New Books in National Security

In The Myth of the Nuclear Revolution: Power Politics in the Atomic Age (Cornell University Press, 2020), Keir A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press tackle the central puzzle of the nuclear age: the persistence of intense geopolitical competition in the shadow of nuclear weapons. The book explains why the race to establish a nuclear deterrent can be destabilizing; how the condition of "mutual assured destruction" can unravel; and why some states threaten to wield the world’s most destructive weapon against conventional threats.On the episode, I talked with Dr. Lieber and Dr. Press about the theoretical and policy implications of their work, the role of fear in international relations, and Thomas Schelling and his theory of a nuclear “taboo.” Dedicated listeners will also be treated to an important question. Which is better: "Dr. Strangelove" or "Failsafe?"John Sakellariadis is a 2020-2021 Fulbright US Student Research Grantee. He holds a Master’s degree in public policy from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia and a Bachelor’s degree in History & Literature from Harvard University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

From one of its keenest observers, The Churchill Complex: The Curse of Being Special, from Winston and FDR to Trump and Brexit (Penguin Press) is a brilliant, witty journey through the "Special Relationship" between Britain and America that has done so much to shape the world, from World War II to Brexit.It's impossible to understand the last 75 years of American history, through to Trump and Brexit, without understanding the Anglo-American relationship, and specifically the bonds between presidents and prime ministers. FDR of course had Churchill; JFK famously had Macmillan, his consigliere during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Reagan found his ideological soul mate in Thatcher, and George W. Bush found his fellow believer, in religion and in war, in Tony Blair. And now, of course, it is impossible to understand the populist uprising in either country, from 2016 to the present, without reference to Trump and Boris Johnson, though ironically, they are also the key to understanding the special relationship's demise.There are few things more certain in politics than that at some point, facing a threat to national security, a leader will evoke Winston Churchill to stand for brave leadership (and Neville Chamberlain to represent craven weakness). As Ian Buruma shows, in his dazzling short tour de force of storytelling and analysis, the mantle has in fact only grown more oppressive as nuanced historical understanding fades and is replaced by shallow myth. Absurd as it is to presume to say what Churchill would have thought about any current event, it's relatively certain he would have been horrified by the Iraq War and Brexit, to name two episodes dense with "Finest Hour" analogizing.But The Churchill Complex is much more than a reflection on the weight of Churchill's legacy and its misuses. At its heart is a series of shrewd and absorbing character studies of the president-prime minster dyads, which in Ian Buruma's gifted hands serve as a master class in politics, diplomacy and abnormal psychology. It's never been a relationship of equals: from Churchill's desperate cajoling and conniving to keep FDR on side in the war on, British prime ministers have put much more stock in the relationship than their US counterparts did.For England, resigned to the loss of its once-great empire and the diminishment of its power, its close kinship to the world's greatest superpower would give it continued relevance, and serve as leverage to keep continental Europe in its place. As Buruma shows, this was almost always fool's gold. And now, even as the links between the Brexit vote and the 2016 US election are coming into sharper focus, the Anglo-American alliance has floundered on the rocks of the isolationism that is one of 2016's signal legacies.The Churchill Complex may not have a happy ending, but as with Ian Buruma's other works, piercing lucidity and elegant prose is its own form of lasting comfort.Kirk Meighoo is a TV and podcast host, former university lecturer, author and former Senator in Trinidad and Tobago. He hosts his own podcast, Independent Thought & Freedom, where he interviews some of the most interesting people from around the world who are shaking up politics, economics, society and ideas. You can find it in the iTunes Store or any of your favorite podcast providers. You can also subscribe to his YouTube channel. If you are an academic who wants to get heard nationally, please check out his free training at becomeapublicintellectual.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

In Camps: Vietnamese Refugees, Asylum Seekers and Repatriates (University of California Press, 2020) is an in-depth study of the fate of the nearly 800,000 Vietnamese refugees who left their country by boat, and sought refugee in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. The experiences of these populations and the subsequent policies remain relevant today; Who is a refugee? Who determines their status? And how does it change over time?Jana K. Lipman takes the reader to visit camps in Guam, Malaysia, the Phillipines and Hong Kong, drawing out the politics, policies and how these impacted refugees rights to remain, be resettled or repatriated. She draws out the tensions between the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and the US government, drawing into focus the direct impact this had on the day-to-day lives of those stuck in camps.Her research is the first major work to pay close attention to first-landing host sites, with particular emphasis on Vietnamese activism in the camps and as part of the diaspora. The work will unsettle conventionally accepted accounts of Southeast Asian migration to the US. It reveals how first asylum seeker sites caused UNHCR to reshape international refugee policy. It is a gripping read; historical and also somewhat anthropological, it raises concerns of humanitarianism, human rights and Asian American studies to confront the legal and moral dilemmas, and the obligations that continue to face the US and all host countries of refugees and asylum seekers. It causes the reader to recall the humanity of those seeking asylum, and question current government policies. Though the plight of the Vietnamese refugees is specific, the human need for certainty and safety are universal. This is essential reading in relation to any refugee policy, and human rights and humanitarianism more broadly.Jana K. Lipman is an Associate Professor of History at Tulane University. She is a scholar of U.S. foreign relations, U.S. immigration, and labor history. Her first book was Guantánamo: A Working-Class History between Empire and Revolution. Jane Richards is a doctoral candidate in Human Rights Law at the University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include disability, equality, criminal law and civil disobedience. You can find her on twitter @JaneRichardsHK where she avidly follows the Hong Kong’s protests and its politics.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

Ranging from Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Jefferson to Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan, and James Baker, America in the World: A History of U.S. Diplomacy and Foreign Policy (Twelve, 2020), tells the delightful story of the history of American diplomacy since 1776.Recounting in a superb fashion the leading actors and events of U.S. foreign policy, Robert Zoellick, former President of the World Bank, Deputy Secretary of State and Deputy White House chief of Staff, identifies the five traditions that have emerged from America's encounters with the world: the importance of North America; the special roles trading, transnational, and technological relations play in defining ties with others; changing attitudes toward alliances and ways of ordering connections among states; the need for public support, especially through Congress; and the belief that American policy should serve a larger purpose. These traditions frame a closing review of post-Cold War presidencies, which Zoellick foresees serving as guideposts for the future of American diplomacy.Both a sweeping work of history and an insightful guide to U.S. diplomacy past and present, America in the World serves as an informative companion and practical adviser to readers seeking to understand the strategic and immediate challenges of U.S. foreign policy during an era of transformation and change. All by one of the leading practitioners of American diplomacy of our era. Perfect reading for the lay educated reader who has an interest in either American history or contemporary events.Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for Chatham House’s International Affairs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

Americans are obsessed with liberty, mad about liberty. On any day, we can tune into arguments about how much liberty we need to buy a gun or get an abortion, to marry who we want or adopt the gender we feel. We argue endlessly about liberty from regulation and observation by the state, and proudly rebel against the tyranny of course syllabi and Pandora playlists. Redesign the penny today and the motto would read, “You ain’t the boss of me.”Yet Americans are only now awakening to what is perhaps the gravest domestic threat to our liberties in a century—in the form of an extreme and fast-growing concentration of economic power. Monopolists today control almost every corner of the American economy. The result is not only lower wages and higher prices, hence a concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few. In Liberty From All Masters: The New American Autocracy vs. the Will of the People (St. Martin's Press, 2020), Barry C. Lynn argues that the result is also a stripping away of our liberty to work how and where we want, to launch and grow the businesses we want, to create the communities and families and lives we want.The rise of online monopolists such as Google and Amazon—designed to gather our most intimate secrets and use them to manipulate our personal and group actions—is making the problem only far worse fast. Not only have these giant corporations captured the ability to manage how we share news and ideas with one another, they increasingly enjoy the power to shape how we move and play and speak and think.Arya Hariharan is a lawyer in politics. She spends much of her time working on congressional investigations and addressing challenges to the rule of law. You can reach her at arya.hariharan@gmail.com or Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

If the US is – in the words of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright – the "indispensible nation" then the economic, democratic and institutional alliance between the US and the EU is the “essential partnership”. So argues Tony Gardner, Barack Obama’s ambassador to the EU and advisor to Joe Biden’s campaign for president in his new book Stars with Stripes: The Essential Partnership between the European Union and the United States (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020),The EU-US partnership has its frustrations and failings, he writes, but has quietly delivered on trade liberalization, data management, defense and law enforcement, leverage against Russia and Iran, and energy security. If Biden wins in November, these joint projects will be expanded and the fight against climate change brought to the forefront but “time will be short and pressure will be really high” to prove that working with allies achieves more than unilateralism.Tony Gardner was US ambassador to the EU from 2014-2017 and a member of Bill Clinton’s National Security Council in 1994-1995. He is now a managing partner at Brookfield Asset Management, a board member of Iberdrola, and senior counsel in the law firm Sidley Austin where he works on trade, data privacy and cybersecurity.Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

On November 3, 1969 Richard M. Nixon addressed the nation in what would come to be known as “The Silent Majority Speech”. In 32 minutes, the president promoted his plan for a “Vietnamization” of the war and called upon “the great silent majority of my fellow Americans” to support his plan “to end the war in a way that we could win the peace”. Arguing against the immediate cessation of hostilities, Nixon warned of a Communist bloodbath should American troops leave too quickly. Hypocritically, he spoke of peace as he made plans for a massive expansion of the murderous American air campaigns, which would include the criminal bombardment of neutral Cambodia.While he asked for unity, the term “silent majority” stood in sharp contrast to Nixon calling anti-war activists on campus “bums” and the range of racist terms he used for African Americans, Jews, and the LatinX community. In The 'Silent Majority' Speech: Richard Nixon, the Vietnam War, and the Origins of the New Right (Routledge, 2019), Scott Laderman argues that this speech was part of Nixon’s rhetorical strategy of using divisive “dog whistle” terms such as “law and order” to cover up his racist appeals to the white working class. According to Laderman the speech was a historical turning point in American political history, opening the way for the Lee Atwaters and Donald Trumps to come. While he shows how this foreign policy speech can work as a prism to understand the later years of the American War in Vietnam, aka the Second Indochina War, Laderman further demonstrate that this speech was an important moment in American domestic politics as it signaled the creation of the New Right.Scott Laderman is a professor of history at the University of Minnesota, Duluth – home of the best surfing in the upper Midwest.Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not quietly reading or happily talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

At the end of the 20th century, the liberal international order appeared unassailable after its triumph over the authoritarian challenges of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Twenty years later, however, the assumptions underlying the system appear discredited as international relations devolve into confrontation and conflict. In The New Twenty Years' Crisis: A Critique of International Relations, 1999-2019 (McGill-Queen's UP, 2020), Philip Cunliffe considers the factors in this decline and the question of what lies ahead. As Cunliffe details, the explanation lies within the liberal international order itself, particularly in the utopian thinking that ignores key factors in international affairs. Cunliffe identifies similarly flawed concepts within international relations theory, which grounded itself on assumptions that led to idealistic thinking over the growing evidence of contemporary events. These dual crises, Cunliffe concludes, demand a reconsideration based on the realities of the modern international order rather than the discredited ideas that seemed unquestionable two decades ago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

As the 2020 presidential campaign begins to take shape, there is widespread distrust of the fairness and accuracy of American elections. In Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust, and the Threat to American Democracy (Yale UP, 2020), Richard L. Hasen uses riveting stories illustrating four factors increasing the mistrust. Voter suppression has escalated as a Republican tool aimed to depress turnout of likely Democratic voters, fueling suspicion. Pockets of incompetence in election administration, often in large cities controlled by Democrats, have created an opening to claims of unfairness. Old‑fashioned and new‑fangled dirty tricks, including foreign and domestic misinformation campaigns via social media, threaten electoral integrity. Inflammatory rhetoric about “stolen” elections supercharges distrust among hardcore partisans.Taking into account how each of these threats has manifested in recent years—most notably in the 2016 and 2018 elections—Hasen offers concrete steps that need to be taken to restore trust in American elections before the democratic process is completely undermined. This is an indispensable analysis, from the nation’s leading election-law expert, of the key threats to the 2020 American presidential election.Professor Hasen’s election law blog can be found here.Arya Hariharan is a lawyer in politics. She spends much of her time working on congressional investigations and addressing challenges to the rule of law. You can reach her at arya.hariharan@gmail.com or Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

In my old age, I try to argue more quietly, though I still believe that sharp disagreement is a sign of political seriousness. What engaged citizens think and say matters; we should aim to get it right and to defeat those who get it wrong. I understand the very limited impact of what I write, but I continue to believe that the stakes are high.– Michael Walzer (2018)These thoughts, from the preface of A Foreign Policy for the Left (Yale University Press, 2018), reflect the understated wisdom of a highly regarded 85-year old political theorist, Michael Walzer. His many books include the influential Just and Unjust Wars, and others mentioned in this interview including: Thick and Thin – Moral Argument at Home and Abroad, Spheres of Justice – A Defense of Pluralism and Equality, and Obligations: Essays on Disobedience, War and Citizenship – the last one being published in 1970 at the height of the divisive Vietnam War era when Walzer was teaching at Harvard.Much of the material for Michael’s books derives from his long affiliation with Dissent magazine – he apprenticed as a young leftist partisan under the prolific Irving Howe whose writing, social role and politics helped shape the young Walzer. Evidence of Michael’s current and ongoing political engagement, as well as the clarity of his thought and seriousness of his message can be seen here: ‘A Note on Racial Capitalism’ from Dissent in July 2020. In his note Michael references K. Sabeel Rahman’s Dissent article ‘Dismantle Racial Capitalism’ in his first paragraph; a month later two scholars write ‘A Reply to Michael Walzer’ from which comes: ‘A Reply to Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò and Liam Kofi Bright’.Professor Walzer published his first Dissent article in 1956 which provides some timeline context for one of the first questions in this interview about whether the Hiss-Chambers testimonies before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (1948) might represent the opening confrontation of our polarizing culture wars. As you will hear, Michael thinks it could date back further; and shares a few thoughts on teaching at Harvard in the sixties, and pivotal moments in his career as a young leftist partisan. He comments about scholars like Rawls, Nozick and Geertz; and offers opinions related to our current polarization including a recent Rolling Stone article, the origins of resentment, engaged citizenship and voting, 9/11 and its aftermath, justice, ‘complex equality’, ‘formative’ books and a poet.An overview of Michael’s life and work, Justice is Steady Work – A Conversation on Political Theory (Polity Press 2020) with Astrid von Busekist at SciencesPo (originally published in French) out soon.Michael Walzer is professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and editor emeritus at Dissent magazine. Professor Walzer studied on a Fulbright Fellowship at Cambridge and completed his PhD in government at Harvard University.Keith Krueger lectures at the SHU-UTS Business School in Shanghai. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security