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THE FOLLY OF REALISM

HOW THE WEST DECEIVED ITSELF ABOUT RUSSIA AND BETRAYED UKRAINE

A persuasive case for rethinking America’s guiding foreign policy doctrine in the face of global chaos.

European affairs expert Vindman recounts the many ways in which American foreign policy has gone astray.

“Realism’s impulse to avert crisis at virtually any cost doesn’t even avert crisis,” declares the author, deprecating the long-standing doctrine, courtesy of Henry Kissinger and company, that indexes foreign policy decisions to American interests. Instead, Vindman advocates a rising doctrine called neo-idealism, which “demands using a more nuanced and coherent understanding of interest, viewed through our values, along with other important inputs, to determine a compass heading for a US foreign-policy approach.” In the instance of his native Ukraine, Vindman argues, U.S. foreign policy has been driven by Moscow’s narrative, a holdover of a long-ago empire and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, in which Ukraine is seen as an integral part of Russia. “Without Ukraine, Russia cannot sustain an imperialist, revanchist narrative of the so-called unity of the ethnic-Russian and Russian-speaking peoples,” he writes. Vladimir Putin’s use of this narrative includes the view that the U.S. has continued to wage the Cold War all along, using “hybrid warfare” that includes—deep irony here—American interference in Russian elections. In a carefully laid-out case, Vindman urges that the U.S. take stronger steps to protect Ukraine as a democratic nation with Western values whose very existence repudiates Putin’s Russia “and Putinism itself.” Neo-idealism also demands that the U.S. take greater interest in protecting democratic nations that realism would consider insignificant and, with that, “strengthening South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan” against China. Regrettably, he concludes, all that’s unlikely to happen under his bête noire, Trump, with the result that the “next administration will inherit not just a fractured global order but also allies wary of America’s reliability”—a situation reparable by means of neo-idealism.

A persuasive case for rethinking America’s guiding foreign policy doctrine in the face of global chaos.

Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025

ISBN: 9781541705043

Page Count: 304

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025

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ABUNDANCE

Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.

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Helping liberals get out of their own way.

Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.

Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.

Pub Date: March 18, 2025

ISBN: 9781668023488

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Avid Reader Press

Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979

ISBN: 0061965588

Page Count: 772

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

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