Book Review: Jeffrey D. Sach's "A New Foreign Policy"

A New Year...A New Foreign Policy?

In today's geopolitical landscape, there are plenty of dichotomies: realism and liberalism, multilateralism and unilateralism, cooperation and isolation, democracy and autocracy, negotiation and war, prosperity and poverty. The Trump administration seems to have only deepened these positional differences with its tendency towards extremes and hyperbole. These rigid contrasts often find their way into America's foreign policy, which swings back and forth on the spectrum with each passing administration's different political alignment. Is there a middle ground America can tread in an era of global challenges like climate change and nuclear proliferation that demand flexibility at the local, national, and international levels? Professor and economist Jeffrey D. Sachs outlines a potential third path of American foreign policy in his 2018 volume A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism.

For those tired of the inflexible debates in foreign policy circles, yet another arena of toxic partisanship, Sach's book is a breath of fresh air. While presaging his arguments with the usual language of (potential) American decline ubiquitous in today's media environment, proclaiming an end to the "American Century" that began in 1941, he places an asterisk on this bleak assessment (Sachs, 2018, p. 12). America gained its superpower status with its ability to rewrite the international system to its advantage in the wake of WWII, when the former powers in Europe were not spared the overwhelming devastation of the global conflict. It converted this political advantage garnered from its victory into an unmatched economic dynamism that in turn fueled its military dominance, facilitating the building of a far-reaching network of outposts on almost every continent except Antarctica. No one dared put up any meaningful opposition to its superpower status after the defeat of its only major competitor in the Soviet Union. This encouraged the re-emergence of the dogma of American exceptionalism, present from the earliest days of the Founding, to a front-and-center position in American life, a "civic religion" that exhorts America as God's most favorite nation and rightful shepherd of the world, able to do largely what it wishes (Sachs, 2018, p. 12). The latter, of course, eventually breeds a hubris that this status cannot be challenged, and that is dangerous in itself.

So, what about today? Are we still the stop dog in the international system, a nation exceptional in comparison to the other 193 nation-states on Earth? The United States still remains a powerful and rich country, but the emerging dynamos of Asia and Africa, home to a growing majority of the world's population, are quickly closing the gap. China is often tagged as the greatest threat to America's continued dominance, with its economy surpassing ours in recent years, with America barely holding onto its per-capita wealth advantage. However, Sachs sees as counterproductive the subsequent reactions of alarm from the military and intelligence communities that have fueled a new arms race against what seem to be new adversaries rather than mere competitors. Instead of succumbing to a largely self-inflicted and steep decline due to generations of exceptionalist-guided policies favoring military build-up and adventurism abroad, coupled with favorable policies towards the rich and not the struggling middle class, Sachs sees a way to stay the present course.

As a first step, Sachs urges Americans to take the first step in admitting that it is no longer possible for America to remain the sole superpower in the world and for America to be a central player in a new, multipolar world. (No one can be all-powerful for long. It's a repeating cycle. How one handles it makes the difference.) This means accepting the somewhat bitter pill that American exceptionalism may not hold true as other nations gradually acquire the power to become equals on the world stage. Rather than re-trenching in Trump's new and toxic variant of American exceptionalism in his America First doctrine of xenophobic and racist isolationism, protectionism and unquestionable unilateralism abroad, Sachs urges a new conceptualizing of exceptionalism in the 21st century into one defined by the incredible potential and diversity of America's melting-pot of citizens.

After the needed perspective shift described above, to reach our goals of continued national prosperity, he concludes with a detailed and prescient ten-point New Years resolutions list of sorts to America as a whole:

1. Be nicer to the United Nations and our allies as a whole, even if they do not agree with every single resolution or position we support. Disagreements may actually teach us more than our agreements when it comes to solving the myriad of problems out there. And it's okay if we're not all-powerful as in our prime; that's why we have allies! (Even better, allies mean we don't have to foot the bill alone!!)
2. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Climate Agreement frameworks brokered by the UN are by no means flawless, but provide the best forum we got for continued political and economic cooperation at the international level. Recommit to these.
3. Give more to the UN. Yes, not a popular sentiment nowadays, but a boost of funding, even a modest one, to the UN is a fantastic investment and a bargain, with other countries chipping in to grow the pot even more to fund critical programs that help people all over the world. Also, the less we need to spend on getting more ammunition.
4. Yes, commitments can be scary and somewhat limiting, but ratifying those outstanding treaties (those relating to the protection of biodiversity, children, and women's rights) gives a huge boost to our reputation abroad (we don't want to be a loner on the world stage, right?) and a better boost to our chances to work together for the common good.
5. Nuclear disarmament is good. Nuclear proliferation is not, as well as nuclear war. Consider revisiting the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. 129 other countries are also doing that and more. Why not us? We deserve happiness too.
6. Want to grow your economy and help with transnational problem solving? Of course you do! Invest anew in science and technology ventures with other countries, such as in renewable energy and smart grids. Two heads are better than one, remember?
7. You alone cannot broker Middle East peace (we know how that turns out). Get the powers-that-be there to the table with the leverage you have over allies in the region and into talks. Find what makes them insecure (extremism and poverty, anyone?) and push a framework that involves more cooperation on the common ground of the latter. Bullets don't help anyone listen after a while.
8. Invest in transparency! Start by making the CIA an intelligence-gathering agency only rather than a shadowy executive army that tends to destabilize and overthrow regimes worldwide if you let it, making it (overall) worse for us as a whole when we try to go in and clean up the mess.
9. You like being praised on the world stage? Yes! Then invest more in the R&D and education parts of the national budget for use domestically and abroad and cut down on ammunition and bombs. The world will definitely like you more then and you'll help the work towards eradicating the extreme poverty that tends to drive people to do desperate things in order to survive (i.e. terrorism).
10. Rediscover what makes you special and own it this year: your diversity. Migrants are our friends; most of us are descendants of them! Welcome them, don't shun them. Work towards comprehensive immigration reform that will help everyone concerned and watch your security and economy grow!

It's a new year America! What will we do in 2019? It's up to you!

Works Cited:

Sachs, Jeffrey D. (2018). A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism. New York: Columbia University Press.

Book Review: Yuval Noah Harari's "21 Lessons for the 21st Century"

In a 24-hour news cycle that constantly bombards us with the underbelly of the world--boorish politicians, hyper-partisanship, climate change, tech scandals, xenophobic nationalism, racism, misogyny, fake news, rising income inequality and national debt and more--it is nice to be able to step back, take a deep breath, and look at the bigger picture. Before humanity can address its formidable catalog of problems, it is necessary to get our bearings in a world that feels chronically unsteady and vicious. Author and historian Yuval Noah Harari attempts to provide that big picture perspective, first with Sapiens, in which he tells of humanity's rise as a function of group cooperation fostered by grand narratives (think nationalism, religion) or the stories that people need to hear . Homo Deus looks at humanity's future, one in which we all potentially become cyborgs, more intimately connected to technology than even today. So what about today? Can humanity address what ails us so we can reach the new heights he predicts in Homo Deus? Harari's answer comes to us in his latest work, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018).

Like his previous works, 21 Lessons doesn't aspire to being an all-encompassing how-to solutions guide for the biggest problems facing humanity. It is more philosophical, thought-provoking, meant to stimulate the necessary conversations that need to take place globally in a vast population of individuals that do not know everything, let alone the latest advances in AI or cryptocurrency. A variety of subjects are addressed in loosely-connected op-ed-like chapters with characteristic wit and cautious optimism, such as fake news, immigration, terrorism and toxic nationalism, which Harari sees as symptoms of malaise in our current liberal international order. Moreover, while these problems are symptomatic of an ill-equipped system, Harari also sees them as products of technological disruption coupled by continuing advances in biotechnology, something free-market logic and an ever-expanding pie (doubtful nowadays, as we don't have exponential planets to draw from) alone cannot solve.

The algorithms are coming, the algorithms are coming! 

Why does technology (both biotechnology and inorganic computer technology) threaten the established liberal order and challenge it with reinvention? Humanity is already faced with trying to stave off the twin existential problems (I call them the Big Ones) of ecological disaster and nuclear war. Those who are at the forefront of the development of technologies like AI, machine learning, Big Data algorithms are profit-driven enterprises not primarily concerned with the ethical, political, and economic consequences of these technologies--like that automation could put a huge segment of the working class out of a job and in need of re-training. A core part of the liberal bargain entails governments looking out for the happiness and well being of its citizens, providing foundational social welfare programs and other services to help citizens prosper in whatever personal and occupational paths they choose.

What happens when automation, machine learning and AI combine to put a good deal of people out of work, while those who invented the technologies are doing better than ever? What happens if all human labor, excepting those operating these technologies (the rich/elites), becomes irrelevant? How do nation-states deal with these tricky issues that involve disillusioned people no longer trusting the grand narratives they were brought up with--whether it be a nationalism, a religious creed, or some other philosophy? The example of automation and significant socioeconomic disruption is just one of the many problems that threaten the liberal dream of a better life for everyone, a life that retains a sense of dignity that comes from being able to control their destinies. People don't particularly enjoy the unknown and the amorphous threats of advancing technology and near-invisible global catastrophes like climate change or nuclear proliferation produce an uncertainty-driven deluge of constant stress.

For all the serious historical and political examination of problems like fake news and terrorism, for Harari it comes down to stories: the stories that inspired ever increasing amounts of people to cooperate for the common good. While it is extremely uncomfortable to realize that human societies must rely on these stories to instill a common sense of identity and purpose in large groups of people (and that disruptions to these stories could potentially undermine the social order as we know it), it is nevertheless mind-expanding, not unusual for works that are audaciously all-encompassing. It is also discomfiting because as with advanced technology, stories can be used for good and bad purposes, powerful tools wielded by those who understand that humans respond more strongly to emotive rather than logical appeals (biochemical paths from evolution better suited to the African savanna--"Move quickly! No time to think!"-than today's over-stimulated world). In the case of nationalism: from "My nation is unique and I celebrate its heritage" to "My nation is superior to yours in every way and I owe it my undying allegiance." Religion? "My religion believes in peace and tolerance and I respect your differing method of achieving spiritual fulfillment" versus "There is only one God and I will fight you to show you the truth." And so on. Then, there is liberalism, the narrative of rational individuals coming together to create a society that believes in democracy, human rights, and the freedom for people to make their own way in life however they choose.

What then is the new story needing to be formulated to help reinvent liberalism to deal with our current slate of problems (whether they primarily stem from technology or not)? Harari's 21 Lessons doesn't provide one. Rather, the overall purpose of the treatise was, like its mind-expanding prose, designed to provoke mass self-reflection and discussion and take people back from the brink of apocalyptic thinking to a more healthy place of cautious optimism, critical thinking and healthy skepticism. That can make it frustrating for readers, but not any less intellectually satisfying. In the end, Harari seems to imply that it is only through a new and urgent worldwide discussion that humanity can find a new story, a new common ideal to organize around that can help society solve its problems and continue to advance. Humanity has done it once before with nation-states and liberal democracy. We can do it again.

Works Cited:

Harari, Yuval Noah. (2018). 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. New York: Spiegel & Grau.

Book Review: Neil deGrasse Tyson's "Accessory to War"

There are many advertisements out there on behalf of the military nowadays, featuring soldiers remote-operating drones at a distance, satellites zooming in on battle terrain as stealth jets fly overhead, conveying a sense of futuristic warfare as they attempt to recruit to their cause. Or smiling, yet serious, soldier-scientists--engineers, physicists, chemists, etc.--going about the business of both military operations and groundbreaking experiments and research. "You can be both [scientist and soldier]! Have a career and serve your country! Come, join the future!" is usually how it goes. Flash to an episode of The Big Bang Theory in which Raj, Leonard, Howard and Sheldon are wrestling with the ethical and moral dilemmas surrounding their project to develop a better guidance system for the Air Force--receiving funding to do this research project, but also realizing the system will likely become another tool of war. This complicated relationship between science and war is everywhere, suffusing our culture, economy, politics, governmental institutions and academia with this uneasy knowledge. To no one's surprise, this complicity between scientific advancements and better technologies of destruction goes way back. Providing a context for our present moment of cyberwarfare, drones and satellites is astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-author Avis Lang's 2018 collaboration Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military.

I remember learning in school about the technological boon to society from the NASA space program, from Velcro to infrared thermometers to warmer, better insulated blankets. Being a kid, I was amazed with science's capacity to push society forward with both the gaining of knowledge and development of better technologies. I suppose I was naive enough not to realize the two-way relationship between scientific/societal advancement and military capabilities, just one of the many dualities and paradoxes of humans in general: building by destroying. Empires rose and fell based off of the level of scientific capital and knowledge present in their societies and the ones they conquered. In other words, science was power in multiple dimensions. After all, the emergence post-WWII of the American superpower on the world stage was greatly facilitated by the scientific and economic boons of the war. Tyson and Lang give vivid illustration to this complicated relationship through a historical jaunt from ancient times to the present.

Those forerunners of today's powers started off by relying on the stars for navigation, time organization, and rituals. After all, knowing where and when you were allowed societies to orient themselves, plan ahead, and standardize everything from rituals to tax collection to the sailing that allowed everything from a more interconnected global economy to the conduct of military operations and conquests. Scientists from the beginning had complicated relations with the state, army, and economic interests with astronomers serving as prized court advisers. Recognizing celestial patterns and cycles and learning to predict them, knowledge gleaned from an immeasurable amount of time of patient observation and recording of the heavens was one of the cornerstones of early societies. It allowed Columbus to trick the natives out of their provisions by his ability to exploit the knowledge of a coming lunar eclipse and explorers to circumnavigate the globe and European powers to colonize and establish outposts in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. The fruits of celestial navigation and prediction gave way to further advances, gained by scientists wanting better observation tools with which to see the universe from and institutionalized armies wanting to see their enemies coming from farther away. The telescope, early message relay systems, the telegraph, photography, spectrography, radar, nuclear power, satellites, GPS and many more such advances flowed from this knowledge.

This perennial quest of constant improvement stemmed from the first stargazers, a quest motivated by humanity's desire to act upon their knowledge of the scale of the world they inhabited, a world that got bigger and bigger the more they advanced, until the seemingly last frontier for which humanity could explore (or conquer) was space. Resources continued their flow between the private sector, academia, and the military, juicing the economy in the process. Society profited from war, while trying to use its newfound knowledge and resources to the common benefit of all, fighting human nature itself.

While countries do engage in scientific collaboration both on Earth and in the emerging dimension of space (think the International Space Station), they also, true to human nature, have started to squabble as each tries to achieve the highest of higher-grounds in space. This is despite the fact that under international law, space is a commons for all humanity, much like the oceans and the air we breathe. [One of the more famous examples of scientific interests (i.e. funding for research and experiments) getting entangled with the geopolitical was the Space Race, an epic Cold War-era fight between communist and capitalist ideologues alike, national pride and international prestige on the line.] Space is getting crowded, full of dual-use, civilian and military satellites and debris from past space missions, making exclusive space control infeasible and space wars with Star Wars-like weaponry of high-powered lasers and the like incredibly dangerous, risking damage to your own space assets and that of your allies and adversaries. Not to mention the astronomical costs of the development of these new and more destructive weapons in the first place, which takes away from other areas of societal investment. Additionally, despite the military investments America continues to make (outpacing the rest of the world presently), China and Russia are closing the gap, developing space programs and capacities of their own and threatening American scientific and technological preeminence (and of course, power).

Instead of doggedly pursuing the doctrine of total command and control (and the development of even more dangerous weapons than the A-bomb) espoused by the American military, Tyson and Lang conclude the well-researched cautionary tale of Accessory to War by making the case for pivoting to more benevolent and economically beneficial space ventures--from space tourism to asteroid mining--that could not only help alleviate the resource disparities that are often the undercurrents to conflict, but open up a new frontier, a glittering future of humanity expanding into the stars. It is a vision of utopian prosperity more akin to Star Trek, where scientific exploration is heavily prioritized because of the alleviation or even elimination of basic need scarcities and embrace of more cooperative means of existence. However, it is a good vision to strive for, especially in a time when science and expertise is often denounced and human capacity for self-destruction is on full display all around us. We may not be able to completely defeat human nature itself, but science continues to give us all a choice to work towards beneficial collaboration rather than mutually-assured destruction.

Works Cited:

Tyson, Neil DeGrasse, & Lang, Avis. (2018). Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Book Review: Ben Fountain's "Beautiful Country Burn Again"

Many books on the Twilight Zone-esque 2016 presidential election campaign have been published and many more certainly are going to be written. So far, a majority have chronicled the (purported) lurid details of daily life in the White House, stuff of political theater and scandal (and even comedy). Unhinged, anyone? Others have examined the history of right-wing movements or the rise of certain economic forces like globalization in order to contextualize the Trump phenomenon. Author and former attorney Ben Fountain, in his 2018 entry Beautiful Country Burn Again: Democracy, Rebellion, and Revolution, continues in this tradition, with a heap of psychological examination of the American psyche on top of the usual historical chronicling.

In his account of 2016, Fountain begins each chapter (one per each month of the 2016 campaign) with an immersionary litany of monthly news, rapid-fire summations of the big stories internationally, before zooming in domestically to the dizzying array of forces active in the American political scene that he believes could precipitate a potential civil war or proportionate cataclysmic event of national crisis. A kind of window on the world to the threats brewing abroad to freedom and a contrasting of them with the dangerous political squabblings of 2016 that threaten to undermine from within instead. (A bit of irony there.) Perhaps the claim yet another existential crisis after the Civil War and Great Depression is a bit of a stretch in current conditions, but it definitely is a jolt for readers, a call to heed the social, economic and political forces that are converging and giving rise to not just Trump, but to demagogues like him across the world. Fountain is not shy about shining light on these forces he believes to be at the root of current American woes: a system predicated on white supremacy that has put people (often white) into positions of power to institute a plutocratic system of racial, economic, and gender-based discrimination. A common refrain throughout the book is Fountain's core assertion of a base systemic logic at work in our daily lives of "profit proportionate to freedom; plunder correlative to subjugation" (Fountain, 2018, p. 4).

Democrat or Republican, no one is spared from blistering (and honest) critique in Fountain's analysis. While he notes that conservative philosophies have had a closer alignment to privileged politicians and tycoons at the expense of the working class they purport to liberate from a bloated, inefficient government bureaucracy, mainstream Democrats have also moved closer to this new centrist political position starting in the late 1990s, with more business friendly party planks alongside those pertaining to traditional social justice and environmental protection ones. Oh, and there were many appeals to the near-universal (and universally overused, in my opinion) "middle class values" of hard work and less government dependence (Fountain, 2018, p. 258). In an attempt to gain a broader coalition and re-brand, Democrats may have inadvertently shafted their traditional minority and union constituencies in a time of rising income inequality, uneven globalization, immigration crises, the rise of social media and politics as reality TV, emerging philosophies of subjective reality, and increasing far-right sympathies. Meanwhile, the conservative strategy of "campaign on a platform decrying government as dysfunctional and ineffective, and once you're in power do everything you can to make government dysfunctional and ineffective" does nothing to improve the situation (Fountain, 2018, p. 383). In turn, this leads to corresponding (mostly justified) reactionary responses from both left (the Occupy movement, Black Lives Matter) and right-wing (the Tea Party) populists.

Instead, both parties have been guilty of pandering more to the One Percent than the majority, complicit in maintaining the former's preferred method of control in the "fantasy industrial complex," or "FIC," defined as the "saturation" of our personal and national scene with an "onslaught of media and messaging that...dims our capacity for understanding the world as it actually is" and instead promotes a relentless barrage of fantasy and the simple and lurid (Fountain, 2018, p. 312). In other words, as the chaos of 2016 unfolded, the American psyche was already coping with the trauma wrought by the FIC, designed to enrage and confuse the response to serious problems like income inequality, racial and gender discrimination, and climate change. What a double whammy. It becomes easier to understand why Trump's warped and racially-charged perception of the American Dream epitomized in his campaign slogan of "Make America Great Again" so easily found its mark, bringing to power a man that has so far raised a middle finger to his working class base with a relentless campaign of deregulation and tax breaks that gutted the New Deal-promoted (relative) stability we enjoy today.

The question left at the conclusion of Beautiful Country Burn Again is whether America can manage the collective will to solve the problems it faces rather than retreating into an alternative reality in reaching a new New Deal, a reworking of the social contract to better align our system of government with serving all and not a few of its citizens. Here, like other authors of the books so far attempting to contextualize 2016, Fountain has difficulty in prescribing a specific treatment for America's ills, rather urging the latter updates of our social contract and calling for Americans to re-realize our common humanity in order to keep democratic governance above the rising tide of globalization and capitalism and other planetary problems like climate change. Perhaps that is unfair, considering the complexity of the project that needs to be undertaken to solve the complex, borderless issues of our era. If anything, Fountain's message of the need to reconnect with our common humanity in order to govern better is enough, a first step in a long journey of national healing.


Works Cited:

Fountain, Ben. (2018). Beautiful Country Burn Again: Democracy, Rebellion, and Revolution. New York: HarperCollins.

Book Review: David Patrikarakos's "War in 140 Characters"

At the risk of sounding repetitive, social media platforms have become ubiquitous in our lives for both good (allowing news from dangerous war zones journalists are unable to reach in great numbers) and ill (the Russian social media disinformation campaign). Everything from citizen journalists to the infamous troll farms have been made possible by these technologies, part of what is commonly termed "Web 2.0," websites that offer various tools for Internet users to become active producers of content rather than passive consumers (Partikarakos, 2017, p. 9). Author and journalist David Patrikarakos explores how these technologically-empowered networks of individuals (the homo digitalis) are impacting twenty-first century warfare in his 2017 book War in 140 Characters: How Social Media is Reshaping Conflict in the Twenty-First Century.

Warfare is by no means a novel concept for humanity. However, Patrikarakos sees the emerging breed of tech-savvy homo digitalis as reshaping conflict into both a physical contest on the battlefield between competing armies or militias and a parallel one in cyberspace. In other words, the narrative about a conflict matters equally as much as the battlefield reality. This is made possible by a variety of factors, including the inauguration of Web 2.0 technologies in an era of post-truth or subjective reality, where individuals can at low or no cost network with other like-minded individuals and broadcast to the world. This has had the effect of circumventing or even undermining traditional actors like the state and media organizations when individuals can get various tasks done without the aid of these often slow-moving, hierarchical institutions.

Patrikarakos illustrates the latter decentralizing and destabilizing effect of social media technology and homo digitalis by exploring from various angles the conflicts in Gaza, Syria and Ukraine. In the Gaza strip, we are introduced to a Gazan teenage citizen journalist named Farah, whose emotive tweets and blog posts helped to galvanize international outrage against Israel during its Operation Protective Edge campaign in July 2014. On the other side of the conflict, Israel's IDF (military) Spokesperson's Unit attempted to contest the narrative space that Farah and other Gazans had utilized to their advantage, by countering their narrative of a people under cruel siege by a superior military force with one of an embattled military doing everything it could to protect their own civilians and Gazan ones from an organization (Hamas) accused of using their people as shields. However, because the Israeli government was largely playing catch-up for much of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the fact is is that Palestinians were able to fortify their position in the narrative arena by virtue of having established a strong presence there first on social media (and giving mainstream media enough time and exposure to then pick up their content).

Meanwhile, in a Ukraine destabilized by the annexation of Crimea by Russia utilizing underhanded propaganda and military aid to back-up eastern Ukrainian separatist militias, a middle-aged Ukrainian woman named Anna Sandalova used Facebook to aid the embattled and under-equipped Ukrainian military. In a country beset with corruption issues, Sandalova was able to create a Facebook page as a private fundraising engine to supply necessities to Ukrainian army personnel battling the separatists in the east, bypassing often corrupt and slow-moving governmental institutions leftover from the Soviet days. Up against Sandalova and individuals like her, however, is a massive propaganda machine in autocratic Russia who is admittedly ahead of the game in comparison with Western democracies with embracing a new doctrine of hybrid-warfare. This has aided them in destabilizing both Ukraine and Syria, where a civil war currently rages.

For all the actors both Eastern and Western involved in Syria, ISIS stands out, even as it is currently in retreat from its peak territory and recruitment game. Just as individuals like Anna Sandalova can use social media for good, various non-state actors and individuals like ISIS, who are often out-matched in resources compared to state institutions, can use those same tools for ill. The ISIS siren song created by their cyberspace recruiters was able to cast a wide net, catching both educated individuals and die-hard jihadi ideologues with a message specifically targeted to these disaffected groups feeling like passive spectators in the lives: with ISIS, you can serve various roles (from caretakers to soldiers) in an idyllic caliphate. The call to something bigger than yourself is a universal narrative, inspiring people to serve states and non-state actors alike. Add this social media and the message's reach, serving whatever group, is amplified greatly.

While I enjoyed Patrikarakos's scholarship on this important topic of 21st century war, War in 140 Characters may be prematurely signing the death certificate of established institutions and states. Sure, outmatched networks of people can definitely influence the political dimension of war when they themselves aren't soldiers of the traditional kind. Yes, states and other slow moving organizations like diplomatic corps are playing catch-up right now in terms of embracing the potential of these Web 2.0 technologies. However, states probably will be able to close the gap, using their vast resources to back-up their own teams of cyber-warriors, as Russia appears to be doing to great effect with their troll farms and misinformation campaigns. As for Patrikarakos's concluding assertion that the destabilizing effects of social media embedded in today's globalization-crazed world facing innumerable transnational crises can precipitate WWIII, I'm less able to dismiss this assertion. While social media can bring people together, it often brings together diverse groups that can and often oppose others, spewing out huge tides of often unverified claims that even the best-equipped fast-checkers cannot keep up with. This is how we end up with autocrats inflaming divisions among their peoples and even those of foreign populations, a situation not the most stable or conducive to democratic dialogues and processes.

All in all, War in 140 Characters is a well-written and researched treatise on an important emergent topic in technology-driven warfare. While the jury is out as to whether or not states are a dying breed in the international arena, readers nonetheless will appreciate the intriguing and thought-provoking intellectual discussion found in Patrikarakos's book. It will be interesting to see how social media continues to play out with the conflicts explored in this book and many others, as the implications will certainly be far-reaching.


Works Cited:

Patrikarakos, David. (2017). War in 140 Characters: How Social Media is Reshaping Conflict in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Basic Books.

Book Review: Ronan Farrow's "War on Peace"

"If you don't fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition ultimately." (Farrow, 2018, p. 273)--Quote by Trump's current secretary of defense James Mattis in March, 2013

The above quote references former General (and now Secretary of Defense in the Trump administration) James Mattis in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee in March 2013. For me, this blunt quote reverberates through our current era in which the Trump administration has hurt America's relationships with allies once regarded by many administrations as central to realizing Western-centered goals of facilitating the transformation of the world into a more democratic and free-trade friendly bloc. Under the leadership of Trump's first secretary of state, former Exxon-Mobil magnate Rex Tillerson, the State Department has been gutted, with recruitment down, career officers leaving in droves while Trump trashed NATO, called North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un "Rocket Man" (one in many derisive nicknames he assigns to people), and lavished Twitter praise on autocrats. Meanwhile, the budget for the military and defense collective was ballooning in an attempt to rectify what Trump viewed as a military neglected and in shambles. It is unclear what Trump's current secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, will do about the budget situation at State. But what is clear, according to former State Department official and journalist Ronan Farrow is that this trend of favoring the military over diplomacy in foreign policy is not squarely on the shoulders of the Trump administration. This story of apparent decline in traditional statecraft dates way back before 9/11 to the late 1980s and early 1990s, Farrow argues in his 2018 book War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence.

Farrow focuses on a relatively modern form of militarized foreign policy that seems to have taken root in American foreign policy circles, fueled by skepticism over the State Department's infamously inefficient bureaucracy in the face of modern challenges--from cyberterrorism to ISIL--to the rise of telecommunications technology that seems to make less special the personal face-to-face dialogues between diplomats. To bypass the ponderous State Department, administrations both Democratic and Republican have been relying increasingly on the military and intelligence agencies to broker the negotiations over everything from treaties to infrastructure development projects to wholesale reconstruction of countries like Iraq and Afghanistan. To make his point, Farrow takes the reader on a tour of American foreign policy hot-spots of Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Egypt, Colombia, the Horn of Africa, Syria and North Korea. He served under the tutelage of the late diplomatic giant Richard Holbrooke, famous for brokering peace in the Balkans in the aftermath of the dissolution of Yugoslavia in the 90s with the Dayton Accords. 

Holbrooke is painted throughout War and Peace as an annoyingly tenacious and ambitious practitioner of old-school diplomacy and a firm advocate of backing up civilian diplomacy with a dose of American military might. However, over his long career of diplomatic service, ended in 2010 with his death from heart failure, he came to agree with many other career Foreign Service officers (and even some military personnel like Mattis) that it was increasingly dangerous for American foreign policy to over-rely on military-brokered transactional relationships. Moreover, he argued for a restoration of civilian-military diplomatic balance. It was only when this happened that America was able to build beyond surface-level relationships to more sustainable ones with other countries, and with them the necessary capacity to effectively push-back against issues like terrorism. This was the case with Colombia, a rare semi-success story of modern American diplomacy offered in Farrow's book.

In Colombia, a multi-billion dollar Plan Colombia military and development assistance package--reminiscent of America's perilous counter-terrorism alliances with the Afghan and Iraqi warlords and with Pakistan's military and intelligence agencies--seemed to doom again from the beginning American objectives of development, counter-terrorism and counter-narcotics policy in Latin America. Much of the resources went to the funding and training of Colombian army units, who often then were incentivized to practice extrajudicial killings in order to secure a more firm backing by U.S. military and intelligence agencies eager to root out left-leaning rebel guerrilla and drug trafficking groups like FARC. The problem was that many of their targets were innocent civilians rather than the criminals they were supposed to be getting, and these paramilitary groups were often not held accountable. As was the case with many forays into the Horn of Africa and Middle East, the United States created a worsening cycle of violence, that, ironically, made accomplishing their goals of sustainable development, democracy, rule of law and the like increasingly difficult. 

However, the tides began to turn with American re-balancing of Plan Colombia's distribution of resources: funds were still going to the military and police to reclaim territory held by the cartels and FARC, but more money was being redirected to peacetime development projects and peace negotiations with guerrilla elements who'd terrorized the country. Notwithstanding the fact that America's over-reliance on military alliances--often anchored by hefty aid packages favoring the building of the institutional capacity of military and intelligence agencies over more democratic ones, like civilian development departments--have often created more problems for us when those armed and trained groups (with no deeper relationship with the U.S. aside from a monetary one) turn on us when their interests no longer align with ours, facilitating a cycle of never-ending violence and defense spending. But modern diplomacy, admittedly, does require a bit of both military muscle and negotiation. It definitely doesn't make sense to follow one path of inevitable cycles of violence with pure military foreign policy ascendant and civilian diplomatic capacity gutted. The loop could continue--potentially decimating us as a nation in the long-run, economically, politically and socially.

While Farrow's book jumps back-and-forth on the timeline often in order to make clear his latter argument, it still works in getting across this message. The prose was otherwise excellent, with the book reading like a novel and presenting erudite historical analyses that echo greatly in today's times, urgently calling for a renaissance of sorts in rebuilding the diplomatic capacity of the United States against a president whose brand of ascendant populism that disdains multilateralism, internationalism and expertise has exacerbated the trends of seeming decline at State. Increasing distrust of the U.S. from both allies and foes alike, borne out of disinvestment in diplomacy and withdrawal from major international pacts/treaties like the Iran nuclear deal and Paris climate agreement have created openings for rival superpowers like China and Russia to fill in the void left by America. 

However, in the end, Farrow takes a more cautiously optimistic bent. Perhaps the damage to our international standing caused by the latter disinvestment in civilian diplomacy will become increasingly obvious to the Trump administration, resulting in an about-face to rebuild our diplomatic arm of the government. The metaphorical restoration of the olive branch to the eagle's talons beside the arrows, if you will. Farrow writes in the epilogue that "the steady dissolution of the State Department under the Trump administration may appear to be a logical outcome of years of imbalanced foreign policy, but it is not an inevitable one" (Farrow, 2018, p. 295). Rather, the downward trend has been uneven, with development initiatives like the one in Colombia making fools out of those who'd prematurely called diplomacy's death for good.

Rumors of the death of diplomacy may have been greatly exaggerated, where the slow-burn process has still yielded great successes where allowed (i.e. Iran, Paris) and probably prevented immediate and costly military action. To continue in the long-term to yield positive results more often, the balance must be restored. In the modern era, we can't just rely on the military or just on State to conduct our foreign policy. We need both. We need balance to continue to prosper as a country.

Works Cited:

Farrow, Ronan. (2018). War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Book Review: Michiko Kakutani's "The Death of Truth"

Much has been made about our turbulent present moment, especially the rise of demagogic leaders who often disparage the media as a danger to the people and not to trust them and other erstwhile purveyors of objectivity: scientists, diplomats, intelligence agencies. Pundits are increasingly coining this era of rising protectionism, isolationism, xenophobia and distrust of globalization and government institutions as "post-truth," evoking the ghosts of 1984 and Animal Farm. Continuing in this vein is former New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani, with her 2018 mini-treatise The Death of Truth: Notes of Falsehood in the Age of Trump.

Unlike many of the current collection of published media, Kakutani's analysis focuses on the cultural and philosophical undercurrents of our times, drawing from a comprehensive array of fictional and non-fictional sources (Orwell to de Tocqueville to T. S. Elliot to more contemporary writers like the outspoken Putin critic Masha Gessen) to try and answer the million-dollar question: is Trump's toxic blend of authoritarian tendencies, brashness, inexpertise, pettiness, and distrust of experts unique or is representative of a historical waxing and waning of reactionary sentiment? To this end, Kakutani divides her analysis into nine topical chapters covering the manipulation of reality that comes from the corruption of language, the role of the Internet in our personal and political lives, fake news, and propaganda.

However, like the subtitle Notes implies, the chapters end up reading more like a loosely bound cataloguing of recent trends, almost a recitation of journalists' coverage of Trump's dishonesty sprinkled with literary parallels and corollaries. Kakutani treads familiar ground of President Trump's estranged relationship with the truth, but is covering so much material that the analysis becomes superficial and hurried, jumping from topic to topic. The common thread tying all these varying chapter-essays is Kakutani's interpretation of postmodernism as the driving force behind today's era of Trumpian "culture wars" (Kakutani, 2018, p. 31). A philosophy pioneered by French theorists Foucault and Derrida in the late 20th century, postmodernism rejects the concept of a completely objective reality, as human perception necessarily adds in subjectivity to how one interprets and understands their reality. Examples of variables influencing this interpretation are categories such as race, gender, socioeconomic class, ideology and the larger culture and political moment one inhabits.

Because this philosophical perspective accepts multiple perspectives as correct, more narratives from marginalized groups can be brought into the conversation, correctly so. The downside to this, Kakutani argues, is that postmodernism can be used to justify the dismissal of expertise, with language prone to being stretched and corrupted to fit multiple narratives one feels should be true: from the fact that a shady cabal of globalists is controlling things behind the scenes to the detriment of the common person to the fact that immigration is tanking the economy (both are mainstays of many of today's far-right groups) to the fact that vaccines cause autism (something that is false) or that President Obama was secretly born in Kenya (an infamous strain of dishonest and racist far-right political thought known as birtherism).

I must concede that Kakutani does have a point, that postmodernist perspectives and how they've become ingrained into our cultural and political lexicons have probably played a role in allowing fringe elements (especially those on the far-right) to weaponize it to attack the foundations of our democratic republic and others around the world: politicians are actually puppets of special interests, the federal government nothing but an overreaching, bloated, and inefficient entity, and the other political party an adversary. As with any idea, how one chooses to use it is the problem, not necessarily the idea itself (case in point: the Internet can be used as a democratizing force, to help share ideas across national borders and spark innovation and can-and is-also used to stir up instability via the spread of noxious and false ideas by state-sponsored or lone-wolf trolls alike). To me, postmodernism gets too much of a bad rap in The Death of Truth. Sure, its ideas can be twisted from producing literary masterpieces and to helping to instill a sense of multiculturalism in our society (definitely positives), for the purpose of producing and enabling demagogues by cunning individuals like Breitbart News darling Steve Bannon. Notwithstanding the latter, to me, the corruption of postmodernism and its related schools of thought are one factor of many driving today's bizarro world.

Other relevant factors, like income, racial, and gender inequality, the role of technology (from the radio to the Internet) in confusing the truth and inhibiting critical thinking, and the use of propaganda have influenced the geopolitical landscape long before postmodernism emerged, serving to cast aspersions (some of this suspicion was definitely warranted, especially in situations where this was used to fuel reformist impulses to improve those institutions) on objective arbiters of truth and problem-solving. Dictators have always played fast with the truth, promised easy solutions to complex woes, and caused untold suffering. Today's propagandists and dictatorships the world over, from North Korea to Russia to today's alt-right movements have merely co-opted an old playbook used repeatedly throughout history to shape the geopolitical landscape (and their peoples' perception of it) in order to stay in power. Us versus them attitudes and accompanying forms of toxic nationalism and militarism have been evoked repeatedly in the name of vanquishing age-old problems undergirding society that established institutions couldn't and achieving that unachievable, perfect utopia. The Internet undoubtedly magnifies the reach of fake news bots, trolls, and dictators that lead the charge against institutions at all levels of government, allowing the world's Trumps and Putins to reach more people and ultimately end up better following and reinforcing this well-worn script. Therefore, it seems a bit unfair to lay Trumpism and other similar philosophies solely at the feet of postmodernist thought when a bevy of other factors contribute to today's social, economic, political, and cultural woes.

In the end, Kakutani's The Death of Truth comes across as erudite (reflecting her well-read background), yet flawed. It is okay to feel contempt and outrage for what the Trumps of the world are doing, but to rage on about the injustices committed against the people and democratic institutions without offering an antidote merely serves to fuel the very cynicism and apathy that we all need to conquer in order to fight back on behalf of democracy. We need to do better.


Works Cited:

Kakutani, Michiko. (2018). The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump. New York: Tim Duggan Books.