Foreign Affairs some of the best books on international relations

 

The Economic Government of the World, 1933–2023

By Martin Daunton

Daunton’s sweeping narrative assesses the history of international economic cooperation and the institutions that organize and sustain it.

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The Economic Government of the World, 1933–2023

Reviewed by Barry Eichengreen

November/December 2023Published on October 24, 2023

In This Review 

Daunton has written a sweeping history of international economic cooperation and of the meetings and institutions through which it is organized. The author’s original design for this book, many years in the making, was evidently to begin his narrative with the London Economic Conference of 1933, which failed to preserve an open international order, and conclude with the more successful G-20 summit in London in 2009, which mobilized international efforts to contain the 2008 global financial crisis and stabilize the world economy. Whereas the first of these conferences was sunk by doctrinal disagreements and international political disputes, the second benefited from the intellectual and political convergence that followed the fall of communism and the end of the Cold War. Developments in the past decade, however, have thrown the author’s optimistic narrative a series of curve balls: the resurgence of populism, tensions between China and the United States, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which put an end to political convergence and inaugurated what some call a “new Cold War.” Progress in strengthening global governance, it turns out, is not inevitable. Institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization retain a role in fostering international cooperation, but Daunton insists that they must not interfere too extensively in domestic policy choices lest they spark a backlash. To sustain international cooperation, governments must complement openness with policies that create good jobs, provide social insurance, tax footloose corporations, and avoid destabilizing capital flows.

From Amazon.com:

“An epic history of the people and institutions that have built the global economy since the Great Depression.

In this vivid landmark history, the distinguished economic historian Martin Daunton pulls back the curtain on the institutions and individuals who have created and managed the global economy over the last ninety years, revealing how and why one economic order breaks down and another is built. During the Great Depression, trade and currency warfare led to the rise of economic nationalism―a retreat from globalization that culminated in war. From the Second World War came a new, liberal economic order. Squarely reflecting the interests of the West in the Cold War, liberalism faced collapse in the 1970s and was succeeded by neoliberalism, financialization, and hyper-globalization.

Now, as leading nations are tackling the fallout from COVID-19 and threats of inflation, food insecurity, and climate change, Daunton calls for a return to a more just and equitable form of globalization. Western imperial powers have overwhelmingly determined the structures of world economic government, often advancing their own self-interests and leading to ruinous resource extraction, debt, poverty, and political and social instability in the Global South. He argues that while our current economic system is built upon the politics of and between the world’s biggest economies, a future of global recovery―and the reduction of economic inequality―requires the development of multilateral institutions.

Dramatic and revelatory, The Economic Government of the World offers a powerful analysis of the origins of our current global crises and a path toward a fairer international order.”

The Rebel Scribe: Carleton Beals and the Progressive Challenge to U.S. Policy in Latin America

by Christopher Neal

Neal’s highly entertaining biography of the writer Carleton Beals, whose work on Latin America foreshadowed later anti-imperialist critiques, sheds light on the United States’ relationship with the ruling elites of Latin America throughout the twentieth century.

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The Rebel Scribe: Carleton Beals and the Progressive Challenge to U.S. Policy in Latin America

Reviewed by Richard Feinberg

January/February 2023Published on December 20, 2022

In This Review 

Neal admires the fierce intellectual independence and penetrating, skeptical eye of Carleton Beals, who died in 1979 at the age of 85. Beals was a remarkably prolific freelance writer of some 40 books and innumerable magazine articles that skewered the ruling elites of Latin America and their U.S. sponsors. As recorded in Neal’s highly entertaining biography, Beals’s best books, enriched by his extensive travels, offered colorful, often acerbic portraits of the leading political and intellectual figures of the day. His biggest scoop, a 1928 exclusive interview with Augusto Sandino, pictured the Nicaraguan guerrilla fighter as a romantic patriot battling against a misguided U.S. military intervention. Something of a celebrity in progressive intellectual circles, Beals foreshadowed the later anti-imperialist critiques of William Appleman Williams and Noam Chomsky and the popularity in academic circles of dependency theory, the notion that globalization impoverishes poorer countries. Like many left-leaning, politically engaged writers, Beals wavered between demanding that the U.S. government keep its hands off Latin America and urging Washington to put its thumb on the scales for progressive democrats.

Cooperating With the Colossus: A Social and Political History of U.S. Military Bases in World War II Latin America

by Rebecca Herman

In this splendid, well-balanced history of an extraordinary but seldom studied period in inter-American relations, Herman argues that pragmatic accords between the United States and Latin American countries enabled a brilliant if brief chapter of solidarity in the Western Hemisphere throughout World War II.

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The Rise and Fall of the EAST: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success, and Why They Might Lead to Its Decline

by Yasheng Huang

In this wide-ranging and shrewd analysis of the Chinese state, Huang predicts that the crackdown on freedom under Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s modernized version of imperial rule may bring an end to the country’s brief spurt of dynamism.

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