Political History

Late last week in Turkey, the stock market declined by 18 percent and the lira lost a third of its value. Interest rates have soared to several thousand … more

Pity the poor nation-state. It is mentioned only to be abused. The nation-state, we are told, is too small -- too tiny to be competitive in the global economy, too feeble to deal on its own with "global issues" like climate change. At the same time, the nation-state is too big. Its centralised bureaucracies are too remote from the real centres of innovation, which are cities and neighbourhoods. National cultures cannot compete with global pop culture or with sub-national… more

According to conventional wisdom, Japan's Emperor Hirohito was a man of peace, forced by Japan's militarist elites to support his country's wartime aggression. In his provocative new book Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, historian Herbert Bix offers a dramatic reappraisal of the emperor's wartime role, arguing that Hirohito was in fact far more hawkish and closely involved in Japan's war plans than has been previously acknowledged.

Bix goes on to argue that the post-war whitewash of… more

Selected reviews of The Coming Anarchy are featured below:

Sunday, March 19, 2000 There can be little doubt that Robert D. Kaplan is one of America's most engaging writers on contemporary international affairs. It is inevitable, then, that the appearance of a new book by such a prominent journalist -- even a book mostly made up of previously published essays -- ranks as not only a literary event but as one bound to… more

If there is one thing that most everybody agrees upon regarding the ideological legacy of the Clinton presidency, it is that there is none. President Clinton, left and right typically concur, is a man of polling and expediency, and almost infinite flexibility of viewpoint. A subset of this thinking, indigenous to the left, holds that Clinton does stand for something, sort of, but it's really nothing more than warmed-over Republicanism. A number of liberal economists have indicted Clinton's fiscal policies… more

Selected reviews of Vietnam: The Necessary War are featured below:

As the 2000 election campaign approaches, it appears that the 30 Years' War in American politics is over and the spirit of the '60s has won--not the radical '60s, now broadly condemned by the right, but the liberal early '60s. The belated triumph of the tradition of '60s liberalism is one of the remarkable political … more

Everett Carll Ladd, a political scientist, once remarked, "Social analysis and commentary has many shortcomings, but few of its chapters are as persistently wrong-headed as those on the generations and generational change. This literature abounds with hyperbole and unsubstantiated leaps from available data." Many of the media's grand pronouncements about America's post-Baby Boom generation -- alternatively called Generation X, Baby Busters, and twentysomethings -- would seem to illustrate this point.

The 1990s opened with a frenzy of negative stereotyping… more