been avoided. Everyday Law in Russia Counterfactual history is always BY KATHRYN HENDLEY. Cornell contentious, but this book embodies the University Press, 2017, 304 pp. genre’s best qualities. Gorbachev: His Life and Times Law in Russia has long been viewed by BY WILLIAM TAUBMAN. Norton, outsiders as a tool used arbitrarily by 2017, 880 pp. those who rule—an image strengthened in the Putin era. Hendley, one of the In this combination of deeply penetrat- most seasoned students of Russian law, ing history and engrossing psychologi- would not deny that any country where cal study, Taubman draws on a wide the law is twisted to serve the political range of sources and interviews (in- and venal interests of those with power cluding seven with his main subject) does not live under the rule of law. to render every major development of However, she estimates that in Russia, the former Soviet leader’s six-year tenure only three percent of all instances of with depth and completeness. The law enforcement involve such perver- biography spans Mikhail Gorbachev’s sions. She does not question the dam- entire life, up to the present day, which age done to democracy by such abuses, inds him despairing over the direction but she is more interested in the ways that Russia has taken under President in which most citizens typically engage Vladimir Putin. The book grants the with the law: divorce proceedings, personal-injury suits, common misde- 188 f o r e i g n a f fai r s