The China question

Peter Navarro is worried about China and if you read his book, you are at the very least, you may well get concerned as well. The Coming China Wars details problems with Chinese production, quality control, human rights and environmental protection. He also points to Chinese foreign policy as an indicator that China is moving into peer competitor territory. Let's look at each in turn.

Navarro wants US consumers to limit buying Chinese goods, because it is not good for the American economy and because it supports bad Chinese work and environmental habits. He provides a number of cases of evidence for this, although some lean toward the anecdotal. Many times it is difficult to know the scale of the problems he is presenting. How much of the Chinese produced medicine is shoddy for example? I suppose the answer in that case is that one case is too many, but it can be hard to tell how serious the problems that Navarro presents are. His tone can reach the apocalyptic which reduces the appeal of his arguments to the unsure.

Quite a bit of the problems he relates call into question the ability of China to continue on its growth path. Internal divisions, more class than ethnic, are a problem. Environmental degradation is reaching critical levels and the wealthy classes will only go so long without a shift to a consumer culture. This is helpful, as most of the books you read tend to treat China's rise as inevitable.

On the foreign policy side, he portrays Chinese as a rapacious neo-imperialist creating new outposts places as far from Beijing as Central Africa and Latin America. This shouldn't be unexpected. China is growing more wealthy and powerful and as such it is spreading its wings. In few ways does this threaten the United States in any meaningful way. The Chinese Army, Navy and Air Force remain far behind the US and would not fare well in any conflict and the Chinese are sure to know this. Navarro strains credulity when he suggests Chinese anti satellite facilities on Cuba might lead to a new Cuban missile crisis.

So take a look at this book for some reasons to reconsider your shopping and for reasons to think that China's rise may stumble, but don't over-react.

Your Government Failed You

Richard Clarke worked for decades in the United States government's national security world. He reached the upper levels of government serving as an Assistant Secretary State and as the chief counter-terrorism official. He left government in 2003 over his disagreements overIraq policy. Shortly thereafter he wrote Against All Enemies, a memoir of his service, as well as a sharp critique of the Bush Administration's terror policy. In his latest book, Your Government Failed You, expands his critique from the personalities and policies of the Bush Administration to the structure and culture of the national security apparatus.

There isn't much that escapes Clarke's scrutiny. The Defense Department reforms meant to avoid another Vietnam failed to prevent Iraq, but helped make it worse. The turf wars, resource allocation and hiring practices of the intelligence community fail to prevent strategic surprise. The Homeland Security Department is described as a underfunded, sum weaker than its parts agglomeration that serves more as a new spoils system than a provider of security.

What is particularly challenging about fixing the issues laid out is the great difficulty in fixing them. In many cases, major legislation will be required and the necessary compromise will take quite a bit of time to implement. More worrisome is whether any single Administration can tackle all of these things in a single or even two terms.

Topics like defense reorganization and the role of the National Guard might be rather dry, but Clarke is writing for both the lay reader and the policy wonk. He provides specific detail about what to fix, but does so in an fashion that doesn't require subject matter expertise. I am particularly happy that Clarke includes global warming (and cyber-security) as a national security issue and that it be treated with the same urgency as issues like terrorism. In terms of threats to the homeland, global warming is probably the worst of all.

None of these issues will be easy to fix and fixing any will be made all the more difficult by the change in the people doing the work. The ideal of government service has certainly faded in this country. Kai Bird, in his masterful the Color of Truth (which, if you can't guess, is gray,) describes the noblesse oblige that led the privileged like the Bundy brothers to seek government service. This is gone, but the government hasn't helped the cause either. On the one hand it continues to outsource key jobs, which may save a bit of money but also fails to develop long term leaders for the government. Then it makes the hiring practices overly long, complicated and demanding and provides pay scales that often require great sacrifice of those who might serve.

In the book, Clarke lays out a number of policy prescriptions to fix the problems he addresses. The most critical one has to be the human resources question. If the government doesn't have the right people to do the work, all the other fixes will come to naught. It is here that Clarke provides the hope that his list of changes might actually be achievable. When the government has the right people in place, it can work wonders.

The end of the world as we know it

Fareed Zakaria's new book, the Post-American World is a book I hope both presidential candidates read. It is a brief book that tells Americans we need to re-think our view of the world. We need to jettison the idea of the world's policeman and hyperpower and replace it with the world's trusted third party. In this his says we need to be less Britain than Bismarck, which I rather like. We need to de-emphasize military power and re-consider economic competitiveness. We need to spend less time worrying about Iranian nuclear weapons and more about how to work with India and China.

It is the briefness that will irritate the foreign policy specialist readership and attract the casual but interested reader. Unlike other international relations big think books, this one does not provide a vigorous examination of the global system. It also does not provide much in the way of policy guidelines, aside from a shift in resources away from primacy and towards a focus on domestic policy.

For those who are looking for help in trying to understand how the world works today and the US can best deal with it, the book will be of great value. Zakaria provides a high level overview saying the superpower era is over, and is being replaced by a multipolar world and one for the first time with non-European powers as the majority of leaders. He surveys China and India and then describes the US's fit in the new world.

Like a number of useful books, this one will have you wanting to read more, about how the US can change its ways and more about modern China and India. This would be a good starting point for the dispirited American wondering where how we should start over after eight less than ideal years.

Us Vs. Them

I am currently reading J. Peter Scoblic's Us Vs. Them: How a Half-Century of Conservatism Has Undermined America's Security, and I'm surprised I have not heard more about it. It one of the most readable, while at the same time intelligent books on modern American foreign policy I have read in quite some time. Even more impressively I think he does a better job of fairly critiquing policy than Richard Rhodes did in his similar recent book Arsenals of Folly.

Scoblic goes back into the Cold War to argue that Bush's foreign policy is not something new under the sun, but is actually the full fruition of a movement that previously had been checked by other foreign policy viewpoints. He argues that Bill Buckley and other writers of the 50s laid the groundwork for a full throated rollback position in the Cold War that sought to defeat communism using military means and believed that nuclear weapons were war fighting rather than political weapons. This viewpoint grew in power when it merged with the neocon stream that believed that US power should be used to spread democracy via violent means.

The title of the book makes it sound both more partisan and less analytically nuanced than it is. Scoblic, who is left in orientation, is fair to many on the right, having many kinds words for Presidents Reagan and Nixon. He also notes that many people that the average reader would consider conservative, including people as diverse as Pat Buchanan and George Schulz adamantly opposed the trends he calls conservative. I wish he had found a term to better differentiate. One of his points is that the neocons didn't so much hijack policy as ally with other flavors of cons, but there are still other flavors that didn't want to play ball.

Still, the book is a pleasure to read and will appeal to those looking for a survey of Cold War policy debates on the right as well as another analysis of the Bush administration foibles. Scoblic's background is arms control, so there is predominance of arms control and other nuclear issues and less about Iraq and Vietnam.

Ain't nobody that spies like us

Larry Devlin is a retired CIA official, who was Chief of Station in the Congo in the 1960s. As such he saw the rise and death of Patrice Lumumba, the Civil War, the Katanaga Crisis and the Rise of Mobutu. His recent book Chief of Station describes his time there. He does provide his viewpoint on a number of pressing issues including the death of Lumumba. He says DC ordered his death, but the local US presence resisted and eventually local rivals assassinated him. On Mobutu, he discusses how he helped Mobuto rise to power.

Given the disastrous reign of Mobutu, it is somewhat surprising to hear that Devlin thinks he was the best possible option. Devlin is an un-apologetic wide focus Cold Warrior believing the US had to fight the Soviets wherever they expanded. This viewpoint is worth exploring and understanding and it is the ancestor of the view that the US must take action wherever possible and ally with bad people to serve larger policy goals. Reading this provides context for thinking about the relationship with Pervez Musharraf.

While his views on the major events make for interesting reading, much of the book consists of dry accounts of how CIA operatives went about their business. While at first this is fascinating, it becomes a bit tedious as the book goes on. This makes the ideal reader for the book difficult to determine. Those with a keen interest in international affairs are likely to be well read in intelligence operations, so they may just want to hear Devlin's views on what happened in Congo. Those looking for true life spy stories will find value, but may tire of the repetition.

Devlin discusses the book here on NPR .

Atomic Times

I suppose I am bit leery of mentioning a memoir, especially one published this century about events in the 1950s. Given the peculiar subject matter, I think it is worth mentioning, even with the possibility that there an element of embellishment. The Atomic Times takes it name from the newspaper for the newspaper of the Army unit stationed on the thermonuclear test base on Eniwetok. The author, Michael Harris, served as an enlisted man on the island for one year and the book is a mix of Catch-22 and nuclear terror.

Despite the title, most of the book focuses on the absurdities of daily life in the conscript military. After writing negative film reviews in the paper, the author is ordered to write only positive ones. For morale of course. He focuses on the humor of the situation, but also the downside, where the misfits are picked on and abused, while those who might stop it look away. Those promoting the idea of national service should read stories like these to see how not to restart a service program.

You can't have a book about serving on a nuclear test site without nuclear explosions. The horror of the experience comes in the details. The bomber that dropped the bomb in the wrong place blinding soldiers. The assurances that no radioactive fallout would ever occur, although at times soldiers were not allowed to leave buildings "for health reasons." The explosions that are much bigger than anticipated. The dreadfully sick sailors who come to the bar with bleeding gums and glowing fingernails.

Some of that may be exaggerated, but the book serves as a reminder, that whatever the war-preventing benefits of nuclear weapons, the world does not need to return to the times of nuclear weapons development.

Arsenals of Folly

Richard Rhodes's Arsenals of Folly is his third book about nuclear weapons. The Making of the Atomic Bomb detailed the successful development of fission weapons. Dark Sun described the successful creation of hydrogen or fusion weapons. Arsenals of Folly focuses on a failure; the attempt by Gorbachev and Reagan to abolish nuclear weapons.

Rhodes's book is selective and this makes sense in supporting his main thesis, which is to explain how the US and USSR came nearly to abolish the weapons and what held them back. The book runs into trouble with some of his asides and side arguments, in which his selectivity shows more bias.

The principal stumbling block to a final agreement was SDI, or Star Wars. Rhodes aligns this program with a series of defense programs built not so much for defensive purposes as for tools in bureaucratic wars, means to starve domestic programs and potential tools for rollback.

Rhodes nicely summarizes the numerous factors that drove the wild increase and innovation in nuclear weapons development. The desire for the Air Force, through SAC, to dominate the budget and the Navy and Army's attempts to defend their share by introducing more platforms certainly boosted spending and created the notion of a triad (missile, bomber, submarine missile) which guaranteed massive spending.

He cheats a bit, and even admits it, by not discussing Khrushchev's foreign policy, which depending on your analysis, created the basis or the cover for much of the eventual defense spending. I think he should have been more critical of Kennedy, who upon learning that the "missile gap"he talked about in the campaign wasn't real, continued to support weapons development despite a massive American lead.

Gorbachev is the hero of the book, as the person who saw that the only way to rescue his country was to turn off the Cold War. Rhodes explores two key historical events that underlie his decision making. The first is the Stalinist terror, which created the seeds of doubt in the application if not the philosophy of Soviet communism. The second is the Chernobyl accident which highlighted the danger of nuclear war. Reagan is given credit for recognizing what Gorbachev was doing and reacting appropriately, but Gorbachev is the hero.

The great villain is Richard Perle, who is presented as nearly Satanic, with a silvery convincing voice and a heart of darkness. His nickname is the Prince of Darkness, so there is probably something to what Rhodes says. Throughout the Reagan years, Perle works to prevent arms control agreements as well as to develop new weapons systems.

The main problem with the book is how Rhodes occasionally ignores complexity where it might slow down his argument. The best example is the concept of deterrence, which Rhodes never explains and for which he makes contradictory statements. Early on, he seems to promote the idea of minimal or even existential deterrence, while later calling into question whether nuclear deterrence works at all. He then cites one article that questions the value of nuclear deterrence, without citing the many more that support it. A deeper discussion of the debates over how and if deterrence works would in the end have made the US arms build up more understandable, which would have tempered, but not contradicted, some of his arguments.

This book does not reach the same standards as the Making of the Atomic Bomb, but it remains an excellent and informative read, as well as a good starting point for thinking of abolition again.

The return of nukes

My reading pile is getting dominated by nuclear weapons. I've recently finished PD Smith's excellent Doomsday Men and my next nonfiction is Richard Rhodes' Arsenals of Folly, which is Rhodes third book on the development of nuclear weapons. After that I have Atomic Times, a memoir of military service at the H-bomb testing grounds on Eniwetok.

All of this would seem like history, which I wish were true. Nuclear weapons are creeping their way back into the world at a disturbing pace. While I think Graham Allison overstates the risk in his Nuclear Terrorism, the fact that countering potential terrorism is so low on the policy agenda is shocking. The fact that three (NK, Pakistan and India) new nuclear powers and potentially one more new one (Iran) are creating new risk of nuclear war gets surprisingly light attention. Any review of the history of the US-USSR nuclear stand-off will reveal that the world is lucky to have escaped without a war.

I fear the Iraq war with its false/failed (depending on your viewpoint) assessment of the Iraqi program has focused the attention away from the problems of nuclear weapons and towards parsing the motivation of those who would address nuclear weapons. The development of new weapons systems, now canceled, like the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, has not helped either. It's hard to support the norm that people shouldn't develop new nuclear weapons when you do the same yourself.

And we become silhouettes when our bodies finally go

PD Smith's Doomsday Men is a mix of science fiction analysis and all too real history. The book covers the fixation on the dream of the ultimate weapon, which evolves from chemical weapons to a true doomsday system put in place by the Soviets. On both the side of scientists and writers there is the great fear of what these more powerful weapons might mean for political power and for society. What drives them is the dream of what they might do. From Nobel with his dynamite on, the dream has been that weapons might become so powerful as to prevent war altogether.

On a more practical front, the dream has been that powerful weapons will drastically shorten war and thereby lessen its effects. The fixation on technical solutions to these problems tend to come up short as demonstrated by chemical weapon which were initially overpowering but were quickly countered. The technologists tend to forget that war is a competition of measure and countermeasure and all the new weapons tend to do is to make it worse.

The book is an excellent introduction to the subject of weapons for non-specialists, but specialists will benefit from the seeing the interplay between science fiction and the development and understanding of what these weapons can do.

It is worth noting that the British cover is a much better representation of the book's contents that the American one.

Here is the British cover:



Here is the American one:



The British cover accurately conveys the mix of science fiction and science, while the American cover makes it look like a conventional history of the H-bomb.

A few good pieces

Here is Andrew Bacevich, one of my favorite writers, on the end of NATO. This is a nice lead in to my next IR read, End of Alliances.

Fred Kaplan's NYT magazine piece on SecDef Robert Gates is a must-read. After reading it, you will wish he held the position in 2000.

Two IR profs discuss a book from one of my grad school colleagues. Yeah, I feel lame.

Talbot

Long serving diplomat, member of the Clinton administration and President of the Brookings Institution Strobe Talbot has a new big think book called The Great Experiment. The experiment is global cooperation in the face of major problems like global warming or the proliferation of nuclear weapon. This can take the form of global governance or cooperation through diplomacy.

Given his ties to the Democratic party, the book is probably a look at the philosophical underpinnings of a Clinton or Obama Administration. Listen to Talbot on the Diane Rehm show. The focus is more on the current international system than the book, but it will give you a sense of his views and approach to international relations.

This will be a big year for books about where American foreign policy should go. Not only is it an election year, but very few people would argue that the current course should continue.

Gift Idea: For those who want to read one book on American foreign policy

Walter Russell Mead's Special Providence provides the cleanest, most comprehensive model that I have seen for understanding the sources of American policy. Many other accounts focus on the specific visions of presidents or the changes wrought by the end of World War 2. Mead argues that four traditions started early in the Republic and continue to drive foreign policy, albeit in differing combinations.

The first tradition, Hamiltonian, emphasizes policies that promote economic growth. The second, Jacksonian, is the populist and nationalist strand that makes the US an unpleasant enemy. The third Wilsonian is the strand that seeks to improve the world, sometimes through treaty and sometimes through force. The last, and often weakest is the Jeffersonian which seeks to make the country a model for others, but is largely disengaged. So for example, the Bush administration is strongly Wilsonian and Jacksonian, while the Clinton administration was strongly Hamiltonian with a less aggressive Wilsonian strand.

While there is an element of abstract analysis involved, the book is readable and fair. Mead is an engaging stylist, injecting humor and telling observations in his story-telling. He is center-right in orientation, so left-oriented people may disagree with some of his eventual prescriptions, but even those who disagree will find his way of looking at foreign policy to be helpful in understanding the cultural constraints and incentives in which American foreign policy is created.

The most inept that ever stepped

When you watch No End in Sight, a movie about decision-making in the lead-up and early days of the Iraq invasion, have some thing of small value at hand, because you will feel the need to smash something. While the movie will not tell anything new to the readers of such books as the Assassin's Gate or Fiasco, there is great value in hearing these people speak and seeing the disbelief in their eyes. The documentary format allows for powerful contrasts between the flippant press comments of Sec. Rumsfeld and the reality on the ground.

The central point the movie makes is that the main decision makers ignored the intelligence community (although it fails to mention that Douglas Feith's people in OSD went out and got their own intelligence when they didn't like what the CIA, DIA and others had to say) and the subject matter experts in the State Department and made decisions based on a fantasy-land, best-case scenario. The DC based decision-makers also operated in such an isolated manner that they failed to listen to their own teams on location that, for example, were telling DC to maintain the Iraqi Army right up until it was disbanded.

The movie is an excellent introduction to the human, policy and military catastrophe that is the Iraq war. If you haven't read them be sure to read the books mentioned above, along with Imperial Life in Emerald City. I've not Night Draws Near, but it has gotten good reviews for its description of life of everyday Iraqis.

On the topic of books, I wonder if Bremer, Rumsfeld, Feith or Wolfowitz will one day write their own In Retrospect-like mea culpa.

Mearsheimer and Walt

Foreign policy books rarely cause controversy outside of academic or policy circles, but IR scholars John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt ignited a firestorm with their Israel Policy and US Foreign Policy. The ADL's Abe Foxman wrote a book attacking Mearsheimer and Walt called the Deadliest Lies and essentially called them anti-Semites on Fresh Air. Other negative reviews come from the New Republic (via National Review!)

The author of my favorite foreign policy book, Special Providence, has a long review in Foreign Affairs, where he argues that the authors are not anti-Semites, but are wrong and have written a a bad book.

So what did they argue? I can't say for sure, as I haven't read it yet. As I understand it, they argue that a pro-Israel lobby forces the US into a relationship with Israel that runs counter to US interests. The heat seems to come from the first rather than the latter half.

If you like journal versions, read the London Review of Books article that serves as the basis for the book. I am picking up the book at the library today. They are speaking in Portland tonight, but you had to have bought tickets by yesterday to attend.

We sell them guns, we sell them tanks

I had heard that Charlie Wilson's War was being made into a movie (trailer here), but I didn't know it had Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts and Philip Seymour Hoffman. All the better to get people into a foreign policy movie. While Steve Coll's Ghost Wars is the definitive book on American involvement in Afghanistan from 1979 to 2001, the late George Crile's Charlie Wilson's War is one of the most entertaining books about foreign policy that you will ever read. The trailer will give you a sense of the oddity that was Rep. Charlie Wilson.

I got an idea of something we can do with a gun

There are plenty of books about US naval history, but the vast majority focus on the wartime navy. In its own ways, the peacetime navy is just as fascinating. How does a navy prepare for the many potential conflicts it faces? How does internal politics determine outcomes? Black Shoes and Blue Water describes the neglected arm of the US Navy, the surface fleet, during a period of decline and renewal from 1945-1975.

The US surface fleet started the period completely dominant but declined as budget dollars went to nuclear programs, aircraft carriers and submarines. By the 60s, most of the fleet was nearly incapable of fighting other surface units, instead focusing on defending carriers. The book ably describes the technical programs designed to maintain a role for the service and the efforts to use the limited budget dollars to convert obsolescent ships into useful assets. Dealing with the shift from a gun to a missile based battlefield was fascinating and makes for a great case of study of the challenges of technical change.

Also helpful is the organizational model of what happens to the underfunded service. With fewer educational and promotional opportunities, fewer of the hard charging officers will choose that service. With fewer training dollars, the crews will be less able to perform their jobs when the time comes. And the weak performance in training operations will reinforce negative perceptions creating a vicious cycle.

Naval nerds will love all the detail of heavy cruisers in Vietnam, the conversions of cruisers to missile cruisers and the many proposals that never made it, like putting Polaris missiles on surface ships. There is a lot of fun detail here.

On the downside, there is a lack of analytical distance which limits the overall lessons. The author identifies closely with the surface fleet and doesn't analyze the overall security threat to the US and how the surface fleet could have optimized the role. While the decline of the surface fleet was certainly bad for that part of the Navy, how bad was it for US national security? The author describes a decline in US conventional deterrence in the 70s, but a more systemic analysis would have been helpful.

One to skip

I watched the Bedford Incident last night. This is for hard-core Cold War junkies only and even then I recommend you watch the first 15 minutes and skip to the last two scenes, as the only the ending is worth your time. The plot involves an overzealous destroyer captain trying to force a Soviet submarine to surface. Of course, his maniacal management drives his poor crew crazy. A reporter and a German ex- U-boat commander brought along as a consultant try to convince the Captain to be less crazy, but to no avail. A good ending, but not worth sitting through the tedious plot. For your Cold War movie goodness, watch these movies instead.

Have a look at this list (with trailers when available) of upcoming fall/Christmas movies. Some look OK, but I am quite surprised they went back for Aliens Vs. Predator, the first one sucking like it did.

Crying parents tell their children, if you survive don't so as we did

Daniel Benjamin and Stephen Simon were NSC staffers who worked counter-terrorism issues during the Clinton Administration. Their book The Age of Sacred Terror provides a good overview of the extreme Islamist terror threat as well as the challenges in recognizing the threat. It is depressing for two reasons. It shows the base from which violent terror arises is large and may well be growing, even without the incendiary effect of the Iraq war. It also shows that the US government is not particularly strong at dealing with threats outside of well understood ones.

The review of the sources and extent of extreme ideology is well described. The authors explore the trail of theological thought that underpins the violent ideology of Bin Laden and his fellow travelers. The societal and political conditions that make the ideology more attractive to many Muslims is also clearly described.

The review of American policy in the 90s and early 21st century shows that the various bureaucracies don't like to change their behavior. Private sector types may tsk tsk, but if you tell a large corporation it needs to change, it will find 100 reasons not to. Like Richard Clarke in his book, the authors make pains to show that the Administration understood the threat was real, but were unable to push the bureaucracies into dealing with it. The FBI in particular comes out badly, with its focus on its total independence and supporting criminal investigations over terror investigations.

Having read this book, I would like to read the much praised and more recent The Looming Tower, which covers much of the same ground.

Amazing

Perhaps you have read Rudy Guiliani's unfortunate Foreign Affairs piece meant to elucidate his approach to foreign policy. If you would like the US to completely drive itself self into the ground, vote for Rudy.

I highly recommend Greg Djerejian's acid take on the piece. Fred Kaplan takes it apart rather nicely too.

I'll teach you to burn

Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin's Pulitzer Prize winning American Prometheus is an excellent example of how a biography should be written. The authors focus on how Robert Oppenheimer's upbringing, academic experiences and personality shaped his approach to his successes in teaching and managing the Manhattan project as well as his failures as a politically engaged public intellectual. While it does not replace Rhodes' book as the leading book of the bomb, it is certainly the leading book on this monumental figure.

Oppenheimer was extremely driven and like a tragic play, many of his early actions comes to haunt him in his later years. His participation with leftist causes in the 30s and his relationships with communist party members nearly cost him his role in the Manhattan project and did cost him involvement in the national security structure during the Eisenhower years. Unfortunately, it was Oppenheimer's ways of alienating people, including President Truman and even worse Lewis Strauss that ultimately crushed him.

There is so much to like about this book. For one, Oppenheimer was an amazing person, conversant in multiple disciplines, although his detractors might instead say he was unfocused and uncommitted to deep study of physics. The book also conveys the turbulent 30s with prominent Americans flirting with hard left politics and then the anti-communist back lash of the late 40s and early 50s. For those who don't desire to read an entire book about the Manhattan project, the book manages to cover that reasonably well. The authors, over the course of decades, conducted dozens of interviews with those familiar with Oppenheimer and the detail is incredible.

The outstanding question about Oppenheimer was not whether he was a spy, but whether he was ever a communist. The authors say no, and provide as much proof as is likely. This makes the witch hunt and hearing all the more reprehensible. The section in which he is effectively tried in a show trial goes on a bit long, but is still worth the read.