[Parag Khanna, The Future is Asian. Simon & Schuster. New York, 2019. 433 p.]

review / Emili J. Blasco

Parag Khanna's book may be greeted with suspicion at the entrance because of the apparent axiomatic nature of its degree scroll. However, the blunt assertion on the cover is softened when one begins to read the pages inside. The thesis of the work is that the world is in a process of asianizationnot of chinizationMoreover, this process is presented as another coat of paint on the planet, not as a color that will be clearly predominant or definitive.

It is possible that the discussion of whether the United States is in decline and will be replaced by China as the preeminent superpower prevents seeing other parallel developments. Those watching Beijing's rise in the world order, writes Khanna, "have often been paralyzed by two views: either China will devour the world or it is on the verge of collapse. Neither is correct." "The future is Asian, even for China," he asserts.

Khanna believes that the world is moving towards a multipolar order, something that is also true in Asia, even if China's size often dazzles.

It is possible that this judgment is influenced by the author's Indian origin and also by his time living in the United States, but he offers figures to support his words. Of the 5 billion people living in Asia, 3.5 billion are not Chinese (70%): China, therefore, has only a third of Asia's population; it also accounts for slightly less than half of its GDP. Other data: half of the investments leaving the continent are non-Chinese, and more than half of foreign investments go to Asian countries other than China. Asia, therefore, "is more than China plus".

It is not just a question of size, but of wills. "A China-led Asia is no more acceptable to most Asians than the notion of a U.S.-led West is to Europeans," says Khanna. He rejects the idea that, because of China's power, Asia is heading toward a kind of tributary system like the one ruled in other centuries from Beijing. He points out that this system did not go beyond the Far East and was based mainly on trade.

The author reassures those who fear Chinese expansionism: "China has never been an indestructible superpower presiding over all of Asia like a colossus". Thus, he warns that while Europe's geographical characteristics have historically led many countries to fear the hegemony of a single power, in the case of Asia its geography makes it "inherently multipolar", as natural barriers absorb friction. In fact, the clashes that have taken place between China and India, China and Vietnam or India and Pakistan have ended in stalemates. "Whereas in Europe wars have occurred when there is a convergence in power between rivals, in Asia wars have taken place when there is a perception of advantage over rivals. So the more powerful China's neighbors like Japan, India or Russia are, the less likelihood of conflict between them."

For Khanna, Asia will always be a region of distinct and autonomous civilizations, especially now that we are witnessing a revival of old empires. The geopolitical future of Asia will not be led by the United States or China: "Japan, South Korea, India, Russia, Indonesia, Australia, Iran and Saudi Arabia will never come together under a hegemonic umbrella or unite in a single pole of power".

There will not be, then, a chinization of the world, according to the author, and the Asianization that is taking place - a shift of the planet's specific weight towards the Indo-Pacific - should not be seen as a threat to those who live elsewhere. Just as there was a Europeanization of the world in the 19th century, and an Americanization in the 20th century, in the 21st century we are witnessing an Asianization. Khanna sees this as "the most recent sedimentation substrate in the geology of global civilization," and as a "layer" he does not assume that the world Withdrawal to what came before. "Being more Asian doesn't necessarily mean being less American or European," he says.

The book analyzes the weight and fit of different Asian countries in the continent. Of Russia, he says it is strategically closer to China today than at any time since its communist pact in the 1950s. Khanna believes that geography leads to this understanding, as it invites Canada to maintain good relations with the United States; he predicts that climate change will further open up the lands of Siberia, which will integrate them more with the rest of the Asian continent.

As for India and China's relationship, Khanna believes that both countries will have to accept each other as powers more normally. For example, despite India's reluctance towards China's Silk Road and India's own regional connectivity projects, in the end the two countries' preferred corridors "will overlap and even reinforce each other," ensuring that products from Asia's interior reach the Indian Ocean. "Geopolitical rivalries will only accelerate the Asianization of Asia," Khanna sentences.

In assessing the importance of Asia, the book includes Middle East oil. Technically, this region is part of the continent, but it is such a separate chapter with its own dynamics that it is difficult to see it as Asian territory. The same is true when Israel or Lebanon are label as such. It may give the impression that the author is lumping everything together to make the figures more impressive. He argues that the Middle East is becoming less and less dependent on Europe and the United States and is looking more to the East.

Khanna is in a position to reasonably defend himself against most of the objections that can be made to his text. The most controversial, however, is the justification, close to defense, that he makes of technocracy as a system of government. Beyond the descriptive attitude of a model that in some countries has been the subject of significant economic and social development , Khanna even seems to endorse its moral superiority.

[Bruno Maçães, History Has Begun. The Birth of a New America. Hurst and Co. London, 2020. 203 p.]

review / Emili J. Blasco

What if the United States were not in decline, but quite the opposite? The United States could actually be in its beginnings as a great power. This is what Bruno Maçães argues in his new book, the degree scroll -History Has Begun- in a certain sense refutes Fukuyama's end of history, which saw the democratization of the world at the end of the 20th century as the culmination of the West. Precisely, the hypothesis of the internationalist of Portuguese origin is that the USA is developing its own original civilization, separate from what has been understood until now as Western civilization, in a world in which the very concept of the West is losing strength.

Maçães' work follows three lines of attention: the progressive separation of the USA from Europe, the characteristics that identify the specific American civilization and the struggle between the USA and China for the new world order. The author had already developed aspects of these themes in his two immediately preceding works, already reviewed here: The Dawn of Eurasia y Belt and Roadand now focuses on the US. The three titles are basically a sequence: the progressive dissolution of the European peninsula in the Eurasian continent as a whole, the emergence of China as the superpower of this great continental mass and the remaining role of Washington on the planet.

As to whether the U.S. goes up or leave, Maçães writes in the book's introduction, "Conventional wisdom suggests that the United States has already reached its peak. But what if it is simply now beginning to forge its own path forward?" The Issue is written before the coronavirus crisis and the deep unease now apparent in American society, but even before that some signs of U.S. domestic unrest, such as political polarization or divergence over the direction of its foreign policy, were already evident. "The present moment in the history of the United States is both a moment of destruction and a moment of creation," says Maçães, who considers that the country is going through "convulsions" typical of this process of destructive creation. In his opinion, in any case, they are "the birth pangs of a new culture instead of the death throes of an old civilization".

It could be thought that the United States is simply evolving towards a mixed culture, the result of globalization, so that the influence that some European countries have had in shaping U.S. society in recent centuries is now being joined by Asian immigration. In fact, it is expected that by mid-century immigrants from the other side of the Pacific will outnumber those arriving from Mexico and Central America, which, although imbued with indigenous cultures, largely follow the Western paradigm. Between the first European and the new Asian heritage, a "hybrid Eurasian" culture could develop in the United States.

In fact, at one point in the book, Maçães asserts that the United States "is no longer a European nation," but "in fundamental aspects now seems more similar to countries like India or Russia or even the Republic of Iran." However, he disagrees with this hybrid Eurasian perspective and argues instead for the development of a new, indigenous American society, separate from modern Western civilization, rooted in new sentiments and thoughts.

When describing this different way of being, Maçães deals mainly with some manifestations, from which he gradually deduces deeper aspects. "Why do Americans speak so loudly?" he asks, referring to one such symptom. His theory is that American life emphasizes its own artificiality as a way of reminding its participants that, at bottom, they are experiencing a story. "The American way of life is consciously about language, storytelling, plot and form, and is meant to draw attention to its status as fiction." An entire chapter, for example, is devoted to analyzing the importance of television in the US. In the midst of these considerations, the reader may come to think that the reasoning has been drifting towards a cultural essay , leaving the field of international relations, but in the conclusion of the work the ends are conveniently tied up.

Having left this loose end here, the book goes on to analyze the pulse between Washington and Beijing. He recalls that since its rise as a world power around 1900, the permanent strategic goal of the United States has been to prevent a single power from controlling the whole of Eurasia. Previous threats in that sense were Germany and the USSR and today it is China. Normally, Washington would resort to the balance of power, using Europe, Russia and India against China (using a game historically employee by Great Britain for the goal of preventing a single country from controlling the European continent), but for the time being the US has focused on directly confronting China. Maçães sees the Trump Administration's policy as confusing. "If the US wants to adopt a strategy of maximum pressure against Beijing, it needs to be clearer about the end game": is this to constrain Chinese economic power or to convert China to the Western model , he asks. He intuits that the ultimate goal is to "decouple" the Western world from China, creating two separate economic spheres.

Maçães believes that China will hardly manage to dominate the supercontinent, since "the unification of the whole of Eurasia under a single power is so far from being inevitable that in fact it has never been achieved". In any case, he considers that, because of its interest as a superpower, the US may end up playing not so much the role of "great balancer" (given the weight of China it is difficult for any of its neighbors to exercise a counterweight) as that of "great creator" of the new order. "China must be trimmed down in size and other pieces must be accumulated, if a balance is to be the final product," he asserts.

It is here that the American character as a builder of stories and narratives finally comes back into the picture, with a somewhat flimsy argument. Maçães can see the US succeeding in this task of "great creator" if it treats its allies with autonomy. As in a novel, his role as narrator "is to bring all the characters together and preserve their own individual spheres"; "the narrator has learned not to impose a single truth on the whole, and at the same time no character will be allowed to replace him." "For the United States," Maçães concludes, "the age of nation-building is over. The age of world building has begun."

[Tae-Hwan Kwak and Seung-Ho Joo (eds). One Korea: visions of Korean unification. Routledge. New York, 2017. 234 p.]

review / Eduardo Uranga

Throughout the second half of the 20th century, tensions between superpowers in East Asia made this part of the world a hot spot in International Relations. Tensions remain today, such as the trade war that since 2018 has pitted the United States and the People's Republic of China against each other. However, over the past 70 years, one territory in particular has been affected by a continuing conflict that has several times claimed the world's attention. This region is undoubtedly the Korean peninsula.

This book, co-edited by Tae-Hwan Kwak and Seung-Ho Joo and bringing together various experts on inter-Korean relations, outlines the various possibilities of a future reunification of the two Koreas, as well as the various problems that need to be solved in order to achieve this goal. The perspectives of the various world powers on the conflict are also analyzed.

The Korean issue comes from World War II: after the country was occupied by Japan, its liberation ended up dividing the peninsula in two: North Korea (occupied by the Soviet Union) and South Korea (controlled by the United States). Between 1950 and 1953, the two halves fought a conflict, which eventually consolidated the partition, with a demilitarized zone in between known as the 38th Parallel or KDZ.

One of the formulas for Korean unification described in this book is unification through neutralization, proposal by both Koreas. However, the constant long-range nuclear missile tests conducted by North Korea in recent years present a major obstacle to this formula. In this atmosphere of mistrust, Korean citizens play an important role in promoting cooperation and friendship on both sides of the border with the goal of achieving the denuclearization of North Korea.

Another aspect that plays an important role in forcing a change in North Korea's attitude is its strategic culture. This must be differentiated from the traditional Korean strategic culture. North Korea has adopted various unification strategies over the years while maintaining the same principles and values. This strategic culture blends elements from the country's strategic position (geopolitically), history and national values. All this under the authority of the Juche ideology. This ideology contains some militaristic elements and promotes the unification of Korea through armed conflict and revolutionary actions.

As for the perspectives of the various world superpowers on a future Korean reunification, China has stated that it favors unification in the long term; a process undertaken in the short term would collide with Chinese national interests, as Beijing would first have to settle its disputes with Taiwan, or end the trade war against the United States. China has stated that it will not accept Korean unification influenced by a military alliance between the United States and South Korea.

On the other hand, the United States has not yet opted for a specific Korean unification policy. Since the 1950s, the Korean peninsula has been but one part of the overall U.S. strategic policy for the entire Asia Pacific region.

The unification of the Korean peninsula will be truncated as long as the United States, China and other powers in the region continue to recognize the status quo on the peninsula. It could be argued that perhaps an armed conflict would be the only way to achieve unification. According to the authors of this book, this would be too costly in terms of resources used and human lives lost. On the other hand, such a war could trigger a conflict on a global scale.

[John West, Asian Century on A Knife Edge: A 360 Degree Analysis of Asia's Recent Economic Development.. Palgrave Macmillan. Singapore, 2018. 329 p.]

REVIEW / Gabriela Pajuelo

The degree scroll of this book seems to contribute to the generalized chorus that the 21st century is the century of Asia. In reality, the book's thesis is the opposite, or at least it puts that statement "on the razor's edge": Asia is a continent of great economic complexity and conflicting geopolitical interests, which poses a series of challenges whose resolution will determine the region's place in the world in the coming decades. For the time being, according to John West, a university professor in Tokyo, nothing is certain.

The book begins with a preamble on the recent history of Asia, from World War II to the present. Already at the beginning of that period, economic liberalism was established as the standard doctrine in much of the world, including most Asian countries, in a process driven by the establishment of international institutions.

China joined this system, without renouncing its internal doctrines, when it joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. Since then, there have been some shocks such as the financial crisis of 2007-2008, which severely affected the U.S. economy and had repercussions in the rest of the world, or the recent tariff tensions between Washington and Beijing, in addition to the current global crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

The principles of protectionism and nationalism deployed by Donald Trump and an increased U.S. resource to the hard power in the region, as well as a more assertive policy of Xi Jinping's China in its geographical environment, also resorting to positions of force, as in the South China Sea, have damaged the multilateralism that had been built up in that part of the world.

The author provides some thought-provoking ideas on the challenges that Asia will face, given that the core topic factors that favored its development have now deteriorated (mainly due to the stability provided by international economic interdependence).

West examines seven challenges. The first is to obtain a better position in global value chains, since since the 1980s the manufacture of components and the production of final products has taken place in different parts of the world. Asia is heavily involved in these supply chains, in fields such as technology and apparel production, but is subject to the business decisions of multinationals whose practices are sometimes not socially responsible and allow the abuse of labor rights, which are important for middle-class development .

The second challenge is to maximize the potential of urbanization, which has grown from 27% of the population in 1980 to 48% in 2015. The region is known for densely populated megacities. This brings with it some difficulties: the population migrating to industrial centers generally moves from leave to high-productivity jobs, and health care capacity is put to the test . But it is also an opportunity to improve environmental practices or encourage innovation through green technologies, even though much of Asia today still faces high levels of pollution.

Another challenge is to give all Asians equal opportunities in their respective societies, from LGBT people to women and indigenous communities, as well as ethnic and religious minorities. The region also faces a major demographic challenge , as many populations either age (such as China's, despite the correction of the "two-child policy") or continue to expand with presumed future supply problems (as in the case of India).

West also reference letter to the barriers to democratization that exist in the region, with China's notable immobility, and to the spread of economic crime and corruption (counterfeiting, piracy, drug trafficking, human trafficking, cybercrime and money laundering).

Finally, the author speaks of the challenge for Asian countries to live together in peace and harmony, while China consolidates its position as a regional leader: if there is a Chinese commitment to thesoft powerThrough the Belt and Road initiative, there is also a more confrontational attitude on the part of Beijing towards Taiwan, Hong Kong and the South China Sea, while players such as India, Japan and North Korea want a greater role.

Overall, the book offers a comprehensive analysis of Asia's economic and social development and the challenges ahead. In addition, the author offers some thought-provoking ideas, arguing that a so-called "Asian century" is unlikely due to the region's lagging economic development , as most countries have not caught up with their Western counterparts in terms of GDP per capita and technological sophistication. Nevertheless, it leaves the future open: if the challenges are successfully met, the time may indeed come for an Asian Century.

[A. Patanru, M. Pangestu, M.C. Basri (eds), Indonesia in the New World: Globalisation, Nationalism and Sovereignty. ISEAS Yusof Ishak Institute. Singapore, 2018. 358 p.]

review / Irati Zozaya

The book consists of fifteen articles, written by different experts, on how Indonesia has dealt with globalization and what effect it has had on the country. The texts have been coordinated by Arianto A. Patunru, Mari Pangestu and M. Chatib Basri, Indonesian academics with experience also in public management , having served as ministers in different governments. The articles combine general approaches with specific aspects, such as the consequences of the opening up to international trade and investment in the mining industry or the nationalization of foodstuffs.

To explain Indonesia's current status , the book occasionally recapitulates periods of its history. Precisely one of the concepts that comes up frequently in the book is that of nationalism: it could be said, according to the authors, that this is what has most marked Indonesia's relationship with the world, regardless of who has led this country of 260 million inhabitants at any given time.

The first part of the book reference letter more generally to Indonesia's experience with globalization, nationalism and sovereignty. They begin by showing the colonial era and how, due to the imposition by Holland and Great Britain of an opening to the world, a strong nationalist sentiment begins to emerge. After the occupation by Japan during the Second World War, a total autarchy was implemented, thus leading the citizens to a problem that is still very present in Indonesia today: the internship of smuggling. In 1945 the country achieved its long-awaited independence under the presidency of Sukarno, who closed Indonesia to the rest of the world to focus on reaffirming national identity and developing its capabilities. This led to the deterioration of the Economics and the consequent hyperinflation, which ushered in a new era: the New Order.

In 1967, with Suharto's accession to the presidency, a cautious opening to foreign trade and investment flows began. However, Suharto repressed political activity and during his tenure the military gained much influence and the government retained control over Economics. In addition, the end of his presidency coincided with the Asian financial crisis (1997-1998), which led to a fall in the country's economic growth and a slowdown in poverty reduction, and consequently a growth in inequality. The financial crisis undermined confidence in the president and culminated in the collapse of the New Order.

The next period addressed is the Reformasi, an era that marked the beginning of a more open and democratic political climate. The next two presidents, Abdurrahman Wahid (1999-2001) and Megawati Soekarnoputri (2001-2004), were more concerned with economic recovery and democratic consolidation and a protectionist system regarding Economics endured. The book does not focus much on the next president, Yudhoyono (2004-2014), remarking only that he was an internationalist who maintained a more cautious and ambivalent stance on economic issues.

Finally, in the 2014 elections, Joko Widodo came to power and holds the position of president today. Under him, Indonesia has returned to the path of economic growth and has stabilized as a reasonably successful democracy. As the president, commonly known as Jokowi, has taken new steps to emphasize political sovereignty and promote economic autarky and national cultural revival, his term has been characterized as 'new nationalism'. In his political speech , Jokowi puts Indonesia as a goal of foreign conspiracies and calls to be on guard against such threats. However, the country maintains an ambivalent stance towards international openness and cooperation since, although trade restrictions have increased again in recent decades, Jokowi emphasizes global engagement and has reactivated regional negotiations.

All this has led to public dissatisfaction with globalization, with up to 40% of citizens believing that globalization threatens national unity. One of the most negative and important effects in Indonesia is that of workers who have been forced to migrate and work abroad under very poor conditions. However, the later parts of the book also show the positive consequences that globalization has had in Indonesia, manifesting itself in higher productivity, increased wages or economic growth, among others. The authors therefore emphasize the importance of constructing a narrative that can generate public and political support for the opening up of the country and counteract the growing anti-globalization sentiment.

As it happens in a book that is the sum of articles by different authors, its reading can be somewhat heavy due to a certain reiteration of contents. However, the variety of signatures also implies a plurality of approaches that undoubtedly provides a wealth of perspectives for the reader.

[Ming-Sho Ho, Challenging Beijing's Mandate of Heaven. Taiwan's Sunflower and Hong Kong's Umbrella Movement. Temple University Press. Philadelphia, 2019. 230 p.]

review / Claudia López

Taiwan's Sunflower Movement and Hong Kong's Umbrella Movement achieved international notoriety throughout 2014, when they challenged the Chinese regime's 'Mandate of Heaven', to use the image that gives degree scroll to the book. It analyzes the origins, processes and also the outcomes of both protests, at a time of consolidation of the rise of the People's Republic of China. Challenging Beijing's Mandate of Heaven provides a detailed overview of where, why and how these movements came into being and achieved relevance.

Taiwan's Sunflower Movement developed in March and April 2014, when citizen demonstrations protested against the approval of a free trade agreement with China. Between September and December of the same year, the Umbrella Movement staged 79 days of protests in Hong Kong demanding universal suffrage to elect the highest authority of this enclave of special status within China. These protests attracted international attention for their peaceful and civilized organization.

Ming-Sho Ho begins by describing the historical background of Taiwan and Hong Kong from their Chinese origins. He then analyzes the status of both territories so far this century, when Taiwan and Hong Kong have begun to encounter increased pressure from China. It also reviews the similar economic circumstances that produced the two waves of youth revolts. In the second part of the book, the two movements are analyzed: the voluntary contributions, the decision-making process and its improvisation, the internal power shift, the political influences and the challenges of the initiative. The book includes appendices with the list of Taiwanese and Hong Kong people interviewed and the methodology used for the analysis of the protests.

Ming-Sho Ho was born in 1973 in Taiwan and has been a close observer of the island's social movements; during his time as a doctorate student in Hong Kong he also followed the political discussion in the former British colony. He is currently researching initiatives to promote renewable energy in East Asian nations.

Being from Taiwan gave him access to the Sunflower Movement and allowed him to develop a close relationship with several of its key activists. He was able to witness some of the students' internal meetings and conduct in-depth interviews with students, leaders, politicians, NGO activists, journalists and university professors. This provided him with a variety of sources for his research.

Although they are two territories with different characteristics - Hong Kong is under the sovereignty of the People's Republic of China, but enjoys management assistant autonomy; Taiwan remains independent, but its statehood is challenged - both represent a strategic challenge for Beijing in its consolidation as a superpower.

The author's sympathy for these two movements is obvious throughout the book, as is his admiration for the risk taken by these student groups, especially in Hong Kong, where many of them were convicted of 'public nuisance' and 'disturbing the peace' and, in numerous cases, ended up sentenced to more than a year in prison.

The two movements had a similar beginning and development , but each ended very differently. In Taiwan, thanks to the initiative, the free trade agreement with China failed and was withdrawn, and the protesters were able to call a farewell rally to celebrate that victory. In Hong Kong, police repression succeeded in stifling the protest and a final massive raid brought a disappointing end for the protesters. However, it is possible that without the experience of those mobilizations, the new student reaction that throughout 2019 and early 2020 has put the highest Chinese authorities on the ropes in Hong Kong would not have been possible.

[Joseph S. Nye. Do Morals Matter? Presidents and Foreign Policy from FDR to Trump.. Oxford University Press. New York, 2020. 254 pp]

review / Emili J. Blasco

The question that serves as the degree scroll for the new book by Jospeh Nye, known to the general public for having coined the expression "the most important thing in the world". soft powerThe author's entrance is not a concession to secularized thinking, but rather a lack of boldness in asserting the importance of ethical reflection in foreign policy decisions, an importance that, despite the question mark, one senses is defended by the author.

In fact, the question itself is a core topic in the discipline of international relations. A common approach is to see the world scenario as a conjunction of states that struggle against each other, in an anarchic dynamic where the law of the strongest prevails. Internally, the state may be driven by criteria of the common good, attending to the different needs of its inhabitants and making decisions at the national or local level through democratic processes. But beyond its own borders, does the legitimacy granted by its own voters not require the president to guarantee the security of its citizens against external threats and to safeguard the national interest against that of other states?

The fact that the state is the basic subject in international relations marks, of course, a dividing line between the two spheres. And therefore the question of whether the ethical discernment demanded of the leader in the domestic sphere should also be demanded of him in the foreign sphere is fully pertinent.

Only from extreme positions that consider that the state is a wolf for the state, applying the Hobbesian principle to international order (disorder) (and here there would be no supra-state to discipline this tendency of the state-individual), can it be defended that amorality governs all against all. On a lower rung is the so-called offensive realism and, on a lower rung, defensive realism.

Nye, a scholar of international relations, believes that realist theory is a good starting point for any president when defining a country's foreign policy, given that he must be guided especially by the ethics of responsibility, as he fulfills a "fiduciary role." "The first moral duty of a president is that of a trustee, and this begins with ensuring the survival and security of the democracy that elected him." But from this point on, the possibilities for international partnership and mutual benefit must also be explored, not closing the entrance to approaches of liberalism or cosmopolitanism.

"When survival is at stake, realism is a necessary basis for a moral foreign policy, though not sufficient," says Nye, for whom it is a "matter of Degree." "Since there is never perfect security, the moral question is what Degree of security should be assured before other values such as welfare, identity or rights become part of a president's foreign policy." He adds, "Many of the most difficult moral decisions are not all-or-nothing [...] The difficult moral decisions are in the middle. While it is important to be cautious about the dangers of a slippery slope, moral decisions rest on matching ends and means with each other." He concludes that "the maintenance of international institutions and regimes is part of moral leadership".

From the very beginning of the book, Nye uses the three conditions that have traditionally been used in moral treatises to judge an action as ethically good: that the intention, the means and the consequences are good at the same time.

Using these three yardsticks, the author analyzes the foreign policy of each of the U.S. presidents since World War II and establishes a final ranking that combines both the morality of their actions on the international scene and the effectiveness of their policies (because it is possible to have an ethical foreign policy that does little to further a country's national interests).

Thus, of the fourteen presidents, he considers that the four with the best grade in that combination are Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower and Bush I. In the middle he places Reagan, Kennedy, Ford, Carter, Clinton and Obama. And as the four worst he mentions Johnson, Nixon, Bush II and ("tentatively incomplete") Trump. Having made the ranking, Nye warns that he may have given precedence to the Democratic administrations for which he worked.

The book is a quick review of the foreign policy of each presidency, highlighting the presidents' doctrines, their successes and failures (as well as examining the ethical component), so it is also interesting as a succinct history of U.S. international relations over the past eighty years.

The aspect of morality perhaps lacks a greater academic foundation, since it is a discipline that has been especially studied since the scholastic era. But Nye's purpose was not to delve into this subject, but to offer a brief study of applied morality.

Reading Nye is always thought-provoking. Among other reflections he makes might be the idea of the new prospects that would have opened up for the world if particularly propitious times had coincided in the calendar. In particular, he suggests that if Brezhnev and his gerontocratic generation had left earlier and the USSR had also been beset by serious economic problems earlier, Gorbachev might have come to power coinciding with Carter's presidency; what they would have achieved together is, however, the realm of speculation.

[George Friedman. The Storm Before the Calm. America's Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond. Doubleday. New York, 2020. 235 pp.]

review / E. Villa Corta, E. J. Blasco

The degree scroll of the new book by George Friedman, the driving force behind the geopolitical analysis and intelligence agency Stratfor and later creator of Geopolitical Futures, does not reference letter to the global crisis created by the Covid-19 pandemic. When he speaks of the crisis of the 2020s, which Friedman has been anticipating for some time in his commentaries and now explains at length in this book, he is referring to deep and long-lasting historical movements, in this case confined to the United States.

Beyond the current pandemic, therefore, which is somewhat circumstantial and not addressed in the text (its composition is previous), Friedman suggests that the United States will reinvent itself at the end of this decade. Like a machine that, almost automatically, incorporates substantial changes and corrections every certain period of time, the US is preparing for a new leap. There will be a prolonged crisis, but the US will emerge triumphant from it, Friedman predicts. US decline? Quite the opposite.

Unlike his previous books, such as The Next Hundred Years or Flashpoints, Friedman this time leaves Friedman's global geopolitical analysis to focus on the United States. In his reflection on American history, Friedman sees a succession of cycles of approximate length. The current ones are already in their final stages, and the reinstatement of both will coincide in the late 2020s, in a process of crisis and subsequent resurgence of the country. In the institutional field, the 80-year cycle that began after the end of the Second World War is coming to an end (the previous one had lasted since the end of the Civil War in 1865); in the socioeconomic field, the 50-year cycle that began with Ronald Reagan in 1980 is coming to an end (the previous one had lasted since the end of the Great Recession and the arrival of Franklin D. Roosevelt to the White House).

Friedman does not see Donald Trump as the catalyst for change (his effort has simply been to restore the status created by Reagan for the working class average , affected by unemployment and loss of purchasing power), nor does he believe that whoever replaces him in the coming years will be. Rather, he places the turnaround around 2028. The change, which will take place in a time of great confusion, will have to do with the end of the technocracy that dominates American political and institutional life and with the creative disruption of new technologies. The author wants to denote America's skill to overcome adversity and take advantage of "chaos" in order to achieve fruitful growth.

Friedman divides the book into three parts: the creation of the nation as we know it, the cycles we have gone through and the prognosis for the next one. In this last part he presents the challenges or adversities that the country will have to face.

Regarding the creation of the country, the author reasons about the subject of government created in the United States, the territory in which the country is located and the American people. This last aspect is perhaps the most interesting. He defines the American people as a merely artificial construct. This leads him to see the U.S. as a machine that automatically fine-tunes its functioning from time to time. As an "invented" country, the U.S. reinvents itself when its cycles run out.

Friedman presents the training of the American people through three overlapping types: the cowboy, the inventor and the warrior. To the cowboy, who seeks to start something completely new and in an "American" way, we owe especially the social construct that is so unique to the United States. To the inventor belongs the drive for technological progress and economic prosperity. And the warrior condition has been present from the beginning.

The second part of the book deals with the aforementioned issue of cycles. Friedman considers that US growth has been cyclical, in a process in which the country reinvents itself from time to time in order to continue progressing. After reviewing the periods so far, he locates the next great change in the US in the decade that has just begun. He warns that the gestation of the next stage will be complicated due to the accumulation of events from past cycles. One of the issues that the country will have to resolve has to do with the paradox between the desire to internationalize democracy and human rights and that of maintaining its national security: "liberating the world" or securing its position in the international sphere.

The present moment of change, in which, agreement to the author, the institutional and socio-economic cycles will collide, is a time of deep crisis, but a long period of calm will follow. Friedman believes that the first "tremors" of the crisis were felt in the 2016 elections, which showed a radical polarization of American society. The country will have to reform not only its complex institutional system, but also various socio-economic aspects.

This last part of the book - dedicated to the resolution of problems such as the student debt crisis, the use of social networks, new social constructions or the difficulty in the educationalsector educationalis probably the most important. If the mechanicity and automatism in the succession of cycles determined by Friedman, or even its very existence, are questionable (other analyses could lead other authors to consider different stages), the real problems that the country has today are easily ascertainable. Thus, the presentation of proposals for their resolution has an undoubted value.

[Scott Martelle, William Walker's Wars. How One Man's Private Army Tried to Conquer Mexico, Nicaragua, and Honduras. Chicago Review Press. Chicago, 2019. 312 p.]

review / Emili J. Blasco

The history of U.S. interference in Latin America is long. In plenary session of the Executive Council Manifest destiny of expansion towards the West in the mid-nineteenth century, to extend the country from coast to coast, there were also attempts to extend sovereignty to the South. Those who occupied the White House were satisfied with half of Mexico, which completed a comfortable access to the Pacific, but there were personal initiatives to attempt to purchase and even conquer Central American territories.

One of those initiatives was led by William Walker, who at the head of several hundred filibusters -the American Falange-, snatched the presidency of Nicaragua and dreamed of a slave empire that would attract the investments of American Southerners if slavery was abolished in the United States. Walker, from Tennessee, first tried to create a republic in Sonora, to integrate that Mexican territory into the United States, and then focused his interest on Nicaragua, which was then an attractive passage for Americans who wanted to cross the Central American isthmus to the gold mines of California, where he himself had sought his fortune. Disallowed and detained several times by the US authorities, due to the problems he caused them with the neighboring governments, he was finally expelled from Nicaragua by force of arms and shot to death when he tried to return, setting foot in Honduras.

Scott Martelle's book is both a portrait of the character - someone without special leadership skills and with a rather delicate appearance unbecoming of a mercenary chief, who nevertheless knew how to generate lucrative expectations among those who followed him (2,518 Americans came to enlist) - and a chronicle of his military campaigns in the South of the United States. It also describes well the mid-19th century atmosphere in cities like San Francisco and New Orleans, full of migrants coming from other parts of the country and in transit to wherever fortune would take them.

It also offers a detailed account of the business developed by the magnate Vanderbilt to establish a route, inaugurated in 1851, that used the San Juan River to reach Lake Nicaragua and from there to go out to the Pacific, with the intention of establishing a railroad connection and the subsequent purpose of building a canal in a few years. Although the overland route was longer than the one that at that time was also being traced under similar conditions on the Isthmus of Panama, the boat trip from the United States to Nicaragua was shorter than the one that had to be made to Panama. The latter explains why, during the second half of the 19th century, the Nicaragua canal project had more supporters in Washington than the Panama project.

Although Panama is one of the symbols of US interference in its "backyard", the success of the transoceanic canal project and its return to the Panamanians largely deactivates a "black legend" that still exists in the Nicaraguan case. Nicaragua is probably the Central American country that has experienced the most US "imperialism". The Walker episode (1855-1857) marks a beginning; then followed the US government's own military interventions (1912-1933), Washington's close support for the Somoza dictatorship (1937-1979) and direct involvement in the fight against the Sandinista Revolution (1981-1990).

Walker arrived in Nicaragua attracted by the U.S. interest in the inter-oceanic passage and with the excuse of helping one of the sides fighting in one of the many civil wars between conservatives and liberals that were taking place in the former Spanish colonies. Elevated to chief of the Army, in 1856 he was elected president of a country in which he could barely control the area whose center was the city of Granada, on the northern shore of Lake Nicaragua.

As he established his power, he moved away from any initial idea of integrating Nicaragua into the United States and dreamed of forging a Central American empire that would even include Mexico and Cuba. Slavery, which in Nicaragua had been abolished in 1838 and he reinstated in 1856, entered into his strategy. He imagined it as a means of preventing Washington from renouncing to extend its sovereignty to those territories, given the internal balances in the US between slave and non-slave states, and as a capital attraction for southern slaveholders. He was finally expelled from the country in 1857 thanks to the push of an army assembled by neighboring countries. In 1860 he attempted a return, but was captured and shot in Trujillo (Honduras). His adventure was fueled by the belief in the superiority of the white and Anglo-Saxon man, which led him to despise the aspirations of the Hispanic peoples and to overestimate the warlike capacity of his mercenaries.

Martelle's book responds more to a historicist purpose than an informative one, so its reading is not so much for the general public as for those specifically interested in William Walker's fulibusterism: an episode, in any case, of convenient knowledge about the Central American past and the relationship of the United States with the rest of the Western Hemisphere.

[Maria Zuppello, Il Jihad ai Tropici. Il patto tra terrorismo islamico e crimine organizzato in America Latina. Paese Edizioni. Roma, 2019. 215 p.]

review / Emili J. Blasco

We usually link jihad with the Middle East. If anything, also with the African Sachel, opening the map to the west, or with the border of Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, opening it to the east. However, Latin America also has a place in this geography. It has it as a place for financing the terrorist struggle - cocaine is a business that the Islamists take advantage of, as happens with heroin in the specific case of the Taliban - and also as a space in which to go unnoticed, off the radar (the Caribbean or Brazilian beaches are the last place that would be imagined as a hiding place for jihadists).

Jihad in the Tropics, by Italian researcher Maria Zuppello, deals precisely with that lesser-known aspect of global jihadism: the caipirinha jihadists, to put it graphically, to emphasize the normality with which these radicalized elements live in the Latin American context, although they are criminal networks more sinister than the name might suggest.

Zuppello's research , which is subtitled "the pact between Islamic terrorism and organized crime in Latin America", deals with various countries, although it is in Brazil where the author locates the main connections with the rest of the region and with the international Structures of various jihadist groups. In particular, she points out the link between the religious leader Imran Hosein, who propagates Salafist doctrines, and the attack against the Bataclan conference room in Paris, since his preaching had a special responsibility in the radicalization of one of the terrorists, Samy Amimour. Zuppello also analyzes the cross-contacts of the Brazilians who were arrested in 2016 in the Hashtag operation, in the final stretch of the preparation for the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro.

Zuppello's book begins with a presentation position Emanuele Ottolenghi, a researcher working at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington think tank. Ottolenghi is an expert on Hezbollah's presence in Latin America, on which he has written numerous articles.

In that presentation, Ottolenghi highlights the partnership established between jihadist elements and certain levels of the Latin American left, especially the Bolivarian left. "The extremist messages differ little from the anti-imperialist revolution rhetoric of the radical left, deeply rooted for decades in Latin America," he says. This explains "the appeal of the Islamic revolution to descendants of the Incas in the remote Andean community of Abancay, a four-hour drive from Machu Picchu, and to Cuban and Salvadoran revolutionaries (now dedicated to spreading Khomeini's word in Central America)."

For Ottolenghi, "the central topic of the red-green alliance between Bolivarians and Islamists is the so-called resistance to U.S. imperialism. Behind this revolutionary rhetoric, however, there is more. The creation of a strategic alliance between Tehran and Caracas has opened the door to Latin America for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and Hezbollah. Venezuela has become a hub for Iran's agents in the region".

Illicit trafficking generates millions of dollars of black money that is laundered through international circuits. The "Lebanese diaspora communities" in areas such as La Guaira (between Venezuela and Colombia), Margarita Island (Venezuela), the free trade zone of Colon (Panama) and the Triple Border (between Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina) are important in this process.

Precisely that Triple Border has been the usual place to refer to when talking about Hezbollah in Latin America. The attacks occurred in Buenos Aires in 1992 and 1994 against the Israeli Embassy and the AMIA, respectively, had their operative origin there and since then, the financial links of that geographic corner with the Shiite extremist group have been frequently documented. Since the arrival of Hugo Chávez to power, there was a convergence between Venezuela and Iran that protected the obtaining of Venezuelan passports by Islamist radicals, who also took over part of the drug trafficking business as Chávez himself involved the Venezuelan state in the cocaine business.

The convergence of interests between organized crime networks in the region and jihadist elements raises the question, according to Zuppello, of whether "Latin America will end up being the new cash machine for financing global jihad", or even "something else: a hideout for fleeing foreign fighters or a new platform for attacks, or both".

One of the specific aspects to which Zuppello refers is the halal sector and its certifications, which is growing exponentially, causing concern among counter-terrorism authorities in various countries, who accuse the sector of concealing terrorist financing and money laundering. The halal meat trade has provided cover for dozens of Iranian meat inspectors, who have permanently settled in the region.

Investigations such as the one carried out in Jihad in the Tropics have led to the recognition of Hezbollah as a terrorist group by several Latin American countries for the first time in 2019.