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David Sanger’s history of US foreign policy during the Biden presidency is a perfect example of the adage that journalism is the first draft of history. As a national security correspondent for the New York Times, Mr. Sanger has had excellent access to those shaping U.S. foreign policy during this turbulent and dangerous time.
The central event in Sanger’s story is, inevitably, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. But Sanger also provides an interesting account of the escalating U.S.-China tensions, the end of the war in Afghanistan, and tensions between Biden and his president. Netanyahu government in Israel.
The New Cold War (Scribe, £18.99/crown, $33) contains no revelations that fundamentally change the standard explanation of world affairs during the Biden administration. However, the book provides interesting details about what was going on behind the scenes, thus making the American decision-making process easier to understand.
Sanger explains how and when the United States learned of Putin’s intention to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and what the White House did to avert war, including Bill He gives a convincing explanation that it also includes a secret mission to Moscow by Secretary Burns. C.I.A. Both Mr. Burns and the president’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, provided written explanations of their actions to the author.
While the New Cold War has many strengths, there are two small weaknesses. The author’s efforts to set the events in a broader historical and intellectual context are less original than his reporting. He is not the first to suggest that Fukuyama’s “end of history” theory was fabricated by events. Others pointed out that the hope that capitalism would lead to political liberalization in China had not panned out.
The new Cold War depicted by Mr. Sanger is also the world itself as seen from Washington. This is an important perspective given America’s role as the world’s leading military power and guarantor of the current world order. But the history of the new Cold War, if this is the case, also needs to explain what things look like from the other side of the divide.
Readers seeking to understand what is happening within Russia will find Sarah Rainsford’s Farewell to Russia (Bloomsbury, 22 lbs.).
Rainsford has devoted much of her life to trying to understand Russia, first as a student and then as a journalist. She was so fond of this country that she admits that when she learned that Russia really intended to invade Ukraine, she felt feelings of shame as well as disgust.
Her first encounter with Russia was in 1992, when she was an 18-year-old exchange student, experiencing everything from Moscow temperatures (-23 degrees Celsius) to underground raves. She cleverly uses diaries and letters from her school days to paint a vivid portrait of a Russia that was “opening up for the first time long before Putin and his wars.” After witnessing a blossoming of freedom and a “deadly scramble for wealth” in the 1990s, Mr Rainsford returned as a BBC journalist in the 2000s, covering the restoration of order and violent authoritarianism under Putin. .
Many of the journalists and democratic politicians who fell victim to Putin, including Boris Nemtsov, Anna Politkovskaya and Alexei Navalny, were acquaintances of Rainsford, and Rainsford provides vivid and moving accounts of their struggles. , mixed with war scene reportage. The life of an ordinary Russian person. And she plausibly argues that there is a direct link between Putin’s repression at home and his acts of aggression abroad.
Beyond the immediate question of why President Putin chose to invade Ukraine, a deeper question lies: Why do wars recur so often in human affairs? This is the question that Richard Overy chooses to address in his fascinating new book, Why War? (Pelican, 22 lbs/WW Norton, $27.99).
Overy is one of Britain’s foremost historians of the Second World War, and is deeply knowledgeable about the diplomatic and political reasons why countries choose war. But in his new book, he considers a different, deeper perspective on the issue. As he explains, war is a recurring phenomenon in human history. The anthropologist who claimed that ancient civilizations were primarily peaceful was, in his view, dead wrong. Archaeological excavations have repeatedly revealed how common violent death was in ancient societies.
Overy examines the question of why humans have repeatedly fought wars from the perspectives of various fields such as psychology, ecology, and political science. For example, he argues that Freud’s explanation of the origins of war is not particularly useful, but that explanations rooted in evolutionary psychology are more convincing. These suggest that societies struggling to survive and expand found it useful to create a “psychological acceptance of war as a masculine duty.”
There is no one headline-grabbing answer to the question “Why do we go to war?” In Overy’s view, the answer typically involves a variety of factors and changes over time. But reading his account, it becomes clear that even advances in technological and social sophistication did not free humanity from its urges to conquer and kill.
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