Richard Haass is a prolific author on international affairs, served as a foreign-policy official in the Reagan and both Bush administrations, and is now president of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is, in short, a high-ranking member of American foreign policy’s clerisy. As if to emphasize the point, he relates that the inspiration for his book “The World: A Brief Introduction” began with a day of fishing in Nantucket, where he spoke with a student from Stanford who confessed that he had taken few courses in economics, politics or history. Otherwise educated young people today, Mr. Haass concludes, “are essentially uninformed about the world they are entering.” He hopes to change this state of affairs with “The World.”
What Mr. Haass has written, alas, is a series of dry primers about the world’s regions and their problems. The book is rife with soporific statements with which it would be difficult to disagree: “Economic problems within Europe have been ever more significant. As a result, the Continent has had low rates of growth.” The assumption seems to be that the young have disengaged from the world because they lack access to information. But engagement has fallen even as the internet has made access to information effortless.
Mr. Haass is among the most respected foreign-policy experts in the world and is fully capable of proposing bold ideas that would put American strategy on a more sustainable path. That “The World” offers mostly uncontroversial data points rather than fresh analysis helps to explain why two (and in some respects three) consecutive U.S. administrations have often rejected the dominant views of foreign-policy experts.
The useful parts of the book mostly come in the opening section, which briskly relays the “essential history” of international affairs. The Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 established the nation-state as the basic political unit in Europe. Webs of alliances and the rise of nationalism set the stage for World War I—and trade ties were not enough to prevent it. This context is important because contemporary debates about international relations often proceed as if history started with World War II.
After this crash course, the reader expects a survey of the contemporary world with some sort of vision to bind it together. Instead the primers on different regions often resemble U.N. bureaucracy memos. We learn, for example, that “for most African countries, their biggest challenge has been establishing good governance” and that Latin American countries need to “promote civil society and thereby make their democracies more robust.” If Mr. Haass’s “narrative flair . . . sparkle[s] on every page,” as Doris Kearns Goodwin writes in a blurb for the book, I did not notice.
The World
By Richard Haass
Penguin Press, 400 pages, $28
Mr. Haass seems determined to avoid staking out a definitive position on key issues. Consider the section on East Asia and the Pacific. China is America’s chief great-power rival, and competition has intensified sharply in recent years. Mr. Haass notes that “Asia is where this era’s major powers come into regular, direct contact with one another.” He describes the U.S.-China relationship as entering its “fourth phase”: early Cold War hostility; the thaw under Nixon; economic partnership after 1991; and now renewed rivalry. What will this rivalry look like and how should Americans approach it? One view holds that the U.S. should cede to China a sphere of influence in the Western Pacific lest it be drawn into a repeat of its 1940s war with Japan. Another holds that the U.S. should treat China the way it did the Soviet Union and try to contain its geopolitical reach.
Mr. Haass’s conclusion? “The direction of the U.S.-China relationship will be critical for the region’s future.” Stability in Asia is “possible, but it is by no means assured.” Ah.
Then again, perhaps the 21st century won’t be shaped primarily by competition between its most powerful countries. Mr. Haass considers that the next era in world politics may be defined instead by global-governance issues like climate change, trade, economic development and the internet. A world defined by multilateral problem-solving has been the dream of foreign-policy experts for decades.
That hasn’t come to pass in part because mandarins and policy makers tend to cast “global” issues as questions of expert technocratic management rather than political choice. Mr. Haass writes of climate change, for example, that “the notion that responsible policy and economic growth are at odds is not backed by the evidence.” But the types of measures needed to meaningfully limit climate change, good or bad, would almost certainly impinge on economic growth, and voters know it.
Other pronouncements on global problems are similarly platitudinous. On trade: “The problem ahead is that the barriers to further progress are complex and addressing them will prove more difficult.” On global poverty: “Progress will require concerted effort on the part of governments, international agencies, foundations, businesses, and NGOs.” Diplomats and foreign-policy mavens often have to obfuscate and say as little as possible, but this isn’t the place to practice that dull art.
If Mr. Haass has a theme, it’s that the global system is increasingly fragile. He is right—and he was writing before China used the cover of a pandemic to further colonize the South China Sea and embark on lethal military provocations along the Indian border. Mr. Haass writes that “order is not the natural state of international affairs and does not just emerge or continue automatically.”
True, but I suspect the young elites Mr. Haass hopes to reach with this book won’t have much interest in sustaining a world order that sounds like an abstraction—a set of anodyne talking points and uninspiring good-governance projects. As chaotic and unprincipled as President Trump’s foreign policy has been, it has the benefit of cutting through certain types of empty jargon and unquestioned assumptions. Perhaps the question isn’t whether Americans can rally to prop up the existing world order—but whether the next generation of elites can manage the new one.
Mr. Willick is an editorial-page writer for the Journal.
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