Sorting through the various narratives is critically important when trying to ascertain the facts in any situation, especially when it comes to the murky world of international relations and espionage. Nothing has stirred up so many narratives and controversies in the latter domain than the massive theft of an estimated 1.7 million documents in 2013 from secure National Security Agency (NSA) computers by former IT worker Edward Snowden that ignited a fierce debate over foreign and domestic government surveillance. Treading through this murky world and how Edward Snowden changed the game for better or worse is investigative journalist Edward Jay Epstein in his 2017 investigative book How America Lost Its Secrets: Edward Snowden, the Man and the Theft.
Epstein's primary assertion in his investigative work is to challenge the casting of Snowden as an unblemished whistle-blower, as an internal NSA investigation found that a majority of the documents concerned not domestic surveillance but methods and sources involved in foreign surveillance. He first examines the trail of Snowden's movements between various government contractors in 2011-2013 before his flight to Hong Kong and eventually Moscow, Russia where he presumably remains. Notwithstanding some very dubious caricatures of Snowden, his allies in the media and hacktivist communities and his girlfriend Lindsay Mills as alternatively nefarious, narcissistic and superficial, Epstein in this first section of his analysis does help highlight the facts and gaps about Snowden's movements before and after his document theft. Some of the more prominent gaps in the story are the interims after he arrived in Hong Kong before he contacted journalists there and the next interval after that until his departure to Russia.
These intervals become the focal points of the remainder of the book, where, necessarily, when concrete facts cannot be found, educated guesses and speculation are made as to the implications of Snowden's disclosure on America's national security and the ongoing debate about government surveillance and contracting in the intelligence business. While not necessarily succeeding in proving without a doubt that Snowden was a knowing Russian spy (an implication of his argument against Snowden's burnished image as a whistle-blower exposing U.S. government overreach), his consultation with fellow journalists and former intelligence workers about the situation and its context does raise a number of concerns surrounding the Snowden case such as the need for increased regulation under the Patriot Act of 2001 on when and how domestic surveillance of national security concerns is conducted and the vulnerabilities in outsourcing espionage functions to private actors.
Because of tightening budgets and caps on the hiring of government employees and the need to keep ahead in an era of cyber-espionage, the United States intelligence apparatus has come to rely on outside contractors like Dell and Booz Allen Hamilton for the vetting and hiring of employees and the maintenance of secure computer networks. However, because outside contractors are driven by the profit motive, the faster they can move on hiring, the more money they earn and increases the potential for more contracts to be fulfilled. Of course, this leads to a decrease in the quality of employee vetting, which means that potential hacktivists with ideological misgivings about the work U.S. intelligence agencies like the NSA conduct could be let in without much thought and provide potentially easy pickings for other intelligence agencies in terms of persuading those employees to leak various quantities of data. Enter Snowden, who was let in by Booz Allen Hamilton to a higher security clearance position despite flags raised by his previous employer, the CIA. It seems to give credence to the concerns by national security professionals of sacrificing computer network security for greater intelligence reach in the cyber-age and the need for a better balance between the two.
Now that a cataclysmic breach once speculated on in the intelligence community for decades became a reality in 2013, what are the other implications aside from the potential need for increased regulation of government contractors? Epstein concludes How America Lost Its Secrets by speculating how the compromising of sources and methods used by the U.S. and its allies impacts the NSA's post 9-11 focus on counter-terrorism efforts. Many of the documents released by Snowden revealed a significant breach of sources in the Middle East, with the potential for darkened channels at the worst to misinformation channels at the best. No matter where one stands on the Snowden issue (such as if he intended serious damage to U.S. intelligence-gathering ability), the reality remains that information is a key currency in this day and age, critical for optimal policy-making and the best use of government and private sector resources.
As noted, it is too early to tell the true impact of the Snowden breach and if Snowden was a willing spy, but one thing that all of us should agree on is finding a way to protect American interests and citizens in a way that doesn't involve dangerous, wanton and unchecked foreign and domestic surveillance characteristic of the authoritarian states we routinely denounce.
Works Cited:
Epstein, Edward Jay. (2017). How America Lost Its Secrets: Edward Snowden, the Man and the Theft. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Friday, February 23, 2018
Sunday, February 18, 2018
Book Review: Richard McGregor's "Asia's Reckoning"
Much has been made in current affairs, news media and foreign policy circles about the emerging frenemies-type relationship between the United States and China, with assessments ranging from guarded optimism about long-term strategies to accommodate and work with the country to more bleak assessments of potential military conflict from the various miscalculations between rising and established powers alike (as in Graham Allison's Destined for War). But what about Japan, a traditional U.S. ally in East Asia and the rest of the volatile region? What is their impact on U.S. and Chinese policy? Richard McGregor, a journalist specializing in East Asian affairs, chooses to examine the often-ignored background relationships between the United States, Japan and other East Asian nations that add further nuance and perspective to the much-reported-on U.S.-China relationship in his 2017 work Asia's Reckoning: China, Japan, and the Fate of U.S. Power in the Pacific Century.
With inside access to officials in both Asia and the United States, Freedom of Information Act requests, various news publications and diplomatic archives, McGregor examines the fraught history of the major trilateral (U.S.-China-Japan) relationship in East Asia and attempts to extrapolate its affects on the future of the region starting in the late 1940s (post WWII) to the present (the beginning of the Trump administration). McGregor teases out the many different interrelating strands of both the foundations of friendship between the two countries and also the frayed areas of tension in a complicated geopolitical quilt, finding a complex blend of political dynasties, conflicting historical narratives, shifting alliances and great-power dynamics that have the potential to seriously destabilize the region as in the Middle East or usher in a new era of unprecedented cooperation.
Our story starts in the wake of WWII, where former Axis power Japan had formed a security alliance with the occupying United States, on the condition that Japan reworks its constitution to be more restrictive to the use of military power, with the idea being to weaken the more militaristic segments of the formal imperial power to stave off further conflict. This alliance formed the anchor for the modernization of the region, with economic and political alliances then allowing for the stabilization of a new postwar international order through the Cold War era. China under the victorious Communist Party (CCP), having forced nationalists into exile in Taiwan, was then biding its time as it focused on uniting the country and fueling rapid economic growth and allowed the U.S. its Asian alliances (with Japan and South Korea, for example) as a bulwark against Soviet expansionism. Meanwhile, the United States encouraged the Japanese economic boom through the end of the 1960s under the stewardship of the dominant and conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) while warily eyeing the rise of communism in China even as diplomatic relations were established in the early 1970s. However by the 1980s, conservative agitations in each country combined with increasing economic competitions and struggles over the historical high ground threatened the meaningful diplomatic progress made over the decades.
Yet, these alliances (formal or not) have largely persevered. Why? McGregor's book is at its best when looking at all the factors that knit countries together and those that seek to tear them apart, revealing continuity among huge changes and subtle changes underneath a seeming continuity. The underlying historical traumas largely resulting from the war were essentially buried by pragmatic factions within each of the countries (the CCP, LDP and U.S. administrations) which sought greater security and economic cooperation to stave off the threats from the Soviets and later North Korea. This pattern of pragmatism has served as the glue that held the relationships between the three powers together through various political transitions within each country, meaning that core aspects of the grand strategy (containment and appeasement of an ambitious China through its integration into the international order and in regional forums as well as greater economic cooperation) tend to be adhered to no matter the political orientation of the party in power. That doesn't mean that there hasn't been much change to the relationship over the years or moments of diplomatic deep freeze.
All of the parties involved are guilty of succumbing to nationalist moments, whether it is the U.S. in demanding protectionist policies against a rising Japan (with familiar charges more recently aimed at China by those allied with the Trump administration) in the 1970s and 80s to the ongoing toxic history war flare-ups involving an assertive China demanding Japanese apologies for wartime atrocities such as the Nanjing Massacre, past colonization of parts of China and South Korea after the first Sino-Japanese war in 1895 and prime minister visitations to the controversial Yasukuni shrine (which serves as a memorial for war dead that includes Class A war criminals). The U.S. wasn't pulled in until the later 1990s and early 21st century when its role in ending the war by the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were brought into question by some factions in Japan and in China still wary of potential exercises of imperial power by Western nations, yet frightened by a potential resurgence of Japanese militarism.
Further complicating the toxic history debates that soured diplomatic progress was an assertive China building up its military and contesting the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, which it claimed as part of a large swath of territory in the South and East China Seas, causing Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and the Philippines to embrace a continued U.S. military presence in the region. Sending further shockwaves through the system was Japan's reworking of its postwar pacifist constitution to allow a military buildup in response to Beijing's regional ambitions and a U.S. withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a signal of a potentially more isolationist and protectionist United States whose decreased regional presence or potential withdrawal threatened an upending of the power balance in the region.
Enter Trump in 2017 whose administration came into power espousing a similar campaign platform of economic nationalism and protectionism that espoused "retrenchment and every country fending for itself" yet contrary to expectations supported the continuing U.S.-Japan alliance and even some degree of cooperation with China on hotspots like North Korea (McGregor, 2017, p. 351). As with any work trying to predict the future by extrapolation from history, Asia's Reckoning is understandably tentative towards the future of the American power component of the title in the East Asia region, leaving such remarks to a brief afterword in which the infighting within the Trump administration's globalist and isolationist wings and Trump's own unpredictability are heavily featured, putting a big question mark at the end for readers. Ultimately, McGregor weaves together a compelling and intriguing narrative while highlighting the continuities below ever-changing foreign policy and thus equips and primes readers with the necessary historical understanding to keep watch through the Trump administration for a potential answer to the fate of American power in the Asia Pacific.
Works Cited:
Allison, Graham T. (2017). Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap? (1st ed.). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: New York.
Mcgregor, Richard. (2017). Asia's Reckoning: China, Japan, and the Fate of U.S. Power in the Pacific Century. Penguin Publishing Group.
With inside access to officials in both Asia and the United States, Freedom of Information Act requests, various news publications and diplomatic archives, McGregor examines the fraught history of the major trilateral (U.S.-China-Japan) relationship in East Asia and attempts to extrapolate its affects on the future of the region starting in the late 1940s (post WWII) to the present (the beginning of the Trump administration). McGregor teases out the many different interrelating strands of both the foundations of friendship between the two countries and also the frayed areas of tension in a complicated geopolitical quilt, finding a complex blend of political dynasties, conflicting historical narratives, shifting alliances and great-power dynamics that have the potential to seriously destabilize the region as in the Middle East or usher in a new era of unprecedented cooperation.
Our story starts in the wake of WWII, where former Axis power Japan had formed a security alliance with the occupying United States, on the condition that Japan reworks its constitution to be more restrictive to the use of military power, with the idea being to weaken the more militaristic segments of the formal imperial power to stave off further conflict. This alliance formed the anchor for the modernization of the region, with economic and political alliances then allowing for the stabilization of a new postwar international order through the Cold War era. China under the victorious Communist Party (CCP), having forced nationalists into exile in Taiwan, was then biding its time as it focused on uniting the country and fueling rapid economic growth and allowed the U.S. its Asian alliances (with Japan and South Korea, for example) as a bulwark against Soviet expansionism. Meanwhile, the United States encouraged the Japanese economic boom through the end of the 1960s under the stewardship of the dominant and conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) while warily eyeing the rise of communism in China even as diplomatic relations were established in the early 1970s. However by the 1980s, conservative agitations in each country combined with increasing economic competitions and struggles over the historical high ground threatened the meaningful diplomatic progress made over the decades.
Yet, these alliances (formal or not) have largely persevered. Why? McGregor's book is at its best when looking at all the factors that knit countries together and those that seek to tear them apart, revealing continuity among huge changes and subtle changes underneath a seeming continuity. The underlying historical traumas largely resulting from the war were essentially buried by pragmatic factions within each of the countries (the CCP, LDP and U.S. administrations) which sought greater security and economic cooperation to stave off the threats from the Soviets and later North Korea. This pattern of pragmatism has served as the glue that held the relationships between the three powers together through various political transitions within each country, meaning that core aspects of the grand strategy (containment and appeasement of an ambitious China through its integration into the international order and in regional forums as well as greater economic cooperation) tend to be adhered to no matter the political orientation of the party in power. That doesn't mean that there hasn't been much change to the relationship over the years or moments of diplomatic deep freeze.
All of the parties involved are guilty of succumbing to nationalist moments, whether it is the U.S. in demanding protectionist policies against a rising Japan (with familiar charges more recently aimed at China by those allied with the Trump administration) in the 1970s and 80s to the ongoing toxic history war flare-ups involving an assertive China demanding Japanese apologies for wartime atrocities such as the Nanjing Massacre, past colonization of parts of China and South Korea after the first Sino-Japanese war in 1895 and prime minister visitations to the controversial Yasukuni shrine (which serves as a memorial for war dead that includes Class A war criminals). The U.S. wasn't pulled in until the later 1990s and early 21st century when its role in ending the war by the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were brought into question by some factions in Japan and in China still wary of potential exercises of imperial power by Western nations, yet frightened by a potential resurgence of Japanese militarism.
Further complicating the toxic history debates that soured diplomatic progress was an assertive China building up its military and contesting the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, which it claimed as part of a large swath of territory in the South and East China Seas, causing Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and the Philippines to embrace a continued U.S. military presence in the region. Sending further shockwaves through the system was Japan's reworking of its postwar pacifist constitution to allow a military buildup in response to Beijing's regional ambitions and a U.S. withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a signal of a potentially more isolationist and protectionist United States whose decreased regional presence or potential withdrawal threatened an upending of the power balance in the region.
Enter Trump in 2017 whose administration came into power espousing a similar campaign platform of economic nationalism and protectionism that espoused "retrenchment and every country fending for itself" yet contrary to expectations supported the continuing U.S.-Japan alliance and even some degree of cooperation with China on hotspots like North Korea (McGregor, 2017, p. 351). As with any work trying to predict the future by extrapolation from history, Asia's Reckoning is understandably tentative towards the future of the American power component of the title in the East Asia region, leaving such remarks to a brief afterword in which the infighting within the Trump administration's globalist and isolationist wings and Trump's own unpredictability are heavily featured, putting a big question mark at the end for readers. Ultimately, McGregor weaves together a compelling and intriguing narrative while highlighting the continuities below ever-changing foreign policy and thus equips and primes readers with the necessary historical understanding to keep watch through the Trump administration for a potential answer to the fate of American power in the Asia Pacific.
Works Cited:
Allison, Graham T. (2017). Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap? (1st ed.). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: New York.
Mcgregor, Richard. (2017). Asia's Reckoning: China, Japan, and the Fate of U.S. Power in the Pacific Century. Penguin Publishing Group.
Thursday, February 8, 2018
Book Review: Mark Perry's "The Pentagon's Wars"
Since the conclusion of WWII, many observers have noted that the United States seems to have lost its way in terms of the formulation and implementation of a consistent foreign policy and there are no shortage of explanations as to why. Naturally then, there are many factors that could account for the inconsistency of our nation's foreign policy, including the turnover of personnel between Republican and Democratic administrations (whose views about policy can differ considerably) and economic downturns. Mark Perry expands and deepens the investigation of the former factor by analyzing the bureaucratic infighting within both the political (mostly civilian) and military establishments within and across the administrations of Presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George Bush and Barack Obama in his 2017 publication The Pentagon's Wars: The Military's Undeclared War Against America's Presidents.
Perry's thesis is that the stability of the nation's political-military bond that is the cornerstone to our democracy (separating us from other countries that, to their detriment, have failed to find a balance between civilian and military power) is not as stable as it appears. While there is plenty of blame to be assigned to both sides of the relationship, Perry warns that "over the last twenty-eight years, the brilliance of our battlefield leadership has not been matched by those in Washington who are responsible for making certain that our soldiers, sailors, and airmen (and women) not only have what they need to win, but are backed by strong leaders who speak their minds" (Perry, 2017, p. 297). In other words, military leaders have come to strongly disagree with various administrations, yet by not raising strong objections at critical points in the decision-making process are letting those same presidents go ahead with major foreign policy decisions without having their assumptions checked and all options thoroughly explored and vetted. Where did this increased resentment come from and why?
It all starts in the 1980s towards the tail end of the Cold War, with two major changes that impacted the nature of warfare and the military itself. The first of these major changes was the "Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA)" which entailed a major technological shift in how wars are fought, going from traditional ground wars involving large amounts of machinery, inaccurate heavy weaponry, and personnel to wars fought by "lighter and more mobile forces" backed up by advances in stealth and surveillance technologies brought on by the age of computers (Perry, 2017, p. xiii-xiv). (Think drones, satellites, stealth bombers and laser-guided weaponry.) Accompanying the RMA was the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act (Goldwater-Nichols Act for short) which revised the chain of command by taking out the heads of the armed services (Joint Chiefs of Staff) from command positions and assigning them to either an advisorial role (JCS chair) or merely to that of training and equipping soldiers (other military heads). Both the RMA and Goldwater-Nichols forced the four branches of the military closer together, but this integration made the civilian-military and intra-military infighting worse as military readiness clashed with the realities of achieving battlefield success.
Often, the result of this friction was for administrations to appoint friendly military officers to head the JCS or other military branches during the course of the eleven military operations in four countries in the Middle East as part of the War on Terror. Of course, none of these Middle East interventions ended in a clear U.S. victory, but instead resulted in stalemates with terrorist groups at best or at the worst, failures (i.e. Abu-Ghraib, the slaughter of majority Shiites by Saddam Hussein's Sunni militias, civil war in Iraq, Libya and Syria), as new RMA-inspired combat doctrines forced commanders to make the army function as not only war-fighters but also peacekeepers and nation-builders when administrations and military leaders failed to plan properly for "the day after" the battle (Perry, 2017, p. 250).
Overall, Perry's The Pentagon's Wars presented an intriguing and thought-provoking, yet disturbing behind-the-scenes narrative of the United State's foreign policy misadventures through the end of the Obama administration in 2016, showing how devastating intra-and-inter-agency fighting can be in carrying out foreign policy. Now, enter candidate-and-now-President Trump, who promised to beef up the military budget and its personnel in order to "start winning wars again" and who repudiated the nation-building failures of the past, especially attacking Hillary Clinton's part in endorsing the Libya intervention as a "cruise missile liberal" or "liberal interventionist" (Perry, 2017, p. 295-296). Will such a strategy overcome the difficult transitions and gray-areas for the civilian-military relationship in the Goldwater-Nichols era? Or does it fail to recognize and address the underlying issues of this critical relationship, dooming us to repeat history not only in the Middle East but also now in Asia? We shall see.
Works Cited:
Perry, Mark. (2017). The Pentagon's Wars: The Military's Undeclared War Against America's Presidents. New York: Basic Books.
Perry's thesis is that the stability of the nation's political-military bond that is the cornerstone to our democracy (separating us from other countries that, to their detriment, have failed to find a balance between civilian and military power) is not as stable as it appears. While there is plenty of blame to be assigned to both sides of the relationship, Perry warns that "over the last twenty-eight years, the brilliance of our battlefield leadership has not been matched by those in Washington who are responsible for making certain that our soldiers, sailors, and airmen (and women) not only have what they need to win, but are backed by strong leaders who speak their minds" (Perry, 2017, p. 297). In other words, military leaders have come to strongly disagree with various administrations, yet by not raising strong objections at critical points in the decision-making process are letting those same presidents go ahead with major foreign policy decisions without having their assumptions checked and all options thoroughly explored and vetted. Where did this increased resentment come from and why?
It all starts in the 1980s towards the tail end of the Cold War, with two major changes that impacted the nature of warfare and the military itself. The first of these major changes was the "Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA)" which entailed a major technological shift in how wars are fought, going from traditional ground wars involving large amounts of machinery, inaccurate heavy weaponry, and personnel to wars fought by "lighter and more mobile forces" backed up by advances in stealth and surveillance technologies brought on by the age of computers (Perry, 2017, p. xiii-xiv). (Think drones, satellites, stealth bombers and laser-guided weaponry.) Accompanying the RMA was the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act (Goldwater-Nichols Act for short) which revised the chain of command by taking out the heads of the armed services (Joint Chiefs of Staff) from command positions and assigning them to either an advisorial role (JCS chair) or merely to that of training and equipping soldiers (other military heads). Both the RMA and Goldwater-Nichols forced the four branches of the military closer together, but this integration made the civilian-military and intra-military infighting worse as military readiness clashed with the realities of achieving battlefield success.
Often, the result of this friction was for administrations to appoint friendly military officers to head the JCS or other military branches during the course of the eleven military operations in four countries in the Middle East as part of the War on Terror. Of course, none of these Middle East interventions ended in a clear U.S. victory, but instead resulted in stalemates with terrorist groups at best or at the worst, failures (i.e. Abu-Ghraib, the slaughter of majority Shiites by Saddam Hussein's Sunni militias, civil war in Iraq, Libya and Syria), as new RMA-inspired combat doctrines forced commanders to make the army function as not only war-fighters but also peacekeepers and nation-builders when administrations and military leaders failed to plan properly for "the day after" the battle (Perry, 2017, p. 250).
Overall, Perry's The Pentagon's Wars presented an intriguing and thought-provoking, yet disturbing behind-the-scenes narrative of the United State's foreign policy misadventures through the end of the Obama administration in 2016, showing how devastating intra-and-inter-agency fighting can be in carrying out foreign policy. Now, enter candidate-and-now-President Trump, who promised to beef up the military budget and its personnel in order to "start winning wars again" and who repudiated the nation-building failures of the past, especially attacking Hillary Clinton's part in endorsing the Libya intervention as a "cruise missile liberal" or "liberal interventionist" (Perry, 2017, p. 295-296). Will such a strategy overcome the difficult transitions and gray-areas for the civilian-military relationship in the Goldwater-Nichols era? Or does it fail to recognize and address the underlying issues of this critical relationship, dooming us to repeat history not only in the Middle East but also now in Asia? We shall see.
Works Cited:
Perry, Mark. (2017). The Pentagon's Wars: The Military's Undeclared War Against America's Presidents. New York: Basic Books.
Friday, February 2, 2018
Book Review: Naomi Alderman's "The Power"
What if women got the chance to run the world? It is a thought experiment performed many times on varying scales, with a prominent example in current pop culture being the Amazons from Greek legend (i.e. an island full of women warriors ruled by a warrior queen). Naomi Alderman continues this tradition and goes a bit further to expose the power dynamics at work in our world in her 2017 novel The Power, in which teenage girls develop the power to generate and manipulate electricity to devastating affects. The women now seem to be turning the tide against the men. How would society look after that? How smooth would the transition be (or not be)?
Alderman gives readers five primary perspectives from which to probe the depths of the latter questions: Roxy Monke (daughter of a London crime boss), Allie (a foster kid who's suffered sexual and emotional abuse), Margot (a mayor with senatorial and presidential ambitions), Jocelyn (Margot's daughter and eventual soldier), and Tunde (a Nigerian journalist and one of the few prominent male voices in the novel). When the world rocks from the revelation that teenage girls have developed bio-electrical organs akin to electric eels (termed "skeins") that allow them electrical powers (and to pass them on to their older female counterparts), Tunde guides us through the larger world that the four primary female characters are exploring, showing everything from the chaotic gender revolutions of the Middle East and Eastern Europe to the tumultuous birth of a nation of women in southern Moldova (Bessapara).
What all of these characters learn (and the reader) is the nature of power in human hands and its corrupting nature as this newly emerging female-dominated world ultimately carries on the very power imbalances that went against women for millennia. While the women ascend to many leadership positions in institutions previously male-dominated, there is of course push back from many men and "men's rights" groups. Like American War, The Power is very successful in turning the world as we know it upside down while at the same time exposing all of its ugly aspects (i.e. the military-industrial complex; sexual, physical, and emotional violence; the seedy interactions between crime syndicates and political institutions).
It was a surreal experience, going from the introduction of the book by future narrators reviewing a historical novel for publication to the elation I experienced as a woman reading the first part of a book in the awakening of the women and the realization of their strength. Admittedly, there was also a sense of poetic justice as matriarchal political, economic, social, and religious institutions rose (the most interesting being a form of religious universalism led by Allie or "Mother Eve" after fleeing to a convent following her self-defense killing of her sexual abuser and former stepfather). A female God rises to match the earthly equivalent establishment of a matriarchal culture and female supremacy. Mother Eve thunders for "Jews: look to Miriam, not Moses...Buddhists: remember Tara, the mother of liberation. Christians: pray to Mary for your salvation" (Alderman, 2017, p. 127). By calling on women to remember "that which you have forgotten," Mother Eve marshals formidable symbolic power of female empowerment (one of many symbols). Or so we thought. There's always a dark side to power.
As the book progressed and the women fell into the trap of ultimate power, abusing it horrifically (doling out the same suffering onto men that they'd experienced at the hands of mostly male, sometimes female, abusers), I found myself becoming more crestfallen and questioning if the world can realize a balance between the two genders without one triggering a backlash at a perceived loss of power that's actually a loss of privilege, a closing of the gap. This revelation of the rot that power can bring, the temptation to right the wrongs of the past yourself with force, comes full circle as the messianic complex Allie has shatters upon coming to the brink of wanting to unleash an apocalypse in order to remake the world from scratch and relieve a lifetime of pain and trauma. It is interesting and horrifying then that all of the players in the game, from the powerful female figures to the powerless to the male terrorist groups all bring about the world's end intentionally, both trying to find a way to "dismantle the old house and begin again" in their own image (oh, and to try and not screw up as big next time around) (Alderman, 2017, p. 370). No balance on either side in trying to find a way to build a better, more egalitarian civilization, just an inexorable and inelegant blasting "entirely to pieces" the constantly shifting "shape of the tree of power" (Alderman, 2017, p. 364).
Ultimately, as the narrators in the post-apocalyptic future close out the story by corresponding one last time before the release of the "historical novel" of The Power, I found myself thinking of feminism and power. Mostly power and its nature. After the last paragraph, in which the narrator jokes with the male author of the novel if he'd rather publish it under a female name (this future society is skewed firmly in the matriarchal direction), I wondered if because power is unpredictable and doesn't discriminate between potential vessels, is it possible to completely root out the corruption inherent in power if you use overwhelming power (in whatever form) to try and stop it? Then, how does one stop abuses of power? Whatever the answer, it seems to me like we as a society need a new approach in order to strive towards a more egalitarian world.
Works Cited:
Alderman, Naomi. (2017). The Power. New York: Hachette Book Group.
Alderman gives readers five primary perspectives from which to probe the depths of the latter questions: Roxy Monke (daughter of a London crime boss), Allie (a foster kid who's suffered sexual and emotional abuse), Margot (a mayor with senatorial and presidential ambitions), Jocelyn (Margot's daughter and eventual soldier), and Tunde (a Nigerian journalist and one of the few prominent male voices in the novel). When the world rocks from the revelation that teenage girls have developed bio-electrical organs akin to electric eels (termed "skeins") that allow them electrical powers (and to pass them on to their older female counterparts), Tunde guides us through the larger world that the four primary female characters are exploring, showing everything from the chaotic gender revolutions of the Middle East and Eastern Europe to the tumultuous birth of a nation of women in southern Moldova (Bessapara).
What all of these characters learn (and the reader) is the nature of power in human hands and its corrupting nature as this newly emerging female-dominated world ultimately carries on the very power imbalances that went against women for millennia. While the women ascend to many leadership positions in institutions previously male-dominated, there is of course push back from many men and "men's rights" groups. Like American War, The Power is very successful in turning the world as we know it upside down while at the same time exposing all of its ugly aspects (i.e. the military-industrial complex; sexual, physical, and emotional violence; the seedy interactions between crime syndicates and political institutions).
It was a surreal experience, going from the introduction of the book by future narrators reviewing a historical novel for publication to the elation I experienced as a woman reading the first part of a book in the awakening of the women and the realization of their strength. Admittedly, there was also a sense of poetic justice as matriarchal political, economic, social, and religious institutions rose (the most interesting being a form of religious universalism led by Allie or "Mother Eve" after fleeing to a convent following her self-defense killing of her sexual abuser and former stepfather). A female God rises to match the earthly equivalent establishment of a matriarchal culture and female supremacy. Mother Eve thunders for "Jews: look to Miriam, not Moses...Buddhists: remember Tara, the mother of liberation. Christians: pray to Mary for your salvation" (Alderman, 2017, p. 127). By calling on women to remember "that which you have forgotten," Mother Eve marshals formidable symbolic power of female empowerment (one of many symbols). Or so we thought. There's always a dark side to power.
"She cuppeth the power in her hand. She commandeth it to strike." (Alderman, 2017, p. 358)
As the book progressed and the women fell into the trap of ultimate power, abusing it horrifically (doling out the same suffering onto men that they'd experienced at the hands of mostly male, sometimes female, abusers), I found myself becoming more crestfallen and questioning if the world can realize a balance between the two genders without one triggering a backlash at a perceived loss of power that's actually a loss of privilege, a closing of the gap. This revelation of the rot that power can bring, the temptation to right the wrongs of the past yourself with force, comes full circle as the messianic complex Allie has shatters upon coming to the brink of wanting to unleash an apocalypse in order to remake the world from scratch and relieve a lifetime of pain and trauma. It is interesting and horrifying then that all of the players in the game, from the powerful female figures to the powerless to the male terrorist groups all bring about the world's end intentionally, both trying to find a way to "dismantle the old house and begin again" in their own image (oh, and to try and not screw up as big next time around) (Alderman, 2017, p. 370). No balance on either side in trying to find a way to build a better, more egalitarian civilization, just an inexorable and inelegant blasting "entirely to pieces" the constantly shifting "shape of the tree of power" (Alderman, 2017, p. 364).
Ultimately, as the narrators in the post-apocalyptic future close out the story by corresponding one last time before the release of the "historical novel" of The Power, I found myself thinking of feminism and power. Mostly power and its nature. After the last paragraph, in which the narrator jokes with the male author of the novel if he'd rather publish it under a female name (this future society is skewed firmly in the matriarchal direction), I wondered if because power is unpredictable and doesn't discriminate between potential vessels, is it possible to completely root out the corruption inherent in power if you use overwhelming power (in whatever form) to try and stop it? Then, how does one stop abuses of power? Whatever the answer, it seems to me like we as a society need a new approach in order to strive towards a more egalitarian world.
Works Cited:
Alderman, Naomi. (2017). The Power. New York: Hachette Book Group.
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