A World in Disarray

October 3, 2016
This foreign policy overview from Haass (Foreign Policy Begins at Home), president of the Council on Foreign Relations, will draw notice, but little surprise, from policymakers and the international community. Haass maintains that the world that followed WWII has run its course; great-power rivalries are returning, and Europe is newly unstable. With Brexit, which starts Haass’s study, the globalism and limited national sovereignty he has long endorsed seem to be in decline. The first half of the book surveys the world of the early 21st century, which Haass regards as one where borders count for less. The second lays out a nebulous, glibly labeled “World Order 2.0,” followed by rapid-fire policy prescriptions. Haass lists many topics of topical interest, though a few paragraphs apiece on climate change, cyberspace, and other widely publicized concerns are not enough. Informed but derivative, Haass’s self-declared centrism tends toward platitudes; he even invokes Goldilocks as “the ultimate centrist.” He sidesteps rising nationalism and religious conflicts but is thoughtful about U.S. economic policies, warning convincingly of entitlement and debt burdens corroding the dollar. Haass’s sensible policy prescriptions will not disturb prevailing consensus in the international community, nor are they meant to. His volume adds up to well-crafted conventional wisdom from the foreign-policy establishment. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency.

October 15, 2016
A public policy insider mines the nuances of states' sovereignty and legitimacy in an increasingly unstable world.Divided into three parts, delineating something of a past, present, and future approach, this systematic work by Council on Foreign Relations president Haass (Foreign Policy Begins at Home: The Case for Putting America's House in Order, 2013, etc.) finds that the bland optimism maintained throughout the Cold War due to the grip of atomic deterrence has been unloosed by new structural and economic forces. For nations big or small, good or bad, these forces increasingly involve internal breakdowns requiring humanitarian intervention and occasionally lead to terrorism. In the first part, the author reaches back to the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) to show how the sovereignty of states was first acknowledged and respected; that order was "based on a balance of power involving independent states that do not interfere with one another's 'internal business.' " Subsequently, the Congress of Vienna helped to determine the sovereignty of states in the 19th century. While the world wars saw the breakdown of the Westphalian order--in the case of World War I, it was accidental and unintended, a "failure of deterrence and of diplomacy"--the era since 1945 has been transformational, with the former villains Germany and Japan now models of "regime change." Moving from the Cold War to the present sense of disorder, rife with regional disputes, Haass sees Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and the American response as the beginning of troubling new developments (although the author applauds U.S. activism). The push back against Iraq and other trouble spots, where internal brutality prompted international intervention on humanitarian grounds, drove the adoption of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine by the United Nations in 2005. The author concludes his knowledgeable but overlong narrative with some predictions for the future--e.g., "mounting debt will hasten the demise of the dollar as the world's reserve currency." A highly learned but sometimes-ponderous survey that will appeal to policy wonks. For most readers, a long-form essay would have sufficed.

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January 1, 2017

After reviewing the origins of the modern state system and the post-World War II world order, Republican foreign policy stalwart Haass (president, Council on Foreign Relations; Foreign Policy Begins at Home) lays out what foreign policies the United States should pursue. Haass describes how "disarray" has replaced the former Great Power World Order. In this environment of disorder, he analyzes how both nations and nonstate actors will continue to challenge the United States for the remainder of the 21st century. Most importantly, Haass contends, wide acceptance that nations have "sovereign obligations" must balance respect for sovereign rights. Nations have a responsibility to the rest of the world in their internal and external behavior because the world is so closely interconnected. In Haass's view, this duty applies to the United States, where the excessive national debt and political dysfunction, for example, so affects the rest of the world. Interestingly, Haass supports free trade, NATO, and immigration reform--concepts that have lost popular and political support in recent times. VERDICT This book will appeal to readers interested in contemporary U.S. foreign policy and the perspective of the main-line Republican foreign policy establishment. [See Prepub Alert, 8/1/16.]--Mark Jones, Mercantile Lib., Cincinnati

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