Review: Perry Anderson, American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers

Though published as an issue of New Left Review, this 162 page essay is in effect a book and the book is in effect an extended - the word "magisterial" comes to mind - literature review. It's not a bad achievement for a man born in 1938. I couldn't sustain Anderson's level of engagement with many dozens of books - and I was only born in 1947.

It has typical Anderson features which used to irritate us when we were young radicals: so the section on actual US foreign policy is entitled "Imperium" and that on its theorists "Concilium". Latinisms, Frenchisms, Germanisms and even one Chinese-ism (page 140) appear throughout the essay - but only the last is glossed. I can see that one might want to show a certain internationalism or cosmoplitanism in the way one writes, but the italicised foreign phrases come across simply as the tics of a very literate man.

The United Kingdom is regarded by several of the US theorists Anderson quotes as a mere dependency. The boys from Eton and Oxford currently in notional power know what is expected of them and don't even have to be told. Anderson is the Other of Cameron and Osborne: like them the product of  Eton and Oxford, he is the lifelong critic of American power. At the outset, he was an outsider, identified by his long-term editorship of the London-based New Left Review. Now, and ironically, he is lodged at the University of California Los Angeles - not even a backwater university but a major institution of the Empire.

What is most interesting in Anderson's sober account of American imperialism is just how total American ambition is (or has been) and just how unashamed its theorists have been in conjuring strategies and tactics for truly global control. The military bases are world-wide - no other country has a fraction of what America has - and there is no part of the world where America thinks its intervention is off-limits. Anderson is particularly good in engaging in a quiet and balanced way with US strategists who could easily be written off as megalomaniacs or totalitarians.

For the USA and even under Obama, all forms of intervention are always on the table from cultural offensives (funded in the past by the CIA) through economic presssures (sanctions against Iraq, Iran and still - vindictively - Cuba) through modest military intervention to topple unco-operative leaders (too numerous to list and even to remember) to all out carpet bombing of people who won't obey (Vietnam).

The rise of China has given US strategic thinkers a great deal to think about and I found particularly interesting Anderson's careful sorting of writers - those who don't want to yield an inch of American supremacy, those who want to "contain" China, those who want to engage, those who want to share the Empire - OK, you take South East Asia.

I had no difficulty working through this valuable survey, not least because I felt that I was being made familiar with the thinking of dozens of theorists who I would not read at first-hand. 

Review: Katie Roiphe, In Praise of Messy Lives

I picked up this book because of its interesting title and because instead of the usual head and shoulders author photograph, there's a three-quarter length of a very attractive woman pressed into the corner of a sofa and displaying what used to be called rather a lot of thigh. It's a challenge - Do you have what it takes to sit down and hold a conversation with me? Well, perhaps not -  buying the book felt like a compromise.

The thirty essays which comprise it - only one previously unpublished - are the work of someone who is, I suppose, a New York Critic. They include essays on parenting, on being a single parent, on childhood, on women writers, on All-American male writers, on contemporary feminism, on the Internet and on sex and power - the final essay is a study of one professional Dominatrix.

The essays are short, lucid and well-crafted. They are meant to be provocative though the provocation is directed at a rather restricted group - not so much the New York chattering classes as a whole but New York chatterers who have two kids and eat wholefood and are a bit to the Right of Katie Roiphe who is an anti-parenting parent rather in the same way that she is an anti-feminist feminist.

On children and parenting, I think she is broadly correct. Children are born into worlds not of their choosing and have their work cut out to make sense of them and to make their way in them. They need their parents to engage with them and to support them - but not to be on their backs all the time. Children deserve to be left alone, left to their own devices. There is nothing more delightful than to observe a young child absorbed in an activity which may seem quite pointless to the adult and yet which clearly is very important to the child. Nothing worse than for an over-active parent (or teacher) to distract the child away from what they find absorbing towards something more "educational". Schooling does a terrible thing when it devotes itself to destroying children's attention span, constantly moving them from one worthy activity to the next. You can see where surfing the Internet comes from.

One essay, Profiles Encouraged - a critique of celebrity profiles in gossipy magazines and not-so gossipy newspapers - reminded me of early Roland Barthes,taking a cultural institution and demystifying it, pulling it apart between what it does and what it says it does. 

Other essays express frustration with other people's ridiculousness or evasiveness: if there is a Leitmotif it is expressed at the end of an essay on Mad Men:

we are bequeathed on earth one very short life, and it might be good, one of these days, to make sure that we are living it (p 152)

I raised an eyebrow in a few places, notably when the author assumes a level of ignorance in her readers which seems out of place. Thus, in the final essay, "We are talking about Story of O, a famous French novel from the fifties about sadomasochism" (page 257) and again, "Venus in Furs, written in 1870 by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch" (page 259). These turns of phrase either imply that New York is not so much a cosmopolitan city as a  bit of a Sunday School or that the habit of writing for the Internet (which Katie Roiphe does) leads all of us to avoid easy cultural assumptions since our audience could be anywhere. I know that whenever I look at my Google dashboard, I make a mental note that half the time I am not being read in the countries where I assume I would be read.

Looking at that Dashboard I can see that I have published over 800 Blog posts on my three on-going Blogs. On top of that, there's a website with sixty plus essays from my past. Sometimes I imagine putting together a book of my own very much like Katie Roiphe's - thirty selected essays, the lines on the page widely-spaced (thirty to the page in this book), so that it feels easy to read. Curiously, I imagine this at the same time as thinking that my Blogs probably have more page views than a book would have readers. Ah, yes, but the book would have more Reviewers. Indeed, you might say that the secret ingredient of Katie Roiphe's book is that it lends itself to being reviewed.

Review: Anthony King and Ivor Crewe The Blunders of Our Governments

Any reader of the London-based satirical magazine Private Eye will be familiar with the substance of this book, despite the contrary claim of its authors (page ix). The book is a chronicle of British government incompetence over three decades - 1980 - 2010 - a period in which both Conservative and Labour parties were alternately in power. Both parties have major cock-ups to their debit accounts: the Poll Tax and the Child Support Agency (Conservative); the Private Finance Initiative for the London Underground and the National Health Service IT scheme (Labour). There are many others. All of them were chronicled, sometimes in depth, by Private Eye as they were on-going.

King and Crewe are less than generous towards Private Eye; they mention it once in the 415 page body of the book (page 199). But then the British Establishment is ambivalent about Private Eye and King and Crewe are paid-up (more accurately, paid for) members of the Establishment: they are senior academics, salaried from public funds and researching with support from public funds. Private Eye is a must-read for the Establishment but, like a pornographic magazine, it must not be seen to be read.

Despite the handicap of their Establishment status, King and Crewe do a very readable job chronicling failures of government policy, all of which cost the taxpayer money and many of which directly harmed vulnerable individuals (including people the policies were supposed to benefit). The chronicle occupies the first couple of hundred pages of the book. They do not even touch upon defence procurement or military operations, both disaster zones, confining themselves to civilian policy areas.

They preface the Chronicle with a disclaimer - something which is in their own terminology surely counts as a Prejudice. They say they are not trying to establish a "British outpost of the American Tea Party movement" (page xi). But why not? If governments repeatedly squander vasts sums of taxpayers' money, as King and Crewe claim that they do, fail to learn from their mistakes and blindly go on expensively proving themselves incapable of delivering the policies they promise to deliver, then it is surely a reasonable position to suggest that one solution is to give them less money to play with. Why encourage fecklessness?

King and Crewe consider such questions closed. It is not part of the way their group thinks. Instead, they devote a full dozen chapters to classifying and analysing why, where and how British governments go wrong and end up with expensive policy failures. These chapters are insightful, but King and Crewe are unable to identify any drivers of change which might push voters or politicians into changing a not-fit-for-purpose system. In contrast, it is quite clear that there are numerous stakeholders in a dysfunctional, sub-optimal system - for example, private companies who can rip off the state and politicians who know that they will be rewarded regardless of how may failures they achieve. John Prescott (to take an individual who they criticise by name) now sits in the House of Lords, despite having no identifiable achievement to his credit, and he is not alone: many of the individuals they have interviewed in the course of their research now have their knighthoods and peerages (page 450) regardless of whether or not in their careers they made a hash of things.

Some of their suggested changes could no doubt be acted upon by a reforming administration, but it is hard to imagine that increased accountability would be one of those changes. The only form of accountability which seems to work is the very, very crude electoral one. King and Crewe name and shame Gordon Brown repeatedly, and they characterise him in ways which ensure that you think he would have made a terrific 1950s American politician in the paranoid mode of that period. But it took the voters to get rid of him - and even then, and apparently without embarassment, the Labour Party invited him as the keynote speaker at the subsequent Party conference and gave him a standing ovation. Small wonder that some of us no longer vote.

Review: Allan Ahlberg, The Bucket

That's a nice Book. I'll have that.

Review: Victor Cha, The Impossible State: North Korea Past and Future

You need to get past two things in order to read this long (529 page) book.

First, the publishers don't employ a copy editor. As a result, the author is allowed to get away with cut and paste from texts written at different periods, producing most obviously paragraphs in which Kim Jong-Il is alive immediately followed by paragraphs in which he is dead. This runs right through the book and is jarring.

Second, the author was an adviser to the George W Bush White House, a fact of which he makes much use: there are eight sides of photos, two of which show images of the author with George W. Perhaps this just illustrates that very few interesting photos of North Korea exist, but I am not convinced.

There is much of interest scattered through a rather repetitive text and there is an overarching claim that, sooner or later (the author thinks sooner), North Korea will implode. That it hasn't already is due to the fact that it has been propped up since the Soviet Union and the successor Russian Federation pulled the plug on it in the 1990s. And so long as it is propped up, it won't implode.

So the question is this, Why has it been propped up? Cha identifies all the actors who have a stake in seeing the very unpleasant Kim family regime stumble on from year to year. And in effect he tells you what their stakes are.

Both South Korea and China dread a flood of starving (and emotionally disturbed) refugees coming across their borders. So they provide massive food aid to help keep people where they are - at the same time, disguising the inability of the regime to feed its population - an inability which has lasted now for twenty years.

China has additionally established an exploitative economic relationship with the North, extracting primary commodities (minerals) to supply some of its own insatiable needs. Often enough, it now treats North Korea like one of its own poor North Eastern provinces.

Russia has very small-scale aspirations to do the same thing, though using North Korea as a host for oil and gas pipelines and seaports. Russia's 12 mile border with North Korea could be made to work to Russia's benefit.

The other stakeholders, Japan and the USA, have ruled out military action to topple the regime and / or to denuclearize the country. Instead, they engage in interminable talks, where carrot and stick are used to try to contain the worst that North Korea can do. So far it hasn't nuked anyone, but it's the nukes which ensure that it is the subejct of repeated charm offensives - all of them chronicled in this book and some of them costing a great deal in terms of aid given.

So just as many small wars continue indefinitely because so many groups have a stake in their continuation, so North Korea has achieved the perverse position of being unwanted, unloved and bottom of every international ranking - and at the same time kept going by the actions of its regional neighbours and the USA.

Review: Edward Luce, Time to Start Thinking. America and the Spectre of Decline

My UK edition of this book does not have Library of Congress Cataloguing In classifications, but I guess they are "1 America 2 Doomed". There are already quite a lot of books on that shelf, and many of the claims advanced in this book are familiar. However, the claims are often expressed directly by American movers and shakers who Luce (a Financial Times journalist) has interviewed, and this makes the book both readable and credible.

The principal claims are quite straightforward. America will lose its position as unchallenged super power in the very near future (by 2020). It has lost its industrial base and with it both its skilled labour force and the purchasing power skilled workers deployed. Its population is increasingly polarised into those who are getting by on debt  and those who are getting richer all the time. It does not get value for its tax money: notably, its state and federal governments fail to deliver adequate public education or public health care. Its society is broken with a prison system of Gulag proportions and cruelty. (For other social indicators of decline, see Luce page 280). Its constitution effectively gives veto powers to organised special interest minorities, making reform almost impossible. Its citizenry is appallingly ignorant: we already knew that they could not locate Afghanistan or Iraq on maps of the world; Luce throws in that nearly half of them believe that the sun orbits the earth. For many questions, Americans would know more if they picked their beliefs by tossing coins. Only in relation to sport and guns can we be sure they know what they are talking about.

"America's ignorance about the outside world is so great as to constitute a threat to national security" said a report by the Strategic Task Force on Education in 2003 (quoted by Luce page 184). It's also a threat to the rest of the world. Ignorance is a Weapon of Mass Destruction. 

We impose sanctions on countries to clean up their acts and we routinely impose reforms on countries as conditions of financial bail outs. Maybe someone should suggest to China that they make it a condition of continued funding of America's deficits that the US embarks on a sustained program of citizen education. 

Luce does not propose remedies though he hesitates to endorse the real reason: there are none. America is doomed. We just have to hope that it does not take the rest of us down with it (and here only China can help us). And that is what is different about America. Luce could write a very similar book about the UK,especially as it now tumbles down the Conservative path of "learning" from America. But though the UK is doomed, fortunately it does not have the capacity to take anyone down with it.

Review: David Caute, Isaac and Isaiah

I had my doubts about buying this book. I thought it might be parochial. In the event, the plot structure is clever. David Caute re-creates for us what academic and intellectual life in the US and UK was often like at the height of the Cold War, when Western governments and intelligence agencies channelled funds in friendly directions (Encounter magazine and such like) and Moscow could still rely on loyal support from a small number of able academics and writers, people who had formed their allegiances in the thirties and firmed them up in the War. It was a period when a great deal of the scribbling and teaching done in universities, and often enough broadcast on the radio, was of a more obviously "political"  than "academic" character, and that was true whether it was "Right" or "Left".

Caute works by focussing on the lives and careers of Isaiah Berlin (1909 - 1997) - wealthy, well-connected Oxford professor and Jewish emigré - and Isaac Deutscher (1907 - 1967) - prolific journalist,Marxist biographer of Stalin and Trotsky and Jewish emigré. And he particularises it still further to the animosity Berlin felt towards Deutscher, culminating in 1963 when  Berlin blackballed him from an academic appointment at the new University of Sussex - the subject of Caute's closing chapter 22. (At some point around 1969 - 70, I researched that story but I don't now know in what context and all I can recall is a visit to the North London home of Isaac Deutscher's widow,Tamara, and - though I can't put a picture to it - a candid conversation with Isaiah Berlin [ see Footnote] - who I did for sure once meet in his rooms at All Souls).

The book makes depressing reading for anyone who is a recluse. It is about people who did networking on a far grander scale than anyone (Tony Blair excepted) today. People whose address books bulged with contacts, world-wide, and whose correspondence stacked up into archives. In Berlin's case, they inhabited colleges which were the Oxford branches of London's gentlemen's clubs (or vice versa). In both cases, they had access to publications - like the Times Literary Supplement - which published your work anonymously, allowing you to puff up your chums and poop on your enemies. Caute provides numerous examples. No one seems to have heard of the idea of "declaration of interest". (As when I state before continuing: Berlin once in 1967 gave me and a friend a cheque for fifty quid to start a student magazine and told us to spend it on champagne if the idea didn't get off the ground - unfortunately, it did).

Caute's book ends abruptly, without any attempt to sum up. He provides much information which allows us to draw our own conclusions - Berlin comes across as a timid person who habitually trimmed his opinions to the person he was writing or speaking to, no matter if the result was support for opposites. More importantly, Caute does not really assess the work Berlin and Deutscher produced. Is there anything in it which is of enduring value, which stands the test of time?

I can't answer this question in relation to Deutscher for the simple reason that I don't think I have ever read more than a line of his work. I have never read the Biographies of Stalin and Trotsky, because at  the time (1960s - 1970s) I didn't read biographies (and I never met Deutscher so never had to mug up).

I do now read biographies but ones which have been able to access the Archives opened since the fall of the Soviet Union - Sebag-Montefiore on Stalin, for instance.

In relation to Berlin, I guess I  read quite a lot and as a university teacher I assigned the obvious ones, like Two Concepts of Liberty, as reading for student essays. But if you asked me now for a short judgement, I'd probably have to say that they belong as much to the higher journalism, to belles lettres, as to any obviously "academic" study. Perhaps no worse for that. (And as an undergraduate at Oxford, I was one of those who regarded Berlin's lectures in the Examination Schools as a high point of the week).

The remarkable thing about Caute's fairly detailed narrative is that though it chronicles a very recent cultural history - only finally terminated by the collapse of the Soviet Union - it reads like a story of things that happened a long time ago and in another country. I am sure Oxford colleges haven't changed very much, nor the London literary world (even if the Times Literary Supplement no longer gives anonymity to its reviewers). But still ... Only right at the end of this book, when Caute sketches Berlin's distaste for Hannah Arendt, did I feel I was reading something fresh and interesting - and those were the quotations from Arendt which Caute provides.

Footnote

When I first saw the sub-title of the book, "The Covert Punishment of a Cold War Heretic", I knew it would deal with the "Sussex Affair". I remembered that I had visited Tamara Deutscher and I was also sure (before opening the book) that Berlin had once told me that, yes, he had advised Sussex against appointing Deutscher - explaining that he was a member of an External Committee appointed to mentor (to use a word we would use now) the new University of Sussex. But I cannot recall any meeting with Berlin other than the non-adversarial meeting in 1967. It may be that I raised the Deutscher question then, even though it only got in to the public domain in early 1969 when Black Dwarf edited by Tariq Ali used the story. However, Caute does quote a 1969 letter from Berlin in which he says that prior to the Black Dwarf article, "I knew that there was some rumour among the students ...that I had somehow vetoed Deutscher, but this is perfectly false" ( p 283). So it's possible that I had heard the story in 1967 and asked Berlin about it then, in a context where he was not on the defensive - Phillip Hodson and I were in his rooms asking for his support and money for our magazine!