Luis Rubio
Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) says, “the True University of these days is a collection of books.” Here is my best attempt to share some of the readings that impacted me the most this year.
Two emblematic dictators-Stalin and Hitler- were allies at the beginning of the Second World War, each because of his own interests and reasons, only to later end up in a fight to the death until the Soviet Union’s occupation of Berlin in 1945. Hitler started the war and is the figure that has received more attention in the historical literature, to the degree that WWII has frequently been identified as “Hitler’s war.” Sean McMeekin[I] argues that this is an erroneous focus because it was Stalin who took advantage of the circumstances presented to him at every juncture until gaining incomparable strategic benefits. While the United States achieved the unconditional defeat of Germany and Japan, this iconoclastic account concludes that the undisputed winner of the conflict was Stalin, who imposed a much longer-lasting tyranny.
In The Spectre of War”, Jonathan Haslam ventures that the Russian Revolution of 1917 altered international relations forever and that those who continued to adhere to the previous frame of reference erred in all their decisions, some extraordinarily transcendental, beginning with the new Soviet regime that was as crucial in Hitler’s rise as the Treaty of Versailles. Yet more important, it led Western leaders to believe that, especially for the British (Chamberlain), Hitler would be a critical factor in containing Communism. No one can know what would have happened had the West and the Soviet Union become allies in the thirties to impede the growth of Germany. Still, Haslam’s speculation is key: “the lesson of the interwar years is that in political life, the extreme can too easily become the mainstream.” It is key, Haslam goes on, not to ignore history because “History does offer warnings if we care to recognize them for what they are.”
Michael Nieberg wrote on the fall of France in 1940, a collapse that no one anticipated given the famous Maginot Line that the French, and the rest of the world, thought invulnerable, only to find that Nazi Germany invaded France through The Netherlands, circumventing formidable fortifications. The book[ii] deals with the impact of the invasion of France on the U.S., and the approach transcends the immediate matter at hand. In essence, the argument is that the folding of France swayed theU.S. because our neighbor to the North had conceived of France as a wall of contention that would provide protection from any enemy on the Atlantic side; the fall would oblige it to rethink its entire conception of the world and, thence, to build the mightiest army in the history of the planet that not only won that war, but that also became a world factotum henceforth. Of particular interest is the description that Nieberg portrays on how the U.S. decided who would be their ally in France, wagering on Vichy, the government of Occupied France, going against the British government that had carried out a conscientious analysis of the French situation and concluding that the ideal partner would be de Gaulle. The book is itself fascinating, but it seems to me especially relevant because of the U.S. propensity for ignoring the local situation, thus blundering in the identification of its allies, as evidenced in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
Manuel Hinds wrote a book that breaks with the last years’ tendency to see the solution to all the problems in the government. In Defense of Liberal Democracy is a peculiar book in that it is authored by a Salvadoran addressing the Americans. The central argument is that periods of technological change produce severe disruptions that, as of now, translate into income inequality and greater poverty, but that liberal democracy is the best instrument that humans have devised to confront these evils. Hinds analyzes complex periods such as the French Revolution and Nazi Germany to conclude that the key to development and democracy lies in the consolidation of a horizontal society that he denominates “multidimensional,” which immediately creates checks and balances that strengthen the capacity of the generation of ideas, projects, and productive activity because these align the incentives of persons with those of the development of their country.
The best book I have read on the China–U.S. relationship was written by a former Australian prime minister, who describes the complexity of the interaction of these two societies, its historical misunderstandings, and, especially, the points of convergence and divergence. Its title, “The Avoidable War” [iii], is suggestive: the route of suspicions and conspiracies assumed by both sides have a sole possible outcome, lest both parties recognize the need to come to key understandings for them and the world.
[i] Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II
[ii]When France Fell: The Vichy Crisis and the Fate of the Anglo-American Alliance
[iii]Rudd, Kevin, The Avoidable War: The Dangers of a Catastrophic Conflict Between the U.S. and Xi Jinping’s China
Further Reading: