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.

Book Review: Kate Andersen Brower's "First Women"

In the realm of politics, especially in Washington, it can be hard to see past carefully-created public veneers and crafted legacies to the often imperfect person behind the legend. This is especially true for the First Ladies of the United States (FLOTUSs), who are often cast as non-controversial supporting figures in their husband's administrations. These women often have less public visibility, often rivalled or overshadowed by the power of their husband's office, even as they become national and international icons. This leaves much to be desired for those like myself who want to know more about the impacts these ladies made on American history and whose school courses more often focused on presidents. Former Bloomberg journalist and researcher Kate Andersen Brower offers readers a chance to sate their curiosity with a peek behind the sometimes obfuscating legends and narratives surrounding the presidency and first ladyship in her 2016 entry First Women: The Grace and Power of America's Modern First Ladies.

First Women focuses exclusively on the tenures of ten first ladies in the modern era, defined in the book as the time period between 1960 and the present: Jackie Kennedy, Lady Bird Johnson, Pat Nixon, Betty Ford, Rosalynn Carter, Nancy Reagan, Barbara Bush, Hillary Clinton, Laura Bush, and Michelle Obama. (As of the time of publication of the book, Melania Trump was not officially First Lady, but the author includes speculation of what kind of FLOTUS she could be in First Women's afterword). Drawing upon more than 200 interviews with former FLOTUSs and their family, friends, aides and residence staffers (including research from her first book The Residence, an intimate view of the White House through the eyes of residence staffers) along with newly available public materials and scholarship, Brower weaves a complicated narrative surrounding American politics's "most elite sorority" (Brower, 2016, p. 5).

Rather than focus on each former FLOTUS chronologically, Brower chooses to intertwine ten narratives under topical chapters, from a discussion about their political dabblings to their public and private relationships with their husbands and other first ladies. While this jumping back and forth in the timeline can be disorienting and sometimes disrupts the flow of the book, I found it an effective mechanism for showing the carry-over between both Democratic and Republican administrations in terms of the underlying traditions of the ever-evolving first ladyship. An unofficial office, the first ladyship nonetheless demands much of the women who ascend to the position upon inauguration: to take on the public work of sympathetic advocate for the common people and defender of their husbands' political dealings (from tirelessly campaigning to being a confidante), while also providing for their families as mothers and spouses.

Each FLOTUS interpreted the latter mandates in their own way, producing an interesting spectrum of political involvement and personal relationships. Some FLOTUSs were highly influential in the crafting of policy (Hillary Clinton, Rosalynn Carter, and Lady Bird Johnson with their most famous work in healthcare reform, mental health and human rights, and civil rights and environmental causes, respectively), while others preferred to be more traditional, utilizing domestic charisma and soft power in supporting their husbands' political agendas (like Pat Nixon, Barbara Bush, Nancy Reagan, Laura Bush and Jackie Kennedy, who dabbled more often in White House preservation projects and FLOTUS-traditional social causes like literacy and education). Despite their different conceptions of the role of FLOTUS, unlikely friendships and lifelong bonds were formed along the way, even between spouses of presidents on opposing sides of the political spectrum, like that between Laura Bush and Michelle Obama and Nancy Reagan and Jackie Kennedy. These relationships often were formed for good or ill during the traditional tour of the White House given by the incumbent FLOTUS to the incoming first lady.

First Women shows each of these women at their worst and best and allows the readers to come out with a greater appreciation for how each FLOTUS navigated the tightrope of political (and sometimes feminist) icon and supporting player roles and the continuing gendered expectations of the office. Add in a healthy dose of public scrutiny, political attacks, and scandal, and one cannot help but admire how tough these women all were, regardless of political persuasion. However, at times the impartiality of the author was strained by gossipy chapters focusing on the bad blood and feuds between first ladies (for example, Barbara Bush's disdain for her much younger successor in Jackie Kennedy or Michelle Obama's lingering resentment of Hillary Clinton for her personal attacks against the Obamas during the heated 2008 presidential campaign) and seeming harshness towards some first ladies (Michelle Obama, for example, who was repeatedly reported as being highly unhappy as FLOTUS). The sisterhood isn't perfect, but the author sometimes lost focus on the overall unity of the first ladies forged from shared experiences.

Despite these flaws, readers of First Women emerge with a greater understanding of the humanity of these complicated women, a greater appreciation for their service to the country, and their places in history and the American political pantheon. While Brower's book is a more general biographical look at these women, it nonetheless is able to give readers a better look at the under-appreciated power brokers in our nation's first ladies.


Works Cited:

Brower, Kate Andersen. (2016). First Women: The Grace and Power of America's Modern First Ladies. New York: Harpercollins.

Book Review: Michael Isikoff and David Corn's "Russian Roulette"

Back in December of last year, I reviewed Luke Harding's Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win, coming out of reading it with the conclusion that there is a lot of smoke, but that the fire hadn't been located in all the obfuscation. And many allegations made were as of yet not verified. As the Mueller investigation into alleged collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign in the 2016 election has steamed along surely but slowly, new revelations and evidence has been revealed that shed a bit more light on Trump-Russia ties and has benefited subsequent authors of many current (and probably many future) books on this subject. New events include the Helsinki summit in which Trump and Putin met in secret (no communique ever appeared after the summit as to what they talked about personally) and Trump publicly rebuffed U.S. intelligence's strong assertion that Russians meddled in the 2016 election while continuing his praise for the Russian president and strongman Vladimir Putin (which even raised the hackles of some of Trump's supporters). Investigative journalists Michael Isikoff and David Corn definitely have an advantage over Harding's Collusion by virtue of the inevitable coming to light of further evidence in the public square over time that comes from careful investigation. Their 2018 entry Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump indirectly utilizes early works on the subject like Collusion and adds a crucial dimension to the narrative by taking advantage of insider accounts of the fight and controversies around shoring up America's vulnerable election infrastructure.

While Isikoff and Corn do explore more in depth about Trump's past in Russia, including previously undisclosed meetings that some of his colleagues (former and present, like Flynn or Manafort) engaged in, there is largely nothing new from what has been reported in the media this past year. Such as the fact that Trump's involvement in 2013 with the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow was not the first contact he had with Russia, with his drive to do business with Putin and the Kremlin in the Russian real-estate market going back at least a decade or so from the Miss Universe event. Shady deals with Russian oligarchs and Kremlin officials ensued between Trump and within his inner circle, with some still shrouded in mystery. What makes Russian Roulette stand out in the latest wave of Trump-Russia centered books is its exploration of new dimensions to the story in that of cyber espionage, troll farms, and campaign and election systems hacking as part of a larger geopolitical strategy, and the fact that the authors don't cringe from showing both the Clinton and Trump campaigns in sometimes unsavory lights.

Both campaigns were wary of the intelligence community, with the Clinton email investigation seeming ill-timed on former FBI director Comey's part and the Trump campaign viewing the FBI's counterintelligence operation probing suspicious dealings between members of his camp and Russia as a witch-hunt. However, as Isikoff and Corn assert throughout Russian Roulette, this wariness on both sides in cooperating with federal officials may have hindered efforts to defend against an ongoing wave of Russian cyberattacks on American public and private entities, including election infrastructure. To put events into their larger geopolitical context, Isikoff and Corn explore the emergence of what is termed the "Gerasimov doctrine" in 2013, named after a Russian general who described that a strong tilt towards the conduct of war in the cyber realm could be as effective at achieving the national interest as conventional warfare (Isikoff & Corn, 2018, p. 44). These operations could range from the actual targeting of the electrical grid to the social media operations revealed to have happened during the 2016 election campaign, with Russian hackers and bots using fake social media accounts to spout out inflammatory and untrue stories about both campaigns. While these operations aren't new, with Chinese and North Korea also taking stabs at the U.S., the Russian actions in America seem to have been of a much larger scale.

Around the time the DNC was first believed to have been hacked by Russian intelligence agencies (the most infamous organization being the Internet Research Agency) in September of 2015, with parallel hacks happening to GOP computers, it was not taken seriously right away. Isikoff and Corn paint a picture of a suspicious Clinton campaign wary of assisting FBI investigators and a Democratic Party largely occupied by the bruising presidential campaign, with emails coming out apparently showing disdain and hostility towards the Sanders campaign and causing intra-party divisions. When DNC leadership learned about various hacks on DNC organizations and the Clinton campaign, they were advised to keep news of the hacks on the down-low while cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike attempted to oust the Russian intruders, the FBI investigated, and the Obama administration mulled how to respond to the blatant intrusion, worried that further sanctions under the Magnitsky Act or a counter cyber-operation would jeopardize their attempts at a diplomatic thaw with Russia that could prove fruitful in terms of counter-terrorism or arms treaty negotiations. (It wouldn't be until December 2016, after the election, when the Obama administration imposed new sanctions on Russian intelligence arms-the GRU and the FSB-and three related Russian companies, close Russian diplomatic compounds in Maryland and New York, and kick out 35 Russian diplomats suspected to be spies.)

With the 2016 election over and a seemingly Russia-friendly administration in office, speculation over whether Trump was compromised by Russia grew during the first year of his office, which saw early attempts to ease or eliminate Obama administration sanctions (this was thwarted by Congress over Trump's veto threat), his firing of FBI director James Comey seemingly over the continued Trump-Russia investigation, his friendly summit meetings with Putin (two of which were covered by this book), revelations of previous Trump Tower meetings to get dirt on Clinton, and continued GOP efforts to discredit the special counsel appointed to oversee the Russia investigation, Robert Mueller. Where we go from here is anyone's guess at this point. Undoubtedly, future volumes will be able to present a better timeline of all of these events.

Sure, the promise of the subtitle was never satisfactorily explored, as the evidence presented in Russian Roulette remains far from definitively proved, insofar as the Mueller investigation remains in progress and a final verdict on the subject has yet to be rendered on this unbelievably complex story. That's the inevitable result of ongoing investigations combined with the bureaucratic secrecy surrounding such cases, where the appearance of political impartiality and protection of top-secret intelligence information and sources involved is paramount. However, all the minutiae is frustrating. Throw in the time-honored tradition of reporters protecting their sources, with anonymity both helping to persuade individuals who might not otherwise want to talk (but recognize something is wrong or needs to be said) but frustrating efforts to fact-check and verify a source's credibility. There were multiple anonymous sources cited in Russian Roulette and one cannot be sure a source is always credible and presenting "the facts." Moreover, I was concerned about how Isikoff and Corn used their information and sources to present what at times seem a simplified and monolithic portrayal of Russia as the villain and the U.S. as the hero, largely ignoring that there are Russian dissidents who genuinely want to work with the United States and help Russia transition back to democracy.

Overall, Russian Roulette is a smart piece of investigative work, despite the flaws I described above, with its helpful exploration of a new dimension of geopolitics in cyber-espionage and cyber-warfare and careful (i.e. detailed) chronological portrayal of events helpful to general readers like myself not intimately involved in American political inner circles. If anything, the main message from this is to remain vigilant and to keep watch on what seems to be a new and expanding geopolitical frontier in cyberspace along with the progression of Mueller's investigation. As they say, stay tuned!


Works Cited:

Isikoff, Michael, & Corn, David. (2018). Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump. New York: Hachette Book Group.

Wintour, Patrick. (2018, July 17). Helsinki Summit: What Did Trump and Putin Agree? Retrieved August 13, 2018, from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/17/helsinki-summit-what-did-trump-and-putin-agree.

Book Review: Madeleine Albright's "Fascism"

History is remarkably grounding, if one pays attention to it and studies it, especially amid considerably turbulent and uncertain times. This holds true for Madeleine Albright, former secretary of state from 1997-2001 and ambassador to the United Nations, who was both an avid consumer of history and a close participant. A child of WWII and the early Cold War, Albright fled with her family from her native Czechoslovakia in 1939 to London ahead of Hitler's invasion. Returning six years later, Albright subsequently witnessed the early stages of the Cold War, with her homeland falling under the sway of Communist regimes. From America, her family then watched as the Berlin Wall fell, signalling the death knell of the USSR and the Cold War. Having witnessed two governmental extremes in her early life and armed with her historical knowledge (especially about her native Central & Eastern Europe) gleaned in her professorial days, Albright brought an invaluable understanding to her conduct as secretary of state. Reflecting on her life and public service, Albright (along with co-author Bill Woodward) attempts to provide context for our present era of strife-anxiety over globalization, the rise of populism, increased protectionist/isolationist sentiments, concerns over sociocultural change and various immigrant crises, rising racism/misogyny-in her 2018 historical treatise Fascism: A Warning.

Throughout the book, I got the impression that the main message was that, yes, fascism has happened many times before in history, but that for all the carnage and evil, people snapped out of it eventually when they realized that one person or party cannot provide the simple answers they wish for complex problems. And that no amount of catastrophic division can serve as a justifiable means to an end. That doesn't make what happened in the past, or what is happening presently since the election of Donald Trump to the presidency in 2016 any less concerning or scary. It's just that looking to the past for lessons on how to deal with the present can be grounding, taking away the core of our uncertainty that comes with the perception that things have never been this bad.

Like her readers were students in her graduate foreign policy class at Georgetown University, Albright profiles Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Francisco Franco, Slobodan Milosevic, Hugo Chavez, Recip Tayyip Erdogan, Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban, Jaroslaw Kacynski, Kim Jong-Un and even Donald Trump (as much as it is possible so early into his presidency). From Europe to the Middle East, East Asia, and America, each profile is helpfully situated within the eras they took power in: post-WWI, WWII, the Cold War, post 9/11. Joseph McCarthy even makes a cameo appearance in the second-most recent national turmoil fresh in our collective cultural memories in the Cold War, Red Scare era. These eras were defined by periods of significant social, cultural, economic and political turmoil, from the ravages of war to rising unemployment and corruption that often gave rise to a toxic mix of nationalism and militarism against scapegoated Others believed to be the cause of their problems (and thus stoked by dictatorial figures like Hitler, Mussolini, and present-day leaders like Putin and Orban into incredibly destructive geopolitical flames). Both left-wing and right-wing revolutions were hijacked for this purpose, even in America, where the interwar period saw the rise of sympathetic groups like the America First Committee (AFC) that sought to prevent American involvement in WWII. A harrowing picture of a dog-eat-dog world was often painted, with a zero-sum game of constant international competition defining international relations.

Sound familiar?

Strains of these eras are with us today in our era of despair over the state of democracy, a seeming resurgence of authoritarianism, refugee crises and histrionics over immigrants irrevocably changing a nation's essence. Albright is definitely concerned about how Trump's antidemocratic sentiments erode our own relatively strong democratic institutions and serves to embolden dictators and their wannabes, but doesn't feel as if our circumstances are as dire as they were in the interwar or Cold War years. The foundation for this cautiously optimistic assessment is that socioeconomic and political conditions have markedly improved over the years and average lifespans have lengthened for the average person. Yet, globalization and the inequalities it has generated, combined with refugee-producing intrastate conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa and climate change are no trifling matters.

In her conclusion, Albright acknowledges the latter issues of the present day, but counters pessimistic readers (admittedly, like myself) with the fact that, in the past, leaders like Nelson Mandela and Abraham Lincoln rose not by dividing, but by uniting people to confront their collective problems in more democratic ways. However, like the dictators and fascists Albright profiles in Fascism: A Warning, no one leader can be our savior; we must also stand up for ourselves and our democracy by being more outspoken participants in our democratic process. Undoubtedly, it will be a difficult fight and the good guys do not always win. But how can we live with ourselves if we don't try to stand up for what's right?

"The temptation is powerful to close our eyes and wait for the worst to pass, but history tells us that for freedom to survive, it must be defended, and that if lies are to stop, they must be exposed." (Albright, 2018, p. 252)

Works Cited:

Albright, Madeleine, & Woodward, Bill. (2018). Fascism: A Warning. New York: HarperCollins.