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Today’s unstable world, however, looks more like that of the 1910s or the 1930s, when social and economic unrest were widespread and multiple powerful players crowded the international scene, some bent on upending the existing order. Just as China is challenging the United States today, the rising powers of Germany, Japan, and the United States threatened the hegemonic power of the British Empire in the 1910s. Meanwhile, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to an economic downturn reminiscent of the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The history of the first half of the twentieth century demonstrates all too vividly that unchecked or unmoderated tensions can lead to extremism at home and conflict abroad. It also shows that at times of heightened tension, accidents can set off explosions like a spark in a powder keg, especially if countries in those moments of crisis lack wise and capable leadership.

If the administration that succeeds Trump’s wants to repair the damaged world and rebuild a stable international order, it ought to use history—not as a judge but as a wise adviser.

WARNING SIGNS

A knowledge of history offers insurance against sudden shocks. World wars and great depressions do not come out of the clear blue sky; they happen because previous restraints on bad behavior have weakened

In the nineteenth century, enough European powers—in particular the five great ones, Austria, France, Prussia, Russia, and the United Kingdom—came to believe that unprovoked aggression should not be tolerated, and Europe enjoyed more peace than at any other time in its troubled history until after 1945

Further hastening the breakdown of the international order is how states are increasingly resorting to confrontational politics, in substance as well as in style.

Their motives are as old as states themselves: ambition and greed, ideologies and emotions, or just fear of what the other side might be intending

Today, decades of “patriotic education” in China’s schools have fostered a highly nationalist younger generation that expects its government to assert itself in the world.

Public rhetoric matters, too, because it can create the anticipation of, even a longing for, confrontation and can stir up forces that leaders cannot control.

Defusing tensions is possible, but it requires leadership aided by patient diplomacy, confidence building, and compromise.

Lately, however, some historians have begun to see that interwar decade in a different light—as a time of real progress toward a strong international order.

Unfortunately, compromise does not always play well to domestic audiences or elites who see their honor and status tied up with that of their country. But capable leaders can overcome those obstacles. Kennedy and Khrushchev overruled their militaries, which were urging war on them; they chose, at considerable risk, to work with each other, thus sparing the world a nuclear war.

Trump, too, has left a highly personal mark on global politics. In the long debate among historians and international relations experts over which matters most—great impersonal forces or specific leaders—his presidency surely adds weight to the latter.

His character traits, life experiences, and ambitions, combined with the considerable power the president can exert over foreign policy, have shaped much of U.S. foreign policy over the last nearly four years, just as Putin’s memories of the humiliation and disappearance of the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War have fed his determination to make Russia count again on the world stage. It still matters that both men happen to lead large and powerful countries.

When Germany fell into the clutches of Adolf Hitler, in contrast, he was able to start a world war.

THE NOT-SO-GOLDEN AGE

In relatively stable times, the world can endure problematic leaders without lasting damage. It is when a number of disruptive factors come together that those wielding power can bring on the perfect storm

By 1914, confrontation had become the preferred option for all the players, with the exception of the United Kingdom, which still hoped to prevent or at least stay out of a general European war.

Although they might not have realized it, many Europeans were psychologically prepared for war. An exaggerated respect for their own militaries and the widespread influence of social Darwinism encouraged a belief that war was a noble and necessary part of a nation’s struggle for survival. 

The only chance of preventing a local conflict from becoming a continent-wide conflagration lay with the civilian leaders who would ultimately decide whether or not to sign the mobilization orders. But those nominally in charge were unfit to bear that responsibility.

In the last days of peace, in July and early August 1914, the task of keeping Europe out of conflict weighed increasingly on a few men, above all Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, and Emperor Franz Josef of Austria-Hungary. Each proved unable to withstand the pressure from those who urged war.

THE MISUNDERSTOOD DECADE

With the benefit of hindsight, historians have often considered the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 to be a failure and the 1920s a mere prelude to the inevitable rise of the dictators and the descent into World War II.

Preparing for conflict—or even appearing to do so—pushes the other side toward a confrontational stance of its own. Scenarios sketched out as possibilities in more peaceful times become probabilities, and leaders find that their freedom to maneuver is shrinking.

The establishment in 1920 of his brainchild, the League of Nations, was a significant step, even without U.S. membership: it created an international body to provide collective security for its members and with the power to use sanctions, even including war, against aggressors

Overall, the 1920s were a time of cooperation, not confrontation, in international relations. For the most part, the leaders of the major powers, the Soviet Union excepted, supported a peaceful international order.

The promise of the 1920s was cut short by the Great Depression.

Citizens lost faith in the ability of their leaders to cope with the crisis. What was more ominous, they often lost faith in capitalism and democracy. The result was the growth of extremist parties on both the right and the left.

The catastrophe that followed showed yet again how important the individual can be in the wielding of power. Hitler had clear goals—to break what he called “the chains” of the Treaty of Versailles and make Germany and “the Aryan race” dominant in Europe, if not the world—and he was determined to achieve them at whatever cost.

The military, delighted by the increases in defense spending and beguiled by Hitler’s promises of glory and territorial expansion, tamely went along. In Italy, Mussolini, who had long dreamed of a second Roman Empire, abandoned his earlier caution. On the other side of the world, Japan’s new rulers were also thinking in terms of national glory and building a Greater Japan through conquest.

Preoccupied with their own problems, the leaders of the remaining democracies were slow to realize the developing threat to world order and slow to take action

This time, war was the result not of reckless brinkmanship or weak governments but of powerful leaders deliberately seeking confrontation. Those who might have opposed them, such as the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, chose instead to appease them in the hope that war could be avoided. By failing to act in the face of repeated violations of treaties and international law, the leaders of the democracies allowed the international order to break.

OMINOUS ECHOES

Led by Roosevelt, statesmen in the Allied countries were determined to learn from this mistake. Even as the war raged, they enunciated the principles and planned the institutions for a new and better world order.

Three-quarters of a century later, however, that order is looking dangerously creaky. The COVID-19 pandemic has damaged the world’s economy and set back international cooperation.

Tensions are building up as they did before the two world wars, with intensifying great-power rivalries and with regional conflicts, such as the recent skirmishes between China and India, that threaten to draw in other players.

Meanwhile, the pandemic will shake publics’ faith in their countries’ institutions, just as the Great Depression did.

Norms that once seemed inviolable, including those against aggression and conquest, have been breached. Russia seized Crimea by force in 2014, and the Trump administration last year gave the United States’ blessing to Israel’s de facto annexation of the Golan Heights and may well recognize the threatened annexation of large parts of the West Bank that Israel conquered in 1967.

Will others follow the example set by Russia and Israel, as happened in the 1910s and the 1930s?

Russia continues to meddle wherever it can, and Putin dreams of destroying the EU

U.S.-Chinese relations are increasingly adversarial, with continued spats over trade, advanced technology, and strategic influence, and both sides are developing scenarios for a possible war. The two countries’ rhetoric has grown more bellicose, too. China’s “Wolf Warrior” diplomats, so named by Chinese officials after a popular movie series, excoriate those who dare to criticize or oppose Beijing, and American officials respond in kind.

How the world copes will depend on the strength of its institutions and, at crucial moments, on leadership. Weak and indecisive leaders may allow bad situations to get worse, as they did in 1914. Determined and ruthless ones can create wars, as they did in 1939. Wise and brave ones may guide the world through the storms. Let us hope the last group has read some history.

it is beautifully written and a magnificent read, whether or not one follows the author all the way to his final destination in this journey of the pilgrim soul in the capitalist wilderness.

McCarraher challenges more than 200 years of post-Enlightenment assumptions about the way we live and work. He rails against “the ensemble of falsehoods that comprise the foundation of economics”, which offer “a specious portrayal of human beings and a fictional account of their history”.

Homo economicus, driven by instrumental self-interest and controlled by the power of money, is condemned as a shabby and degrading construct that betrays the truth of human experience.

After capitalism has delivered what the author describes as “two centuries of Promethean technics and its irreparable ecological impact” there must be a return to an earlier, gentler, more sacramental vision of the world; one that has a greater sense of natural limits and a restored sense of wonder at creation.

McCarraher embarks on a kind of genealogy of neoliberal morals, barrelling his way through the tracts, studies, theories and literature that have constituted the “symbolic universe” of capitalism since the Renaissance.

From the English Puritans who made money for the greater glory of God, through the machine idolatry rampant in 1920s Fordism, to the cult of the ruthless entrepreneur

capitalism is best understood, he concludes, as a secular faith. It operates through myths and dogma, just as any religion does.

Modernity is not, as Max Weber maintained, the culmination of a process of intellectual “disenchantment”, in which societies lost their sense of the sacred and embraced the rational

Instead, a different enchantment took hold of our minds; the material culture of production and consumption. “Its moral and liturgical codes are contained in management theory and business journalism,” writes McCarraher. “Its iconography consists of advertising, marketing, public relations and product design.”

This brave new era produced a “predatory and misshapen love of the world

Spiritually diminished by the commodification of things and people, and the desire to consume, we have lost sight of what the Catholic poet Gerard Manley Hopkins described as the “dearest freshness deep down things”.

On Avarice. This work, says McCarraher, signalled a transition: the growth of commerce and banking was beginning to loosen the grip of biblical disdain for “filthy lucre”

the Florentine then makes an argument that is precociously modern, suggesting that without it, there would be “no temples, no colonnades, no palaces…”

The 17th-century Puritans are presented as a capitalist “avant garde”, driven by notions of a divine calling to turn common land into private property and then turn a profit on it

Milton mourns this sellout of the English revolution, using Paradise Lost to portray Mammon as a fallen angel, driven to blasphemous self-aggrandisement on eart

by the 20th century such satanic cunning is the new common sense in business circles

McCarraher leaves the poetry of Milton to move, via the Industrial Revolution, to the outlandish business utopias dreamed up in early 20th-century America

In February 1928, Vanity Fair caught the mood, praising Henry Ford as “a divine master-mind”

the epilogue of this mammoth portrait of the religious longings at the heart of secular materialism carries a bleak message: 20th-century fantasies of the world as one global business have been realised. Capital’s empire now extends to all corners of the world. Globalisation has built a “paradise of capital”

But Mammon is delivering an unsustainable future dominated by wage stagnation, tech-led unemployment, deepening inequality and environmental peril. As disaster looms, distraction is being sought in “a tranquillising repertoire of digital devices and myriad forms of entertainment” along with “the analgesic pleasures of consumption”.

“get back to the garden”. A new Romantic left is needed to reinhabit a sacramental imagination, which values people and things in themselves rather than as factors of production, and places collaboration over competition

recalling John Ruskin’s principle of “amazement”, which teaches that the gifts of nature should be admired and nurtured, rather than ravished and depleted

where pessimism might take hold, the author’s Christian faith gives him a trump card. For McCarraher, it is simply the case that “the Earth is a sacramental place, mediating the presence and power of God”

however obscured the truth is by a destructive lust for power and accumulation. It is simply a question of seeing things as they truly are.

Riding the waves of mutability has always been possible if the frame of mind in government and society is adequately supple and responsive. Reliance on ancient nostrums, and expectations that old solutions will remain good enough, are almost inevitably fatal.

Civilisations that become dependent on large, widespread and complex supply networks and reciprocal markets usually generate their own fragilities. If one part of such a network fails, the effects cascade in a series of chain reactions through all apparently powerful participants in the system

The end of the Bronze Age c.1200 BC, perhaps triggered by drought in Anatolia, may have precipitated one such domino collapse, as the Hittite empire, the Mycenaeans, the Mesopotamian states and Pharaonic Egypt all either fell apart or shrank to an unrecognisable impotence.

The stability and good weather of the 18th century had allowed Qing, Mughal, Bourbon and Hanoverian regimes all to thrive, but China and India, more settled and less anxiously aggressive than Europe, did not take off in the way that the Continent’s empires did.

In his hands, the triumph of the West, with the unconscionable horrors of the Atlantic slave trade at its heart, takes on the appearance of an alarming fusion of Faust and Midas. For centuries, Europeans felt they could do no wrong. They could use the world, its people and beauties. They could transform it as they wished, shifting its plants, animals and populations where they wanted, and there would be no consequences. Or at least, as in those two myths of the cult of ‘entitlement’ – a word Frankopan repeatedly uses of the transforming empires – the consequences were hidden from the perpetrators.

His story of destruction over the past two centuries is one of arrogant myopia which led in the 20th century to ‘a sequence of catastrophes unparalleled both in human history and in that of the natural world. The suffering of the past 100 years has been by far the greatest in recorded history in terms of its scale and its horror’.

The assumption that man must conquer nature was allied to the capital and industrialised capacity to bring it about. Humanity became its own climate. Its own actions created the world in which it lived

The value of this book is as an act of deep understanding, recognising not only scientifically but culturally and philosophically that we are epiphenomena – not dominators of the Earth but products of it

Bleakly and soberingly, Frankopan recognises from the long line of precedents that the prospects are for a world of war and suffering. The destructive changes are already ‘baked in’. Success does not breed success, he says, but more often than not ‘sows the seeds of ruin’.

it is easy to forget how much we have in common as people. I can’t think of any major nation after the United States with more of a Protestant work ethic and naturally capitalist population than China.

These days, it is extremely difficult for a visiting columnist to get anyone — a senior official or a Starbucks barista — to speak on the record. It was not that way a decade ago.

The Communist Party’s hold is also a product of all the hard work and savings of the Chinese people, which have enabled the party and the state to build world-class infrastructure and public goods that make life for China’s middle and lower classes steadily better.

Beijing and Shanghai, in particular, have become very livable cities, with the air pollution largely erased and lots of new, walkable green spaces.

some 900 cities and towns in China are now served by high-speed rail, which makes travel to even remote communities incredibly cheap, easy and comfortable

Just when trust has become more important than ever between the U.S. and China, it also has become scarcer than ever. Bad trend.

China’s stability is a product of both an increasingly pervasive police state and a government that has steadily raised standards of living. It’s a regime that takes both absolute control and relentless nation-building seriously.

For an American to fly from New York’s Kennedy Airport into Beijing Capital International Airport today is to fly from an overcrowded bus terminal to a Disney-like Tomorrowland.

China got an early jump on A.I. in two realms — facial recognition technology and health records — because there are virtually no privacy restrictions on the government’s ability to build huge data sets for machine learning algorithms to find patterns.

“ChatGPT is prompting some people to ask if the U.S. is rising again, like in the 1990s,”

“I understand your feeling: You have been in the first place for a century, and now China is rising, and we have the potential to become the first — and that is not easy for you,” Hu said to me. But “you should not try to stop China’s development. You can’t contain China in the end. We are quite smart. And very diligent. We work very hard. And we have 1.4 billion people.”

Before the Trump presidency, he added: “We never thought China-U.S. relations would ever become so bad. Now we gradually accept the situation, and most Chinese people think there is no hope for better relations. We think the relationship will be worse and worse and hope that war will not break out between our two countries.”

A lot of people hesitated when I asked. Indeed, many would answer with some version of “I’m not sure, I just know that it’s THEIR fault.”

t was repeated conversations like these that got me started asking American, Chinese and Taiwanese investors, analysts and officials a question that has been nagging at me for a while: What exactly are America and China fighting about?

the real answer is so much deeper and more complex than just the usual one-word response — “Taiwan” — or the usual three-word response — “autocracy versus democracy.”

Let me try to peel back the layers. The erosion in U.S.-China relations is a result of something old and obvious — a traditional great-power rivalry between an incumbent power (us) and a rising power (China) — but with lots of new twists

One of the twists, though, is that this standard-issue great-power rivalry is occurring between nations that have become as economically intertwined as the strands of a DNA molecule. As a result, neither China nor America has ever had a rival quite like the other.

in modern times, China, like America, has never had to deal with a true economic and military peer with which it was also totally intertwined through trade and investment.

Another new twist, and a reason it’s hard to define exactly what we’re fighting about, has a lot to do with how this elusive issue of trust and the absence of it have suddenly assumed much greater importance in international affairs.

This is a byproduct of our new technological ecosystem in which more and more devices and services that we both use and trade are driven by microchips and software, and connected through data centers in the cloud and high-speed internet

so many more things became “dual use.” That is, technologies that can easily be converted from civilian tools to military weapons, or vice versa.

no one country or company can own the whole supply chain. You need the best from everywhere, and that supply chain is so tightly intertwined that each company has to trust the others intimately.

when we install the ability to sense, digitize, connect, process, learn, share and act into more and more things — from your GPS-enabled phone to your car to your toaster to your favorite app — they all become dual use, either weapons or tools depending on who controls the software running them and who owns the data that they spin off.

As long as most of what China sold us was shallow goods, we did not care as much about its political system — doubly so because it seemed for a while as if China was slowly but steadily becoming more and more integrated with the world and slightly more open and transparent every year. So, it was both easy and convenient to set aside some of our worries about the dark sides of its political system.

when you want to sell us ‘deep goods’ — goods that are dual use and will go deep into our homes, bedrooms, industries, chatbots and urban infrastructure — we don’t have enough trust to buy them. So, we are going to ban Huawei and instead pay more to buy our 5G telecom systems from Scandinavian companies we do trust: Ericsson and Nokia.”

as we’ve seen in Ukraine, a smartphone can be used by Grandma to call the grandkids or to call a Ukrainian rocket-launching unit and give it the GPS coordinates of a Russian tank in her backyard.

So today, the country or countries that can make the fastest, most powerful and most energy efficient microchips can make the biggest A.I. computers and dominate in economics and military affairs.

As more and more products and services became digitized and electrified, the microchips that powered everything became the new oil. What crude oil was to powering 19th- and 20th-century economies, microchips are for powering 21st-century economies.

When you ask them what is the secret that enables TSMC to make 90 percent of the world’s most advanced logic chips — while China, which speaks the same language and shares the same recent cultural history, makes zero — their answer is simple: “trust.”

TSMC is a semiconductor foundry, meaning it takes the designs of the most advanced computer companies in the world — Apple, Qualcomm, Nvidia, AMD and others — and turns the designs into chips that perform different processing functions

TSMC makes two solemn oaths to its customers: TSMC will never compete against them by designing its own chips and it will never share the designs of one of its customers with another.

“Our business is to serve multiple competitive clients,” Kevin Zhang, senior vice president for business development at TSMC, explained to me. “We are committed not to compete with any of them, and internally our people who serve customer A will never leak their information to customer C.”

But by working with so many trusted partners, TSMC leverages the partners’ steadily more complex designs to make itself better — and the better it gets, the more advanced designs it can master for its customers. This not only requires incredibly tight collaboration between TSMC and its customers, but also between TSMC and its roughly 1,000 critical local and global suppliers.

As the physics of chip making gets more and more extreme, “the investment from customers is getting bigger and bigger, so they have to work with us more closely to make sure they harvest as much [computing power] as they can. They have to trust you.”

China also has a foundry, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, which is partly state-owned. But guess what? Because no global chip designers trust SMIC with their most advanced designs, it is at least a decade behind TSMC.

It’s for these reasons that the erosion in U.S.-China relations goes beyond our increasingly sharp disagreements over Taiwan. It is rooted in the fact that just when trust, and its absence, became much bigger factors in international affairs and commerce, China changed its trajectory. It made itself a less trusted partner right when the most important technology for the 21st century — semiconductors — required unprecedented degrees of trust to manufacture and more and more devices and services became deep and dual use.

when American trade officials said: “Hey, you need to live up to your W.T.O. commitments to restrict state-funding of industries,” China basically said: “Why should we live by your interpretation of the rules? We are now big enough to make our own interpretations. We’re too big; you’re too late.”

Combined with China’s failure to come clean on what it knew about the origins of Covid-19, its crackdown on democratic freedoms in Hong Kong and on the Uyghur Muslim minority in Xinjiang, its aggressive moves to lay claim to the South China Sea, its increasing saber rattling toward Taiwan, its cozying up to Vladimir Putin (despite his savaging of Ukraine), Xi’s moves toward making himself president for life, his kneecapping of China’s own tech entrepreneurs, his tighter restrictions on speech and the occasional abduction of a leading Chinese businessman — all of these added up to one very big thing: Whatever trust that China had built up with the West since the late 1970s evaporated at the exact moment in history when trust, and shared values, became more important than ever in a world of deep, dual-use products driven by software, connectivity and microchips.

it started to matter a lot more to Western nations generally and the United States in particular that this rising power — which we were now selling to or buying from all sorts of dual-use digital devices or apps — was authoritarian.

eijing, for its part, argues that as China became a stronger global competitor to America — in deep goods like Huawei 5G — the United States simply could not handle it and decided to use its control over advanced semiconductor manufacturing and other high-tech exports from America, as well as from our allies, to ensure China always remained in our rearview mirror

Beijing came up with a new strategy, called “dual circulation.” It said: We will use state-led investments to make everything we possibly can at home, to become independent of the world. And we will use our manufacturing prowess to make the world dependent on our exports.

Chinese officials also argue that a lot of American politicians — led by Trump but echoed by many in Congress — suddenly seemed to find it very convenient to put the blame for economic troubles in the U.S.’s middle class not on any educational deficiencies, or a poor work ethic, or automation or the 2008 looting by financial elites, and the crisis that followed, but on China’s exports to the United States.

As Beijing sees it, China not only became America’s go-to boogeyman, but in their frenzy to blame Beijing for everything, members of Congress started to more recklessly promote Taiwan’s independence.

Xi told President Biden at their summit in Bali in November, in essence: I will not be the president of China who loses Taiwan. If you force my hand, there will be war. You don’t understand how important this is to the Chinese people. You’re playing with fire.

at some level Chinese officials now understand that, as a result of their own aggressive actions in recent years on all the fronts I’ve listed, they have frightened both the world and their own innovators at precisely the wrong time.

I don’t buy the argument that we are destined for war. I believe that we are doomed to compete with each other, doomed to cooperate with each other and doomed to find some way to balance the two. Otherwise we are both going to have a very bad 21st century.

I have to say, though, Americans and Chinese remind me of Israelis and Palestinians in one respect: They are both expert at aggravating the other’s deepest insecurities.

China’s Communist Party is now convinced that America wants to bring it down, which some U.S. politicians are actually no longer shy about suggesting. So, Beijing is ready to crawl into bed with Putin, a war criminal, if that is what it takes to keep the Americans at bay.

Americans are now worried that Communist China, which got rich by taking advantage of a global market shaped by American rules, will use its newfound market power to unilaterally change those rules entirely to its advantage. So we’ve decided to focus our waning strength vis-à-vis Beijing on ensuring the Chinese will always be a decade behind us on microchips.

I don’t know what is sufficient to reverse these trends, but I think I know what is necessary.

If it is not the goal of U.S. foreign policy to topple the Communist regime in China, the United States needs to make that crystal clear, because I found a lot more people than ever before in Beijing think otherwise.

As for China, it can tell itself all it wants that it has not taken a U-turn in recent years. But no one is buying it. China will never realize its full potential — in a hyper-connected, digitized, deep, dual-use, semiconductor-powered world — unless it understands that establishing and maintaining trust is now the single most important competitive advantage any country or company can have. And Beijing is failing in that endeavor.

In his splendid biography of the great American statesman George Shultz, Philip Taubman quotes one of Shultz’s cardinal rules of diplomacy and life: “Trust is the coin of the realm.”

Japan's Meiji Restoration of 1868 and Turkey's Kemalist Reforms that followed the establishment of the republic in 1923 are both models of modernization adopted by lagging countries in the periphery of the West. Both ushered in new eras for their respective countries and both involved great risks, often implementing drastic measures and facing hostile opposition

"Humanity is in need of a great restoration; our region is in need of a great restoration, and right in the center of all this great restoration, our very nation is striving for its own great restoration within itself." One does not repeat with such fervor the "need to restore greatly" unless they are making a point about the distinction between restoration and reform

The Ottoman Empire had already tried, and failed at, something similar in 1839 with the Tanzimat Reorganization, so by the time Ataturk's Kemalist Reforms rolled around 50 years after the Meiji Restoration, modernity and tradition seemed irreconcilable: modernization could not occur without Westernization. Almost everything was brought in line with the West; clothing was Europeanized, the alphabet was Latinized, numerals were - rather ironically - Arabized, and women could now not only display their hair but also vote and pursue professional careers, just to name a few

Erdoğan doesn't seek a return to pre-revolutionary Turkey. His actions aren't those of an overzealous Ottoman romantic but rather of a Meiji restorer, re-appropriating the republican revolution by redefining its spirit and essence to one that blends Western innovation with local culture, tradition and historic bonds -- "Western technique, Ottoman spirit"

the fundamental divergence between the two paradigms was in their disagreement over the role of culture. Adopting the slogan "Western technique, Japanese spirit," the Meiji Restoration involved taking the technological, scientific, industrial and military advancements of the West but retaining Japanese values. Japanese culture needed not be sacrificed in adopting modern economic and military techniques and would in fact be the glue that kept a revolutionary society together.

synthesizing the best of the West and the best of the East in order to strengthen his hand.

If your country has spent the past nine decades claiming to be a copy of the West, then the West has no reason to see you as anything more than an inferior copy of itself.

Historically, boom times are the exception, not the norm.

Over the past two centuries, per capita incomes in all advanced economies, from Sweden to Japan, have grown at compound rates of around 1.5% to 2% a year

these distinctly non-euphoric averages mean that most of the time, over the long sweep of history, people’s incomes typically take about 40 years to double.

looking from one year to the next, the improvements in living standards that come from higher incomes are glacial. The data may show that life is getting better, but average families feel no reason to break out the champagne.

that is no longer good enough. Americans expect the economy to be buoyant, not boring. Yet this expectation is shaped not by prosaic economic realities but by a most unusual period in history: the quarter-century that began in the ashes of World War II, when the world economy performed better than at any time before or since.

The Golden Age was the first sustained period of economic growth in most countries since the 1920s. But it was built on far more than just pent-up demand and the stimulus of the postwar baby boom. Unprecedented productivity growth around the world made the Golden Age possible. In the 25 years that ended in 1973, the amount produced in an hour of work roughly doubled in the U.S. and Canada, tripled in Europe and quintupled in Japan.

Many factors played a role in this achievement.

The workforce everywhere became vastly more educated.

As millions of laborers shifted from tending sheep and hoeing potatoes to working in factories and construction sites, they could create far more economic value.

New motorways boosted productivity in the transportation sector by letting truck drivers cover longer distances with larger vehicles. Faster ground transportation made it practical, in turn, for farms and factories to expand to sell not just locally but regionally or nationally, abandoning craft methods in favor of machinery that could produce more goods at lower cost.

Six rounds of tariff reductions brought a massive increase in cross-border trade, putting even stronger competitive pressure on manufacturers to become more efficient.

Above all, technological innovation helped to create new products and offered better ways for workers to do their jobs.

The 1973 oil crisis meant more than just gasoline lines and lowered thermostats. It shocked the world economy.

But it wasn’t the price of gasoline that brought the long run of global prosperity to an end. It just diverted attention from a more fundamental problem: Productivity growth had slowed sharply.

The consequences of the productivity bust were severe. Full employment vanished. It would be 24 years before the U.S. unemployment rate would again reach the low levels of late 1973

and the infinitesimal unemployment rates in France, Germany and Japan would never be reached again. Through the rest of the 20th century, the jobless rate in 28 wealthy economies would average nearly 7%.

the world’s overall economic growth rate dropped from 4.9% a year from 1951 through 1973 to an average of just 3.1% for the balance of the century.

With economic planners and central bankers unable to steady their economies, voters turned sharply to the right

Conservative politicians such as Margaret Thatcher in the U.K., Ronald Reagan in the U.S. and Helmut Kohl in West Germany swept into power, promising that freer markets and smaller government would reverse the decline, spur productivity and restore rapid growth.

But these leaders’ policies—deregulation, privatization, lower tax rates, balanced budgets and rigid rules for monetary policy—proved no more successful at boosting productivity than the statist policies that had preceded them

Some insist that the conservative revolution stimulated an economic renaissance, but the facts say otherwise: Great Britain’s productivity grew far more slowly under Thatcher’s rule than during the miserable 1970s, and Reagan’s supply-side tax cuts brought no productivity improvement at all.

It is tempting to think that we know how to do better, that there is some secret sauce that governments can ladle out to make economies grow faster than the norm. But despite glib talk about “pro-growth” economic policies, productivity growth is something over which governments have very little control

That may not sound like much, but scientists say even the smallest increase causes the seawater to eat away more aggressively at the shoreline in calm weather, and leads to higher tidal surges during storms. The sea-level rise of decades past thus explains why coastal towns nearly everywhere are having to spend billions of dollars fighting erosion.

The evidence suggests that the sea-level rise has probably accelerated, to about a foot a century, and scientists think it will accelerate still more with the continued emission of large amounts of greenhouse gases into the air. The gases heat the planet and cause land ice to melt into the sea.

The official stance of the world’s climate scientists is that the global sea level could rise as much as three feet by the end of this century, if emissions continue at a rapid pace. But some scientific evidence supports even higher numbers, five feet and beyond in the worst case.

the land in this part of the world is sinking. And that goes back to the last ice age, which peaked some 20,000 years ago.

s a massive ice sheet, more than a mile thick, grew over what are now Canada and the northern reaches of the United States, the weight of it depressed the crust of the earth. Areas away from the ice sheet bulged upward in response, as though somebody had stepped on one edge of a balloon, causing the other side to pop up. Now that the ice sheet has melted, the ground that was directly beneath it is rising, and the peripheral bulge is falling.

Up and down the Eastern Seaboard, municipal planners want to know: How bad are things going to get, and how fast?

People considering whether to buy or rebuild at the storm-damaged Jersey Shore, for instance, could be looking at nearly a foot of sea-level rise by the time they would pay off a 30-year mortgage, according to the Rutgers projections. That would make coastal flooding and further property damage considerably more likely than in the past.

Even if the global sea level rises only eight more inches by 2050, a moderate forecast, the Rutgers group foresees relative increases of 14 inches at bedrock locations like the Battery, and 15 inches along the New Jersey coastal plain, where the sediments are compressing. By 2100, they calculate, a global ocean rise of 28 inches would produce increases of 36 inches at the Battery and 39 inches on the coastal plain.

Even the relatively favored areas had rainfall of just 20 to 40 centimeters (8 to 15 inches)—where 20 centimeters (8 inches) is regarded as the absolute minimum to sustain agriculture—and the national average was less than 10 centimeters (4 inches)

Considering only “agricultural Syria,” the population is about five times as dense as Ohio or Belgium, but it does not have Ohio’s or Belgium’s other means of generating income.

Syria is not just a piece of land; it is densely populated. When I first visited Syria in 1946, the total population was less than 3 million. In 2010, it reached nearly 24 million.

The bottom line is that the population/resource ratio is out of balance. While there has been a marginal increase of agricultural land and more efficient cropping with better seed, neither has kept up with population growth.

During Ottoman rule the population was organized in two overlapping ways. First, there was no “Syria” in the sense of a nation-state, but rather provinces (Turkish: pashaliqs) that were centered on the ancient cities. The most important of these were Damascus, which may be the oldest permanently settled city in the world today, and Aleppo.

throughout its centuries of rule, the Ottoman Empire generally was content to have its subjects live by their own codes of behavior. It did not have the means or the incentive to intrude into their daily lives. Muslims, whether Turk or Arab or Kurd, shared with the imperial government Islamic mores and law. Other ethnic/religious “nations” (Turkish: millet) were self-governing except in military and foreign affairs.

the same groups also moved into mainly Muslim cities and towns, where they tended to live in more or less segregated neighborhoods that resembled medieval European urban ghettos or modern American “Little Italys” or “Chinatowns.”

Since this system was spelled out in the Quran and the Traditions (Hadiths) of the Prophet, respecting it was legally obligatory for Muslims. Consequently, when the Syrian state took shape, it inherited a rich, diverse, and tolerant social tradition.

the French created a “Greater” Lebanon from the former autonomous adjunct provinces (Turkish: sanjaqs) of Mount Lebanon and Beirut. To make it their anchor in an otherwise hostile Levant, they aimed both to make it Christian-dominated and big enough to exist as a state. But these aims were incompatible: the populations they added, taken from the pashaliq of Damascus, were mainly Muslim, so the French doomed Lebanon to be a precariously unbalanced society.

the French reversed course. They united the country as defined in the mandate but attempted to change its social and cultural orientation. Their new policy aimed to supplant the common language, Arabic, with French, to make French customs and law the exemplar, to promote Catholicism as a means to undercut Islam, and to favor the minorities as a means to control the Muslim majority. It was inevitable that the native reaction to these intrusions would be first the rise of xenophobia and then the spread of what gradually became a European style of nationalism.

When French policies did not work and nationalism began to offer an alternate vision of political life, the French colonial administration fell back on violence. Indeed throughout the French period—in contrast to the relatively laissez-faire rule of the Ottoman Empire—violence was never far below the outward face of French rule.

the “peace” the French achieved was little more than a sullen and frustrated quiescence; while they did not create dissension among the religious and ethnic communities, the French certainly magnified it and while they did not create hostility to foreigners, they gave the native population a target that fostered the growth of nationalism. These developments have lingered throughout the last 70 years and remain powerful forces today.

in the years after the French were forced out, coup leader after military dictator spoke in nationalist rhetoric but failed to lead his followers toward “the good life.”

for three and a half years, Syria became a part of the United Arab Republic.

Union did not work, so in 1961 Syrians were thrown back on their own resources. A fundamental problem they faced was what it meant to be a Syrian.

The more conservative, affluent, and Westernized nationalists believed that nationhood had to be built not on a religious but on a territorial base. That is, single-state nationalism (Arabic: wataniyah) was the focus of Syria’s statehood.

Their program, however, did not lead to success; its failure opened the way for a redefinition of nationalism as pan-Arab or folk nationalism (Arabic: qawmiyah). As it was codified by the Baath Party, it required that Syria be considered not a separate nation-state but a part of the whole Arab world and be domestically organized as a unified, secular, and at least partly Westernized state. This was a particularly difficult task because the dominant Muslim community, initially as a result of French rule and later as a result of domestic turbulence and foreign interference, regarded the members of the minority communities, particularly the Jewish community, as actual or potential turncoats.

as Syrians struggled for a sense of identity and came to suspect social difference and to fear the cooperation of minorities with foreigners, being an Alawi or a Christian or a Jew put people under a cloud. So, for Hafez al-Assad, the secular, nationalist Baath Party was a natural choice

Their answer was to try to bridge the gaps between rich and poor through a modified version of socialism, and between Muslims and minorities through a modified concept of Islam. Islam, in their view, needed to be considered politically not as a religion but as a manifestation of the Arab nation. Thus, the society they wished to create, they proclaimed, should be modern (with, among other things, equality for women), secular (with faith relegated to personal affairs), and defined by a culture of “Arabism” overriding the traditional concepts of ethnicity.

The “Resurrection” (Arabic: Baath) Party had its origins, like the nationalist-communist Vietnamese movement, in France. Two young Syrians, one a Christian and the other a Sunni Muslim, who were then studying in Paris were both attracted to the grandeur of France and appalled by the weakness of Syria. Like Ho Chi Minh, they wanted to both become like France and get the French out of their nation. Both believed that the future lay in unity and socialism. For Michel Aflaq and Salah Bitar, the forces to be defeated were “French oppression, Syrian backwardness, a political class unable to measure up to the challenge of the times,”

After Assad’s assault in 1982, the Syrian city of Hama looked like the Iraqi city of Fallujah after the American assault in 2004. Acres of the city were submerged under piles of rubble. But then, like Stalingrad after the German attack or Berlin after the Russian siege, reconstruction began. In a remarkable series of moves, Hafez al-Assad ordered the rubble cleared away, built new highways, constructed new schools and hospitals, opened new parks, and even, in a wholly unexpected conciliatory gesture, erected two huge new mosques. He thus made evident what had been his philosophy of government since he first took power: help the Syrian people to live better provided only that they not challenge his rule. In his thought and actions, his stern and often-brutal monopoly of power, he may be compared to the ruling men, families, parties, and establishments of Chinese, Iranian, Russian, Saudi Arabian, Vietnamese, and numerous other regimes.

Hafez al-Assad did not need to wait for leaks of documents: his intelligence services and international journalists turned up dozens of attempts by conservative, oil-rich Arab countries, the United States, and Israel to subvert his government. Most engaged in “dirty tricks,” propaganda, or infusions of money, but it was noteworthy that in the 1982 Hama uprising, more than 15,000 foreign-supplied machine guns were captured, along with prisoners including Jordanian- and CIA-trained paramilitary forces (much like the jihadists who appear so much in media accounts of 2013 Syria). And what he saw in Syria was confirmed by what he learned about Western regime-changing elsewhere.

As Iraq “imploded” in coups beginning in 1958 and morphed into Saddam Husain’s regime, the Syrians came to regard it as an enemy second only to Israel.

During the rule of the two Assads, Syria made considerable progress. By the eve of the civil war, Syrians enjoyed an income (GDP) of about $5,000 per capita. That was nearly the same as Jordan’s, roughly double the income per capita of Pakistan and Yemen, and five times the income of Afghanistan, but it is only a third that of Lebanon, Turkey, or Iran

In 2010, savaged by the great drought, GDP per capita had fallen to about $2,900, according to UN data. Before the civil war—and except in 2008 at the bottom of the drought, when it was zero—Syria’s growth rate hovered around 2 percent,

In social affairs, nearly 90 percent of Syrian children attended primary or secondary schools and between eight and nine in 10 Syrians had achieved literacy. On these measures, Syria was comparable to Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Libya despite having far fewer resources to employ.

Like his father, Bashar sought to legitimize his regime through elections, but apparently he never intended, and certainly did not find, a way satisfactory (to the public) and acceptable (to his regime) of enlarged political participation.

The lack of political participation, fear of public demands, and severe police measures made the regime appear to be a tyranny

This and its hostility to Israel led to large-scale, if covert, attempts at regime change by outside powers including the United States. These acts of subversion became particularly pronounced during the second Bush administration.

between 2 and 3 million of Syria’s 10 million rural inhabitants were reduced to “extreme poverty.”  

Four years of devastating drought beginning in 2006 caused at least 800,000 farmers to lose their entire livelihood and about 200,000 simply abandoned their lands, according to the Center for Climate & Security. In some areas, all agriculture ceased. In others, crop failures reached 75 percent. And generally as much as 85 percent of livestock died of thirst or hunger. Hundreds of thousands of Syria’s farmers gave up, abandoned their farms, and fled to the cities and towns

Syria was already a refuge for a quarter of a million Palestinians and about 100,000 Iraqis who had fled the war and occupation. Formerly prosperous farmers were lucky to get jobs as hawkers or street sweepers. And in the desperation of the times, hostilities erupted among groups that were competing just to survive.

And so tens of thousands of frightened, angry, hungry, and impoverished former farmers were jammed into Syria’s towns and cities, where they constituted tinder ready to catch fire.

Instead of meeting with the protesters and at least hearing their complaints, the government saw them as subversives. The lesson of Hama must have been at the front of the mind of every member of the Assad regime. Failure to act decisively, Hama had shown, inevitably led to insurrection. Compromise could come only after order was assured. So Bashar followed the lead of his father. He ordered a crackdown. And the army, long frustrated by inaction and humiliated by its successive defeats in confrontation with Israel, responded violently. Its action backfired. Riots broke out all over the country. As they did, the government attempted to quell them with military force. It failed. So, during the next two years, what had begun as a food and water issue gradually turned into a political and religious cause.

we don’t know much about the rebels. Hundreds of groups and factions—called “brigades” even when they are just a dozen or so people—have been identified. Some observes believe that there are actually over 1,000 brigades. A reasonable guess is that, including both part-time and full-time insurgents, they number about 100,000 fighters.

In Syria, quite different causes of splits among the brigades are evident. To understand the insurgency there, we must look carefully at the causes. The basis is religion

During the course of the Assad regime, the interpretation of Islam was undergoing a profound change. This was true not only of Syria but also of understanding, practice, and action in many other areas of the world.

tens of thousands of young foreigners flocked to Syria to fight for what they see as a religious obligation (Arabic: fi sabili’llah).

in Syria, while many Muslims found the Assad regime acceptable and many even joined its senior ranks, others saw its Alawi and Christian affiliations, and even its secularism and openness to Muslim participation, insupportable.

The foreign jihadists, like the more recent nationalists, put their emphasis on a larger-than-Syria range. For them, it is a folk nationalism not only to the Arab world but also to the wider world of Islam, affecting a billion people across the globe. What they seek is a restored Islamic world, a Dar ul-Islam, or a new caliphate.

the aims of the two broad groups—the Syrians and the foreigners—have grown apart in a way similar to the split that occurred in Arab nationalism. The Syrians focus on Syria and seek the overthrow of the Assad regime much as their fathers and grandfathers focused on the task of getting the French out of their country—their watan. Their nationalism is single-country oriented

all the rebels regard the conflict in Syria as fundamentally a religious issue. Particularly for the native rebels, as I have pointed out, the religious issue is overlaid by ethnic complexities.

It would be a mistake to regard the Syrian war, as some outside observers have done, as a fight between the forces of freedom and tyranny. If the opponents of the regime are fighting for some form of democracy, they have yet to make their voices heard.

as in Afghanistan, they have fought one another over territory, access to arms, leadership, and division of spoils as bitterly as they have fought their proclaimed enemy. This fracturing has made them impossible to defeat—as the Russians experienced in Afghanistan—but also, so far at least, incapable of governing on a national scale. But they are moving in that direction.

All observers agree that the foreign-controlled and foreign-constituted insurgent groups are the most coherent, organized, and effective. This is little short of astonishing as they share no common language and come from a wide variety of cultures.

Paradoxically, governments that would have imprisoned the same activists in their own countries have poured money, arms, and other forms of aid into their coffers. The list is long and surprising in its makeup: it includes Turkey; the conservative Arab states, particularly Qatar and Saudi Arabia; the EU member states; and the U.S.

The United States has a long history of covertly aiding insurgents in Syria, and has engaged in propaganda, espionage, and various sorts of dirty tricks. The rebels, naturally, have regarded the aid they’ve received as insufficient, while the government has regarded it as a virtual act of war. Both are right: it has not been on a scale that has enabled the rebels to win, but it is a form of action that, had another country engaged in it, seeking to overthrow the government, any American or European administration would have regarded as an act of war under international law.

Such covert intervention, and indeed overt intervention, is being justified on two grounds, the first being that the Syrian government is a tyranny. By Western standards, it is undoubtedly an authoritarian regime

However, the standards Western nations proclaim have been applied in a highly selective way. The EU and the U.S. enjoy cordial and mutually beneficial relations with dozens of tyrannical governments including most of the countries now attempting to regime-change Syria.              

Senior rebels have publicly threatened to carry out a genocide of the country’s main ethnic/religious minority, the Alawis. Scenes being enacted in Syria today recall the massacres and tortures of the wars of religion in 16th- and 17th-century Europe.

Most urgent in the minds of the EU and the U.S. is the second justification for intervention: the Syrian government is charged with using illegal chemical weapons. This is a very serious charge. However, doubts remain about who actually used the weapons. And, more importantly, even though the weapons are indeed horrible and are now generally considered illegal, several other states (the U.S., Israel, Egypt, and Iraq) have used them. Terrible as they are, they are only a small part of the Syrian problem—more than 99 percent of the casualties and all of the property damage in the war have been the result of conventional weapons. Getting rid of chemical weapons will neither in and of itself stop the war nor create conditions favorable to a settlement.

the cost of the war has been immense. And, of course, it is not over. We have only guesses on the total so far. One estimate is that the war has cost Syria upwards of $150 billion. Whole cities now resemble Stalingrad or Berlin in World War II. More than 2 million people have fled abroad while more than 4 million are internal refugees, remaining in Syria.

Lebanon. Even though there is little fighting there, the conflict in Syria is estimated to have cost that little country about $7.5 billion and doubled unemployment to 20 percent. About 1 million Lebanese were already judged by the World Bank as “poor,” and an additional 170,000 are now thought to have been pushed into poverty. The Syrian refugee population in the country has reached at least 1 million, making Syrians now almost a third of the total Lebanese population.

In Jordan, the story is similar. Half a million refugees are camped out there. One refugee encampment in the country houses over 100,000 people and has become Jordan’s fifth-largest city

However reprehensible the Syrian government may be in terms of democracy, it has not only given refugees and minorities protection but also maintained the part of Syria that it controls as a secular and religiously ecumenical state.

Tragic as these numbers are—the worst for nearly a century—factored into them is that Syria has lost the most precious assets of poor countries: most of the doctors and other professionals who had been painstakingly and expensively educated during the last century

Even more “costly” are the psychological traumas: a whole generation of Syrians have been subjected to either or both the loss of their homes and their trust in fellow human beings. Others will eventually suffer from the memory of what they, themselves, have done during the fighting. Comparisons are trivial and probably meaningless, but what has been enacted—is being enacted—in Syria resembles the horror of the Japanese butchery of Nanjing in World War II and the massacres in the 1994 Hutu-Tutsi conflict in Rwanda.

How the victims and the perpetrators can be returned to a “normal life” will be the lingering but urgent question of coming generations in Syria and elsewhere.

one in four or five people in the world today are Muslim: roughly 1.4 billion men, women, and children. That whole portion of the world’s population has its eyes on Syria. What happens there is likely to have a ripple effect across Asia and Africa. Thus, even though it is a small and poor country, Syria is in a sense a focal point of world affairs.

Unlike the Iraq and Afghan wars, the Syrian conflict will also have a “blowback” effect on the countries from which the Muslim fundamentalist insurgents come. It is in recognition of this fact that Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to intervene in the Syrian war.

Even if fighting dies down, “lasting and bitter war,” like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—regardless of what American and European politicians say or even hope—will necessarily involve “boots on the ground.” That is, it will be fought with guerrilla and terrorist tactics on the rebel side against the now-typical counterinsurgency methods on the other side.

The extreme reader, to coin a phrase, is a rare bird indeed. ("I have done what people do, my life makes a reasonable showing," Lynne Sharon Schwartz writes. "Can I go back to my books now?") Such people are born, not made, I think; or mostly born and only a little made.

It is more common to come across the person who has known the joys of reading but who can be distracted from them. But even those folks are a small percentage of the population.

American universities are largely populated by people who don't fit either of these categories—often really smart people for whom the prospect of several hours attending to words on pages (pages of a single text) is not attractive.

Steven Pinker once said that "Children are wired for sound, but print is an optional accessory that must be painstakingly bolted on." The key here is "painstakingly": There can be many pains, in multiple senses of the word, for all parties involved, and it cannot be surprising that many of the recipients of the bolting aren't overly appreciative, and that even those who are appreciative don't find the procedure notably pleasant.

the printing press ushered in an age of information overload. In the 17th century, one French scholar cried out, "We have reason to fear that the multitude of books which grows every day in a prodigious fashion will make the following centuries fall into a state as barbarous as that of the centuries that followed the fall of the Roman Empire." Such will be our fate "unless we try to prevent this danger by separating those books which we must throw out or leave in oblivion from those which one should save and within the latter between what is useful and what is not."

Rarely has education been about teaching children, adolescents, or young adults how to read lengthy and complicated texts with sustained, deep, appreciative attention—at least, not since the invention of the printing press. When books were scarce, the situation was different:

Bacon tells such worried folks that they can't read them all, and so should develop strategies of discernment that enable them to make wise decisions about how to invest their time. I think Bacon would have applauded Clay Shirky's comment that we suffer not from "information overload" but from "filter failure."

especially noteworthy is Bacon's acknowledgment that there is a place for what Katherine Hayles would call "hyper attention" as well as "deep attention." Some books don't need to be read with patience and care; at times it's OK, even necessary, to skim (merely to "taste" rather than to ruminate). And as Shreeharsh Kelkar, a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has pointed out, "To be successful today, it not only becomes necessary to skim, but it becomes essential to skim well."

Except in those cultures in which books have been scarce, like Augustine's Roman North Africa, the aims of education have often focused, though rarely explicitly so, on the skills of skimming well. Peter Norvig says: "When the only information on the topic is a handful of essays or books, the best strategy is to read these works with total concentration. But when you have access to thousands of articles, blogs, videos, and people with expertise on the topic, a good strategy is to skim first to get an overview. Skimming and concentrating can and should coexist."

education, especially in its "liberal arts" embodiments, has been devoted to providing students with navigational tools—with enough knowledge to find their way through situations that they might confront later in life.

All this is to say that the idea that many teachers hold today, that one of the purposes of education is to teach students to love reading—or at least to appreciate and enjoy whole books—is largely alien to the history of education.

Rose's book is largely a celebration of autodidacticism, of people whose reading—and especially the reading of classic texts, from Homer to Dante to Shakespeare to the great Romantic poets—wasn't imposed on them by anyone, and who often had to overcome significant social obstacles in order to read. "The autodidacts' mission statement," Rose writes, was "to be more than passive consumers of literature, to be active thinkers and writers. Those who proclaimed that 'knowledge is power' meant that the only true education is self-education, and they often regarded the expansion of formal educational opportunities with suspicion."

Over the past 150 years, it has become increasingly difficult to extricate reading from academic expectations; but I believe that such extrication is necessary. Education is and should be primarily about intellectual navigation, about—I scruple not to say it—skimming well, and reading carefully for information in order to upload content. Slow and patient reading, by contrast, properly belongs to our leisure hours.

There is a kind of attentiveness proper to school, to purposeful learning of all kinds, but in general it is closer to "hyper attention" than to "deep attention." I would argue that even reading for information—reading textbooks and the like—does not require extended unbroken focus. It requires discipline but not raptness, I think: The crammer chains himself to the textbook because of time pressures, not because the book itself requires unbroken concentration. Given world enough and time, the harried student could read for a while, do something else, come back and refresh his memory, take another break ... but the reader of even the most intellectually demanding work of literary art would lose a great deal by following such tactics. No novel or play or long poem will offer its full rewards to someone who consumes it in small chunks and crumbs. The attention it demands is the deep kind.

for people like Erasmus (with his "cry of thankful joy" on spying a fragment of print) or Lynne Sharon Schwartz ("Can I get back to my books now?"), books are the natural and inevitable and permanent means of being absorbed in something other than the self.

But then there are the people Nicholas Carr writes about in The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, and Carr himself: people who know what it is like to be lost in a book, who value that experience, but who have misplaced it—who can't get back,

From the beginning, Byzantium manifested highly creative and original impulses to re-fashion rich, pre-existing traditions. Its inner Greek fire came from a unique combination of traits. When Constantine created his new capital, he brought together Roman administrative skills, law and military traditions; the Hellenic wisdom long sustained by ancient Greek education; and the dynamic new Christian belief (which later became the state's driving force).

The city quickly generated a highly sophisticated work force. Its artisans produced the Mediterranean world's most elegant silks, carved ivories and gold enamels. Its engineers constructed the immense walls that kept all enemies out of Constantinople until 1204. The recent excavations of the harbor of Theodosius (today Yenikapi) have yielded more than 30 boats and their cargoes and shown how the capital attracted traders and craftsmen from across the Mediterranean. Venice, Genoa and Pisa established quarters within the city, while Syrian and Russian merchants stayed in particular residences when they came to trade. In the 1090s, as the western forces of the First Crusade arrived at Constantinople, they were overcome with awe at the wealth and sophistication of the eastern capital, the like of which they had not even imagined. The city was larger than any in Western Europe, with a population of about 500,000— a level not attained by Paris until the 17th century.

The Byzantines knew that negotiating peace terms was infinitely preferable to risking the loss of highly trained and hard-to-replace fighting forces. By developing a trained service of diplomats—a typical embassy would comprise a general, a bishop and a high-ranking eunuch, accompanied by secretaries with records of past negotiations—the empire nurtured the skills we associate with a modern state.

Mr. Harris provides a sympathetic reading of the civil wars and conflicts engendered by the empire's fundamental problem in this era: how to balance Byzantine traditions with the need for military aid from the West in order to confront the Ottoman Turks.

Both Peter Heather's "Empires and Barbarians " (2009), although it only treats the first millennium A.D., and John Darwin's "After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400-2000 " (2007) consider Byzantium in such a comparative perspective.

it always had to balance the two very distant fronts with the immense lines of communication and logistical support extending from the Caucasus to the Adriatic.

The last phase of Byzantine power, from 1261 to 1453, was marked by military failure and shrinking control but also by a great cultural explosion.

historians established, half a century ago, how difficult Byzantium's position was between aggressive states east and west.

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The empire checked the first great wave of Muslim expansion in the 630s, and by 740 a more secure border with the caliphate in Damascus was established at the Taurus mountains in southeastern Turkey.

what about the United States? Before the 1914 war, the great economic potential of the U.S. was suppressed by its ineffective political system, dysfunctional financial system, and uniquely violent racial and labor conflicts. “America was a byword for urban graft, mismanagement and greed-fuelled politics, as much as for growth, production, and profit,”

as World War I entered its third year—and the first year of Tooze’s story—the balance of power was visibly tilting from Europe to America. The belligerents could no longer sustain the costs of offensive war. Cut off from world trade, Germany hunkered into a defensive siege, concentrating its attacks on weak enemies like Romania. The Western allies, and especially Britain, outfitted their forces by placing larger and larger war orders with the United States

His Republican opponents—men like Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Elihu Root—wished to see America take its place among the powers of the earth. They wanted a navy, an army, a central bank, and all the other instrumentalities of power possessed by Britain, France, and Germany. These political rivals are commonly derided as “isolationists” because they mistrusted the Wilson’s League of Nations project. That’s a big mistake. They doubted the League because they feared it would encroach on American sovereignty.

That staggering quantity of Allied purchases called forth something like a war mobilization in the United States. American factories switched from civilian to military production; American farmers planted food and fiber to feed and clothe the combatants of Europe

But unlike in 1940-41, the decision to commit so much to one side’s victory in a European war was not a political decision by the U.S. government. Quite the contrary: President Wilson wished to stay out of the war entirely. He famously preferred a “peace without victory.” The trouble was that by 1916, the U.S. commitment to Britain and France had grown—to borrow a phrase from the future—too big to fail.

His Wilson is no dreamy idealist. The president’s animating idea was an American exceptionalism of a now-familiar but then-startling kind.

Grant presents this story as a laissez-faire triumph. Wartime inflation was halted. Borrowing and spending gave way to saving and investing. Recovery then occurred naturally, without any need for government stimulus. “The hero of my narrative is the price mechanism, Adam Smith’s invisible hand,

It was Wilson who wished to remain aloof from the Entente, who feared that too close an association with Britain and France would limit American options.

“By the end of 1916, American investors had wagered two billion dollars on an Entente victory,” computes Tooze (relative to America’s estimated GDP of $50 billion in 1916, the equivalent of $560 billion in today’s money).

Wilson hoped to deploy this emerging super-power to enforce an enduring peace. His own mistakes and those of his successors doomed the project,

What went wrong? “When all is said and done,” Tooze writes, “the answer must be sought in the failure of the United States to cooperate with the efforts of the French, British, Germans and the Japanese [leaders of the early 1920s] to stabilize a viable world economy and to establish new institutions of collective security. … Given the violence they had already experienced and the risk of even greater future devastation, France, Germany, Japan, and Britain could all see this. But what was no less obvious was that only the US could anchor such a new order.”

And that was what Americans of the 1920s and 1930s declined to do—because doing so implied too much change at home for them: “At the hub of the rapidly evolving, American-centered world system there was a polity wedded to a conservative vision of its own future.”

The Forgotten Depression is a polemic embedded within a narrative, an argument against the Obama stimulus joined to an account of the depression of 1920-21. As Grant correctly observes, that depression was one of the sharpest and most painful in American history.

Then, after 18 months of extremely hard times, the economy lurched into recovery. By 1923, the U.S. had returned to full employment.

Wilson was guided by a different vision: Rather than join the struggle of imperial rivalries, the United States could use its emerging power to suppress those rivalries altogether. Wilson was the first American statesman to perceive that the United States had grown, in Tooze’s words, into “a power unlike any other. It had emerged, quite suddenly, as a novel kind of ‘super-state,’ exercising a veto over the financial and security concerns of the other major states of the world.”

the central assumption of his version of events is the same one captured in Rothbard’s title half a century ago: that America’s economic history constitutes a story unto itself.

Monetary authorities, worried that inflation would revive and accelerate, made the fateful decision to slam the credit brakes, hard. Unlike the 1918 recession, that of 1920 was deliberately engineered. There was nothing invisible about it. Nor did the depression “cure itself.” U.S. officials cut interest rates and relaxed credit, and the economy predictably recovered

Germany, for its part, could only pay if it could export, and especially to the world’s biggest and richest consumer market, the United States. The depression of 1920 killed those export hopes. Most immediately, the economic crisis sliced American consumer demand precisely when Europe needed it most.

But the gravest harm done by the depression to postwar recovery lasted long past 1921. To appreciate that, you have to understand the reasons why U.S. monetary authorities plunged the country into depression in 1920.

Americans, meanwhile, were preoccupied with the problem of German recovery. How could Germany achieve political stability if it had to pay so much to France and Belgium? The Americans pressed the French to relent when it came to Germany, but insisted that their own claims be paid in full by both France and Britain.

But 1920-21 was an inflation-stopper with a difference. In post-World War II America, anti-inflationists have been content to stop prices from rising. In 1920-21, monetary authorities actually sought to drive prices back to their pre-war levels

James Grant hails this accomplishment. Adam Tooze forces us to reckon with its consequences for the rest of the planet.

When the U.S. opted for massive deflation, it thrust upon every country that wished to return to the gold standard (and what respectable country would not?) an agonizing dilemma. Return to gold at 1913 values, and you would have to match U.S. deflation with an even steeper deflation of your own, accepting increased unemployment along the way. Alternatively, you could re-peg your currency to gold at a diminished rate. But that amounted to an admission that your money had permanently lost value—and that your own people, who had trusted their government with loans in local money, would receive a weaker return on their bonds than American creditors who had lent in dollars.

Britain chose the former course; pretty much everybody else chose the latter.

The consequences of these choices fill much of the second half of The Deluge. For Europeans, they were uniformly grim, and worse.

But one important effect ultimately rebounded on Americans. America’s determination to restore a dollar “as good as gold” not only imposed terrible hardship on war-ravaged Europe, it also threatened to flood American markets with low-cost European imports. The flip side of the Lost Generation enjoying cheap European travel with their strong dollars was German steelmakers and shipyards underpricing their American competitors with weak marks.

American leaders of the 1920s weren’t willing to accept this outcome. In 1921 and 1923, they raised tariffs, terminating a brief experiment with freer trade undertaken after the election of 1912. The world owed the United States billions of dollars, but the world was going to have to find another way of earning that money than selling goods to the United States.

Between 1924 and 1930, world financial flows could be simplified into a daisy chain of debt. Germans borrowed from Americans, and used the proceeds to pay reparations to the Belgians and French. The French and Belgians, in turn, repaid war debts to the British and Americans. The British then used their French and Italian debt payments to repay the United States, who set the whole crazy contraption in motion again. Everybody could see the system was crazy. Only the United States could fix it. It never did.

That way was found: more debt, especially more German debt. The 1923 hyper-inflation that wiped out Germany’s savers also tidied up the country’s balance sheet. Post-inflation Germany looked like a very creditworthy borrower.

“If man accumulates enough combustible material, God will provide the spark.” So it happened in 1929. The Deluge that had inundated the rest of the developed world roared back upon the United States.

From the start, the United States was Hitler’s ultimate target. “In seeking to explain the urgency of Hitler’s aggression, historians have underestimated his acute awareness of the threat posed to Germany, along with the rest of the European powers, by the emergence of the United States as the dominant global superpower,” Tooze writes. “The originality of National Socialism was that, rather than meekly accepting a place for Germany within a global economic order dominated by the affluent English-speaking countries, Hitler sought to mobilize the pent-up frustrations of his population to mount an epic challenge to this order.”

Germany was a weaker and poorer country in 1939 than it had been in 1914. Compared with Britain, let alone the United States, it lacked the basic elements of modernity: There were just 486,000 automobiles in Germany in 1932, and one-quarter of all Germans still worked as farmers as of 1925. Yet this backward land, with an income per capita comparable to contemporary “South Africa, Iran and Tunisia,” wagered on a second world war even more audacious than the first.

The reckless desperation of Hitler’s war provides context for the horrific crimes of his regime. Hitler’s empire could not feed itself, so his invasion plan for the Soviet Union contemplated the death by starvation of 20 to 30 million Soviet urban dwellers after the invaders stole all foodstuffs for their own use. Germany lacked workers, so it plundered the labor of its conquered peoples. By 1944, foreigners constituted 20 percent of the German workforce and 33 percent of armaments workers

On paper, the Nazi empire of 1942 represented a substantial economic bloc. But pillage and slavery are not workable bases for an industrial economy. Under German rule, the output of conquered Europe collapsed. The Hitlerian vision of a united German-led Eurasia equaling the Anglo-American bloc proved a crazed and genocidal fantasy.

The foundation of this order was America’s rise to unique economic predominance a century ago. That predominance is now coming to an end as China does what the Soviet Union and Imperial Germany never could: rise toward economic parity with the United States.

t is coming, and when it does, the fundamental basis of world-power politics over the past 100 years will have been removed. Just how big and dangerous a change that will be is the deepest theme of Adam Tooze's profound and brilliant grand narrative

Smith had a particular example in mind when he talked about market integration between continents: Europe and America.

Kevin O’Rourke and Jeffrey Williamson argued in a 2002 paper that globalisation only really began in the nineteenth century when a sudden drop in transport costs allowed the prices of commodities in Europe and Asia to converge

But there is one important market that Mssrs O’Rourke and Williamson ignore in their analysis: that for silver. As European currencies were generally based on the value of silver, any change in its value would have had big effects on the European price level.

The impact of what historians have called the resulting “price revolution” dramatically changed the face of Europe. Historians attribute everything from the dominance of the Spanish Empire in Europe to the sudden increase in witch hunts around the sixteenth century to the destabilising effects of inflation on European society. And if it were not for the sudden increase of silver imports from Europe to China and India during this period, European inflation would have been much worse than it was. Price rises only stopped in about 1650 when the price of silver coinage in Europe fell to such a low level that it was no longer profitable to import it from the Americas.

The German historical economist, Andre Gunder Frank, has argued that the start of globalisation can be traced back to the growth of trade and market integration between the Sumer and Indus civilisations of the third millennium BC. Trade links between China and Europe first grew during the Hellenistic Age, with further increases in global market convergence occuring when transport costs dropped in the sixteenth century and more rapidly in the modern era of globalisation, which Mssrs O’Rourke and Williamson describe as after 1750.

it is clear that globalisation is not simply a process that started in the last two decades or even the last two centuries. It has a history that stretches thousands of years, starting with Smith’s primitive hunter-gatherers trading with the next village, and eventually developing into the globally interconnected societies of today. Whether you think globalisation is a “good thing” or not, it appears to be an essential element of the economic history of mankind.

They did. Today, a century after the outbreak of World War I, the Second Battle of the Marne is considered the pivotal battle of the First World War,

hape the legend and character of the modern American military, especially the Marines, and signaled the arrival of the United States as a modern military power.

It marked the start of an era in which the United States would become the guarantor of security in Western Europe

A century after a series of interlocking alliances plunged Europe into a war that drew in the United States,

Obama is seeking to define a less interventionist foreign policy, but often finds, as President Woodrow Wilson did 100 years ago,

The battlefield on which the American Century arguably began is bucolic today.

It is hard to imagine that nearly 300,000 men died or were wounded here almost a century ago.

or decades, complaints about “voter fraud” have been a core component of Republican right-wing folklore — and one of their most useful election-year tools, particularly in places where winning the white vote isn’t enough to win elections.

the extent to which blocking voting opportunities for Democratic constituencies had become baked into conservative Republican culture became evident when Jimmy Carter proposed a package of electoral reforms in March of 1977. These included national same-day registration.

Ultimately, that year Barr reported that his workers had “discouraged or successfully challenged 50,000 illegally registered voters.” This claim was baldly fantastical. Meanwhile, in Arizona, future Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist ran Operation Eagle Eye in Phoenix’s Maricopa County. Federal judge Charles Hardy later recalled that Eagle Eye workers in Democratic-majority precincts challenged “every black or Mexican voter,” demanding that they read a passage from the Constitution

Barr expanded Operation Eagle Eye to help Senator Barry Goldwater’s bid for the presidency in 1964. The RNC sent 1.8 million letters to registered voters nationwide — a practice called voter caging. If a letter couldn’t be delivered for any reason, it would represent a reason to challenge the voter as illegitimate.

One document from state-level GOP operations obtained by the Democratic National Committee instructed workers to stall lines in Democratic precincts. In another document, a state ballot security office in Louisiana explained that “all sheriffs in the state of Louisiana, except one, are sympathetic with Senator Goldwater’s election. We should take full advantage of this situation.”

Unsurprisingly, the effort did less to restore confidence than it did to stoke paranoia. In Houston, the Austin American newspaper looked for the more than a thousand “fictitious” or ineligible registrations claimed by the GOP county chairman. It found nothing but some simple clerical errors. In Long Beach, California, another newspaper investigation found that seven of eight people on a list of ineligible voters “were just as eligible as can be.” In Oshkosh, Wisconsin, annoyed voters called the police on the Eagle Eyes. In Miami, a circuit court judge enjoined Citizens for Goldwater for “illegal mass challenging without cause, conducted in such a manner as to obstruct the orderly conduct of the election.

The effect was immediate. In 1961, the Republican National Committee launched a “ballot security program,” explained in a pamphlet published by its Women’s Division. Party workers were advised to place poll watchers outside the polls with cameras.

As historian Greg Downs recently wrote for TPM, the entire system of voter registration had been designed, back in the nineteenth century, to dampen democratic participation by immigrants and black Southerners that threatened native-born white dominance. A century later, conservatives went to the mat to preserve it.

At first, legislators from both parties enthusiastically endorsed same-day registration. Then, conservatives convinced the Republican Party establishment that, as the conservative newspaper Human Events put it, it would represent “Euthenasia for the GOP,” because “the bulk of these extra votes would go to the Democratic Party.” It pointed to a political scientist who said national turnout would go up 10 percent under the plan, but made it clear that the wrong people would be voting: most of the increase would come from “blacks and other traditionally Democratic voter groups.” The Heritage Foundation argued the reforms would “allow eight million illegal aliens in the U.S.” to vote

Weyrich made the dubious nature of the New Right’s definition of “free elections” more explicit. Speaking at an Evangelical gathering in 1980 alongside Reagan, he warned Christians against the “good government syndrome.

“I don’t want everyone to vote,” he said. “Elections are not won by a majority of the people… As a matter of fact, our leverage in the election quite candidly goes up as the voting population goes down. We have no responsibility, moral or otherwise, to turn out our opposition. It’s important to turn out those who are with us.”

The DNC and the New Jersey Democratic Party sued, and finally, as part of a settlement designed to stanch voter intimidation, the RNC entered a consent decree agreeing not to run any ballot-security efforts specifically targeting districts for their racial makeup.

The state Republican Party sent 125,000 postcards to recipients in Democratic areas who turned out to be 97 percent black, falsely claiming that a voter who had moved within 30 days of the election couldn’t vote, and noting that giving false information to an election official was punishable by up to five years in jail.

Both the 1986 and 1990 incidents led to new consent decrees. Neither dampened Republican enthusiasm to use fraud allegations as a political tool. In fact, by this time, it had become one of the conservative movement’s go-to responses to all kinds of perceived threats.

So too were ongoing Republican efforts to fight the liberalization of voter registration. In 1988, Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell — having been first elected to the Senate in a close vote in 1984 — argued in the American Bar Association Journal against a bill that would require mail-in registration systems nationwide. Liberal registration systems might be fine in places like North Dakota and Minnesota, he wrote, but “for other states like mine, and regions where one party dominates and people are poor, election fraud is a constant curse.”

Taking a page from Reagan and Weyrich, McConnell wrote that “relatively low voter turnout is a sign of a content democracy,” an observation that was, he argued, “heresy to some, blasphemy to others, and worst of all, politically incorrect.” Motor Voter could “foster election fraud and thus debase the entire political process,” he wrote. And anyway, “We should ask ourselves: How easy should voting be? Is it too much to ask that people have a passing interest in the political process, 10, 20, or 30 days prior to an election and that they go down to the courthouse, or the library, to register?”

Rep. Spencer Bachus of Alabama was more explicit, alleging that the Motor Voter bill would register “millions of welfare recipients, illegal aliens, and taxpayer funded entitlement recipients.”

In 1992, George H.W. Bush vetoed Motor Voter, calling it an “open invitation to fraud and corruption.” But it passed the next year, essentially on a party line vote, and Bill Clinton signed it into law.

Motor Voter was responsible for tens of millions of new voter registrations. But its roll-out wasn’t smooth. Many states resisted implementing parts of it, particularly the part about letting people sign up to vote at the offices where they received government benefits. In 1994, McConnell pushed to remove WIC offices from the list of places where voter registration must be offered. This had nothing to do with his original opposition to Motor Voter, he insisted. He was just concerned that “WIC workers will have to spend valuable time and money on an activity that is totally unrelated to the mission of the WIC program.”

Between 1999 and 2000, the Jeb Bush administration carried out a voter purge with a sloppy vengeance. It contracted with a private company, DBT, to produce “scrub lists” of ineligible voters. In her recounting of this episode, the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer notes that DBT received an award for “innovative excellence” in 1999 by a conservative group called the Voting Integrity Project, which had been pushing states to purge their rolls. DBT’s lists ended up including almost 1 percent of Florida’s electorate and nearly 3 percent of its black voters. But they were enormously messy.

voters were identified as candidates for the purge just because “their name, gender, birthdate and race matched — or nearly matched — one of the tens of millions of ex-felons in the United States.” DBT proposed refining its lists using address histories or financial records, but the state declined to take it up on the offer.

Similar purges went down across the country. A report drawn up by the House Judiciary Committee’s Democratic staff after the 2000 election found that “voters in the majority of states reported being improperly excluded or purged from voting rolls.”

As Joshua A. Douglas, a University of Kentucky law professor, tells the story, Bond took the stage at an Election Night rally, pounding the podium and screaming “this is an outrage!” He blamed Ashcroft’s loss on votes cast by dead people and dogs. Specifically, Bond spoke frequently of a Springer Spaniel named Ritzy Mekler. As it turned out, someone had indeed registered Ritzy, but the dog never cast a vote. Later investigations found only six definitively illegitimate votes out of the more than 2 million cast in all of Missouri that year.

But the post-election chaos in Florida that year was, of course, of a whole different order, and would refocus the GOP for more than a decade on the potency of a handful of votes

Today, though, Griffin is happily serving as lieutenant governor of Arkansas. Gonzales avoided criminal charges and now serves as dean of Belmont University in Tennessee. Hans von Spakovsky and one of the conservative activists Bradley Schlozman had hired as a DOJ attorney, J. Christian Adams, reprised their Bush-era roles by becoming members of Trump’s voter fraud commission last year. Few of the other people responsible for spreading the voter fraud myth faced any consequences at all.

for Republicans, one clear lesson from 2000 was that any move to keep potential Democratic voters away from the polls might win them an election.

Ultimately, the federal ID requirement wasn’t terribly onerous, but Minnite writes that it was significant; it “embedded a party tactic into federal law and signaled approval for a new partisan movement in the states to encumber voters with unnecessary identification requirements.”

In the next presidential election year, 2004, talk of voter fraud was everywhere. Conservative activists targeted the community group ACORN in multiple states where it was registering voters. (In several cases, the organization’s employees turned out to have forged the registration forms — but not in the hope of casting illegitimate votes. Instead, they were trying to hit a quota set by the organization that required volunteers to collect a certain number of registrations.) In Washington State, after a super-close gubernatorial election, Republican Dino Rossi refused to concede until nearly six months after his opponent was sworn in, claiming there was illegal voting. And back in Florida, the Bush campaign got caught with caging lists made up of mostly African-American voters that it planned to use to challenge people at the polls.

Rove was convinced that some U.S. attorneys weren’t doing enough to make hay over voter fraud charges. Between 2005 and 2006, the administration fired nine U.S. attorneys. It would become one of the major scandals of the Bush presidency.

One of the fired attorneys, David C. Iglesias of New Mexico, later explained that he’d been asked to resign after declining to file corruption charges against local Democrats. Another, John McKay of Washington, said he suspected his firing had to do with his decision not to call a grand jury to investigate voter fraud in the governor’s race in 2004, which Rossi lost by just a few hundred votes. The Washington Post reported that five of the 12 U.S. attorneys the administration dismissed or considered for dismissal in 2006 oversaw districts that Rove and his deputies saw as “trouble spots for voter fraud,” including New Mexico, Nevada, Washington State, Kansas City and Milwaukee

Gonzales and the Justice Department later acknowledged that they had fired U.S. Attorney Bud Cummings in Arkansas to make way for Tim Griffin, a former Rove aid who had been involved with the caging in Florida in 2004. Griffin ended up stepping down from the post in 2007 after the scandal broke, and Gonzales lost his own job later that summer.

Given the astoundingly slim final official margin of 537 votes, it was easy for observers to rightfully attribute the outcome to any number of efforts to skew the vote or accidents of history: If Republicans hadn’t convinced state officials to count overseas absentee ballots that didn’t comply with state laws, or if the state hadn’t disenfranchised thousands of people falsely judged to be felons, or if Ralph Nader hadn’t run, or if Palm Beach County hadn’t used weirdly designed ballots, everything might have been different.

This past January, a judge allowed the 1982 consent decree that banned the RNC from racially motivated voter security operations to expire. In June, the Supreme Court ruled that Ohio could purge occasional voters from its voter rolls if they don’t return a mailed address-confirmation form.

As Watts puts the point, the principal purpose of his book is to allow “readers to better appreciate the serious problems that result both from politicians who breach a republic’s political norms and from citizens who choose not to punish them for doing so.

In Watts’s telling of the Roman Republic’s agonizing death, slow-moving structural transformations gradually sowed the seeds of demise.

As the population exploded and the economy became ever more sophisticated, the growing share of poor citizens started to demand redress. But since the institutions of the republic were dominated by patricians who had much to lose from measures like land reform, they never fully addressed the grievances of ordinary Romans.

With popular rage against increasingly dysfunctional institutions swelling, ambitious patricians, determined to outflank their competitors, began to build a fervent base of support by making outsize promises. It was these populares — populists like Tiberius Gracchus and his younger brother Gaius — who, in their bid for power, first broke some of the republic’s most longstanding norms.

The transformation of Rome’s army compounded the challenge of growing inequality. In the early days of the republic, soldiers thought of their participation in military service as a civic duty. Commanders hoped to win great honors and perhaps to attain higher office

But by the late second century B.C., the army had essentially been privatized. Commanders knew that the plunder of new lands could garner them vast riches. Their soldiers signed up for the ride in the hope of gaining a generous allotment of land on which to start a farm.

It took a long time for these tensions to build. But once they reached a critical point, Rome’s descent into chaos and dysfunction was astonishingly swift.

During the century and a half between the days of Pyrrhus and the rise of Tiberius Gracchus, there had not been a single outbreak of large-scale political violence. Then Tiberius pushed through land reforms in defiance of the Senate’s veto. In the ensuing fracas, he and hundreds of his followers were murdered. The taboo on naked power politics had been broken, never to recover

“Within a generation of the first political assassination in Rome, politicians had begun to arm their supporters and use the threat of violence to influence the votes of assemblies and the election of magistrates. Within two generations, Rome fell into civil war.”

If we are to avoid the fate that ultimately befell Rome, Watts cautions, it is “vital for all of us to understand how Rome’s republic worked, what it achieved and why, after nearly five centuries, its citizens ultimately turned away from it and toward the autocracy of Augustus.”

the sheer repetitiveness of the calamities that befell Rome only serves to underline the book’s most urgent message.

Like the original populist, Trump was propelled to power by the all-too-real failures of a political system that is unable to curb growing inequality or to mobilize its most eminent citizens around a shared conception of the common good.

And like Gracchus, Trump believes that, because he is acting in the name of the dispossessed, he is perfectly justified in shredding the Republic’s traditions.

Far from single-handedly destroying our political system, he is the transitional figure whose election demonstrates the extent to which the failings of our democracy are finally starting to take their toll

The bad news is that the coming decades are unlikely to afford us many moments of calm and tranquillity.

If the central analogy that animates “Mortal Republic” is correct, the current challenge to America’s political system is likely to persist long after its present occupant has left the White House.