Iran
Empire of the Mind
Michael Axworthy
2009

One of the very first things you notice after arriving in Iran is just how much damn history they have there. The country is not only awash with the remains of ancient traditions and dynasties but marked by an intense sense of continuity with them. Portraits of martyrs line the highways, families read ancient poetry over dinner, and taxi drivers breathlessly recount the accomplishments of Cyrus the Great. From the Achaemenids to the Zoroastrians, and everything in between, there's a sense that all that's worth seeing in human history has been played out, at scale, on the global stage that is the Iranian Plateau.

This adds up to a rather formidable challenge for any author trying to relate that history, let alone one ambitious enough to tackle it in only a few hundred pages. Indeed, even providing a detailed list of the various emperors, invaders, prophets, and revolutionaries could likely take a small book. Axworthy's goal in Iran is to provide a first-pass introduction to all of Iranian history, meaning individual elements are necessarily shortchanged as a result. Readers seeking a microscopic investigation of the various Greco-Persian wars, or a subtle discussion on the evolution of Shia political theology will need to look elsewhere, as Axworthy's breakneck pace forbids any subject from holding the stage for more than a few dozen pages. Importantly, while Iran does contain an extended overview of modern (that is, post-revolutionary) Iranian politics, readers interested primarily in the last half-century would be far better served by David Crist's The Twilight War (recently reviewed by Dunlop here), or Axworthy's own Revolutionary Iran.

This is hardly a damning criticism, of course. As I mentioned at the outset, Iran has a damn lot of history, the vast majority of which is particularly opaque to most of us outside the country. For those who don't know their Sassanids from their Safavids, Axworthy's panoramic treatment is precisely what's required to get the lay of the land, before delving deeply into any particular focal points.

Dunlop once described this book to me as 'workmanlike', and months after that conversation I still can't come up with a better word for it. Axworthy resists the academic's urge to offer any kind of sweeping historiography and, aside from a handful of speculative theories on the impact of ancient Iranian thought on the development of early Christian doctrine (and some slightly pained references to Iranian poetry, a personal passion of his), sticks closely to a "just the facts, ma'am" recounting of the major episodes in Iranian history. Taken together, Iran resembles something like a particularly high-minded civil service briefing book, perhaps ripped straight from its author's past life in Her Majesty's Foreign and Commonwealth Office. It's an eminently pragmatic style of history-writing: dry at times, but useful throughout.

Indeed, that's probably the role it fills best even in non-governmental life: a single document to bring inductees up to speed with a minimum of flourish or wasted effort. It may seem extravagant to suggest that Axial Age history is an essential part of getting up to speed on a modern country, but there are few countries in the world today which are as extravagantly attuned to their history as Iran. Iran will likely be of little use to professional historians, but it does have real potential to help outsiders understand Iran (and Iranians) better. At a time when Iran is becoming increasingly central to world affairs, that makes Iran potentially a very important book.

The cover image is my own photo, taken at the Nasir al-Mulk mosque in Shiraz, Iran

Utopia for Realists
And How We Get There
Rutger Bregman tr. Elizabeth Manton, 2017

When you think of the Dutch, mountain ranges are rarely the first thing that comes to mind. Yet that was the image I was left with at the end of Utopia for Realists, a policy manifesto by the Dutch journalist Rutger Bregman. A vast alpine landscape, plummeting ravines and soaring peaks, with every summit marked by a small flag flapping defiantly in the face of the winds of the world.

At the risk of suffocating the analogy by explaining it, the altitudes of these mountains correspond to the quality of Utopia as it progresses and the flags to the citations. While Utopia is a decent agglomeration of a great deal of important work, Bregman has, as far as I can tell, absolutely nothing of original value to add and the farther we get from the crests of the work of others, the worse the scenery and more treacherous the territory.

Billed as a bold policy compendium, the ideas in Utopia essentially boil down to Universal Basic Income (more than a third of the book), a shorter workweek, and a global relaxation of border controls, plus a few epicyclic extensions of these. All good ideas in their own right, but all better elucidated elsewhere, by actual researchers. More to the point, none particularly radical. Indeed, the policies, their histories, and even much of the evidence Bregman cites should all be thoroughly familiar to any reader whose revolutionary education extends no further than the opinion pages of a few large newspapers. Despite Bregman's self-praise for his apparently radical thinking, policies that have been detailed on the front cover of The Economist are not shockingly unthinkable.

If these ideas form the brittle skeleton of Utopia, it's the meat of the beast that's truly diseased. The stated mission of the book is the search for utopia, the belief that our society should strive for true greatness. The problem is that Bregman's aspirational utopianism quickly gives way to methodological utopianism, leaving the book little more than a masterclass in confirmation bias. While Bregman praises the work of Esther Duflo and the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (an organisation that I'm absolutely enamoured with) on the importance of statistical rigour and honesty in empirical policy, he fails to take heed of their lessons at any other point in the book, as he races through the headline results of any finding that supports him without the slightest pause for skepticism or closer examination. Besides the undergraduate statistical errors, Bregman resolutely refuses to consider any single result that casts a shadow on his plans. Towards the end of the book, Bregman even offers a brief aside on the dangers of confirmation bias, mentioning a single time he saw a newspaper headline that didn't fit his beliefs about shorter work weeks (importantly, this is not mentioned until over 100 pages after the chapter on the subject) and where the primary lesson appears to be how adroitly he was able to dismiss the conclusion without even needing to read the paper. "Watch out for those who would lead you astray" is advice for children and fanatics, certainly not for policy writers who were praising the virtues of unsentimental empiricism not twenty pages earlier.

It's these contradictions that are the most damning feature of the book. While oversimplification may not appeal to me (nor, I suspect, to most of the audience here), it does serve some purpose when we live in democracies where nearly 40% of adults are functionally illiterate. But Utopia is not a TED talk where a researcher simplifies their work to suit the format. Rather, the frequent contradictions show that Bregman doesn't really grok the logic of the policies that he's peddling and leave the impression that Utopia for Realists is little more than a scrapbook of newspaper op-eds that Bregman agrees with. His original contributions largely amount to the opening and closing exhortations to 'dream big' and 'reach for the stars' when setting public policy, chapters roughly as visionary as a boilerplate high school graduation speech.

More than once, Bregman repeats Hugo's quote, On résiste à l'invasion des armées; on ne résiste pas à l'invasion des idées. Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come. And Bregman is right to do so. These are good policies, policies whose time has come. They deserve more attention. They deserve to be called from the peaks of mountain ranges. They deserve better than this book.

Postscript:
As a rule, I don't like to read other reviews of a book before writing my own. I find it keeps my thoughts clear. However, this time I did come across a breathless review in The Guardian while looking for some biographical details about Bregman. The reviewer, Andrew Anthony, correctly pinned Bregman as "a hybrid that’s reminiscent of the New Yorker’s Malcolm Gladwell". Utopia for Realists is a book for people who read that as a compliment.

The cover image is a photograph of the Himalayas, taken from aboard the International Space Station. Courtesy of NASA.

The Dispensable Nation
American Foreign Policy in Retreat
Vali Nasr, 2014

In The Dispensable Nation, international relations academic and former State Department advisor Vali Nasr tackles one of the wickedest problems in the world with aplomb, producing a sharp and lucid summary which deserves to be required reading for anyone wishing to have an opinion on the modern Middle East. In contrast to Nasr’s other famous book, The Shia Revival (you can read my review here), The Dispensable Nation takes a far more open-ended, forward looking view, though still with a similar (yet broader) aim of understanding recent shifts of power in the Middle East and Central Asia.

Weighing in at a scant 250 pages, The Dispensable Nation certainly qualifies as a whirlwind tour. Where The Shia Revival delivered a laser-focused history of Shia Islam (as relevant to modern policy makers), The Disposable Nation is more of a scattershot, a fraying tapestry which reflects the complexity and confusion inherent in its subject. Rather than polished syllogism or tidy narrative, Nasr presents a kind of guidebook to the region’s complexity, a stream of issues to be aware of and questions to ask, and a framework from which details can be hung in the future.

It’s this willingness to embrace complexity that makes the book such a powerful read. The first few chapters are admittedly less than stellar, but the book consistently improves as it progresses, every chapter building on and enriching those before it. As new players and forces in the Middle East are introduced, Nasr displays the diplomat’s talent for getting inside the heads of the players, painting a rich portrait of the relations and motivations between the groups in the region.

Far more than the sophomoric simplism of which countries ‘don’t like each other’ (leave that to toddlers and presidential candidates), Nasr takes us into details of the internal divisions in the region, explaining why Iranian Shia leaders are involved with Saudi Sunni Hejazi minorities, or why the Pakistani Haqqani Taliban are paying close attention to Beijing’s trade policy in Kashmir, or how Chinese Uyghur minorities have effected Turkish economic policy. Importantly, Nasr avoids the shamefully common pitfall of placing the United States at the centre of all international affairs, and delves into issues that the vast majority of Westerners have never heard of, let alone worried about. It’s this approach, acting more as cartographer than helmsman, that ensures that The Dispensable Nation will remain a valuable guide to the Middle East well after the politics of the day have passed.

Insofar as the book does have an argument, it’s that modern US foreign policy has become too driven by a domestic political calculus incapable of thinking beyond the next election, and that a robust and responsible State Department is necessary if the US is to be capable of the long-term planning required. As a foreign policy expert, Nasr only alludes to the benefits this would bring, and does not clearly explain what such a model would look like, less how it may come about. Every developed country possesses a politically independent central bank, accepting the importance of setting long-term monetary policy without the destructive influence of short-sighted political concerns (personally, I’ve come to agree that a similar model is necessary for tackling climate change, though I’m not entirely sure exactly what form the solution takes there either). That being said, it’s hard to envision a democratic populace surrending any degree of control over their foreign policy, so it’s perhaps for the best that Nasr leaves this as simply a taciturn call for restraint, rather than a concrete proposal to be attacked.

In the absence of such a model, Nasr focuses on what he sees as a chain of important consequences flowing from the politicisation of foreign policy. Most important is a general retreat from diplomacy and an increasing tendency to rely on military force, the latter being faster to produce headlines and to feed the public’s demand for presidents to play the role of maker-of-tough-decisions on the nightly news.

The consequence, detailed in an explosive few chapters (yet deserving of far more work in the future) is a failure to recognise or respond to a historic shift in the balance of global power, viz. the ascendance of China in the Middle East. Not one to let brevity compromise detail, Nasr romps through trade statistics and political headlines, pointing to the tenfold growth of Chinese trade with both would-be hegemons Saudi Arabia and Iran, with a similarly spectacular rise in FDI into Turkey, showing China moving its pieces across the board already.

Safety and certainty in oil lie in variety and variety alone
- Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty

Henry Kissinger has long argued that an understanding of the game of Go (or wéiqí in pinyin Chinese) is vital in understanding Chinese strategic thought. Unlike Chess, Go proceeds not by the concentrated application of force, but the gradual surrounding and suffocation of the enemy. Whilst not calling on Kissinger’s ideas here explicitly, Nasr does note that broader Chinese stragegy reflects a priority on maintaining energy flows, with Chinese investment in Bosphorus-having Turkey complementing an increasingly aggressive posture around the Strait of Malacca, and the construction of natural gas pipelines along the New Silk Road, part of a considered strategy to ensure the gulf oil flow Eastward and to secure the energy that will be required to fuel China's modernisation race.

It would be absurd to think that the United States government is unaware of this, of course. Nasr’s argument is rather that decision-makers lack either the foresight or the political will to realise the lasting effects this could have. In the most insightful look at White House decision making in recent years, The Obama Doctrine, Jeffrey Goldberg conveys a president seeking to break free from a cold war energy-focused Middle East policy. The United States is now largely energy-self sufficient, and a net exporter of oil. While global markets still keep prices in check, it’s correct to say that Middle East oil supplies are not the lifeline they once were.

However, few countries have the resource luxuries of the United States (or the lax environmental regulations required for a large coal-seam gas sector), and Nasr notes that the supreme irony of the White House’s ‘pivot to Asia’ is that leaving China unchecked throughout the Middle East may very well grant it an energy monopoly of huge importance throughout a still oil-dependent Southeast Asia. Once again, Nasr quietly advances the case that these long-run effects are lost in the four-year cycle of presidential elections.^[1]

The entirety of the Middle East in 250 pages is an ambitious meal, to say nothing of adding the future of Asia as dessert. The Dispensable Nation lights an important path, but it will take a gargantuan scholastic effort to pave the road fully. In the mean time, Nasr provides, at the very least, an excellent syllabus, an overview of the issues to know and the quiestions to ask in any future study of the region. Ultimately, The Dispensable Nation, bold as it is, is simply too threadbare to be called a single authoritative resource on the Middle East, and anyone seeking one book to understand the subject will require something far meatier. However, for anyone committed to reading in detail on the Middle East, this book provides an outstanding resource to tie all the details together.

The cover image was taken from the Karakoram China-Pakistan Friendship Highway in the Xinjiang Autonomous of China, home to China's large Uyghur Turkic ethnic community. Sometimes referred to as the Eighth Wonder of the World due to the difficulty of its construction, the highway is a key economic and strategic link between China and its partners in Central Asia. Any beauty and/or desolation in the image is left to the reader to interpret as they see fit. Thanks to Chris Lim for sharing this image on Flickr.

Where Wizards Stay Up Late
The Origins of the Internet
Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, 1996

With more than a passing similarity to the omnipresent and omniscient gods of old, it's hardly surprising that the Internet (and its Old Testament precursor, the ARPANET) comes replete with its fair share of contradictory creation myths. By far the most famous of these, certainly the one I'd been told my entire life until picking up Wizards, is the tale that the ARPANET was created to provide redundant, decentralised communications for the US military in the event of a nuclear war. It was interesting to learn that the purpose of the ARPANET was actually the far more wholesome mission of sharing expensive computing resources between far-flung universities, and indeed that the original network would have been woefully unsuited to the outbreak of war. This fact encapsulates important lessons about our willingness to accept, without evidence, narratives that we find just counterintuitive enough, clickable yet not confronting, shareable yet not shocking. It holds a lesson that's far more important in the Internet of 2017 than the Internet described in Wizards, and is quite easily the most interesting passage in the entire book.

Unfortunately, it appears on the second page of the prologue.

Unlike Tracy Kidder's The Soul a A New Machine, a true engineering ethnography par excellence, Hafner and Lyon researched their subjects from a distance, through interviews conducted decades after the fact, rather than by living with the team and documenting the endeavour from the inside. Without enough technical detail to be considered a truly definitive history, and lacking Kidder's ability to capture the air of excitement that accompanies grand feats of engineering, Wizards is left as little more than a list of names and career milestones, a 300 page compendium of LinkedIn pages with scatted anecdotes for flavour. I struggle to think of a single reader whose time would not be better spent reading The Soul of a New Machine instead.

The cover image shows a replica of Léon Foucault's famous pendulum demonstration, hung in the lobby of MIT's Lincoln Laboratory. Lincoln Lab was one of the premier sites for military science during the Cold War, and the nexus for a great deal of the research leading to the early construction of the Internet.

Syria
A Recent History
John McHugo, 2015

First things first - this is not a book on the Syrian Civil War. In an age where the highest editorial virtue appears to be velocity rather than depth, even avid news consumers could be understood for failing to remember that Syria has played a vital role in world history for centuries, and deserves a treatment which extends earlier than the most recent election cycle.

Nevertheless, McHugo's work is (sub)titularly a modern history, so it bears asking what that means, precisely. Other than a few initial pages on the latter years of the Ottoman regime, the book begins at the end of the First World War and the beginning of the French Mandate. This window seems appropriate, neither so narrow as to devolve into wonkishness and political screed, yet not so broad as sacrifice its analytical resolution.

Reminding me of Michael Axworthy's similarly scoped Revolutionary Iran, McHugo's greatest accomplishment in Syria is an ability to 'zoom in' on political processes to the point where the players can be represented as more than silly caricatures. Rather than statements along the lines of "Syria doesn't like Egypt anymore" or "Alawis run the government" (each of a level of fatuity beneath anyone other than a small child or powerful politician), McHugo provides granularity down to the level of individual players, detailing their personal interests and patronage networks and their consequences. This is an important theme throughout the entire book, but nowhere more so than his discussion of the Assad family and their close circle of power, and the way that the maintenance of these patronage networks has accelerated the country's slide into corruption and war.

Unfortunately, so deft is McHugo at bringing the microscope of history to bear on the Levant that it makes his failings farther afield all the more glaring. To his credit, McHugo is a lifelong student of Syria and not a scholar of international relations in the abstract, yet it's still jarring to hear him talk of a monolithic 'Russia' or 'America'. At points, this tendency is made worse by McHugo's subscription to the strand of anti-Zionism particular to the British Left which, without commenting on it's ultimate merits, has the unfortunate effect of simplifying any political analysis that comes near.

It's for this reason that the stories McHugo tells best are those of Syria's internal politics. Of particular note are his parallel histories of the country's two most powerful institutions, the military and the Renaissance Movement (or as you almost certainly know it, the Ba'ath Party. What a difference branding can make). McHugo is a masterful storyteller here, detailing the circumstances that gave rise to these institutions, and tracing the sad histories of their decay and capture by authoritarian rulers.

Ultimately, Syria: A Recent History is, rather unsurprisingly, a recent history of Syria. The focus is tight, and McHugo does not attempt to provide a sweeping analysis of autocracies or political Islam. Indeed, when tasked with placing Syria within a broader international context he often falls short, forced to take the actions of outside states and politicians as exogenous, a kind of historical deus ex machina. In the hands of a less knowledgeable and less talented author, this would be a recipe for the kind of bland myopia more befitting a foreign service briefing note than anything fit for public consumption, but McHugo posesses the talent to keep his book accessible and enjoyable, without giving up control of the microscope. Syria is unlikely to spark a fire for those with no interest in the region, and liable to prove too academic for those looking for nothing more than a novelisation of the civil war. However, for readers seeking a serious introduction to the political landscape of of post-independence Syria, it will be tough to beat Syria: A Recent History.

This book comes to me from Shakespeare and Company, an incredible English-language bookstore on Paris's Left Bank. As this book provides an essential lesson for the context of the Syrian Civil War, may the store's motto, "Be Not Inhospitable to Strangers Lest They Be Angels in Disguise", serve as a reminder on how to deal with the country's refugee crisis.

The cover image is courtesy of Syria Civil Defence, the heroic White Helmets of the civil war.

Theories of International Politics and Zombies
Daniel Drezner, 2011

Obvious as it may seem once stated, it's easy to forget a simple fact about professional academics: They're mostly nerds^[1]. Dan Drezner, professor of international politics at Tufts and member of the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations, demonstrates this plainly in his witty tutorial Theories of International Politics and Zombies.

The book is a short, single-session-length introduction to the dominant paradigms of modern international relations theory; each explained through their application to the rise of the living dead. Each chapter briefly introduces the concepts and history of a particular paradigm, before applying it to the questions of how surviving humans would interact with encroaching zombies, as well as with any other uninfected states.

Drezner does occasionally use his device to hark back to contemporary issues, such as the lessons that zombie cure research have to offer for the free-rider problem of CO2 emissions, but the focus of the book remains very much on the issue of a zombie outbreak. Indeed, Drezener's extended asides on zombie sociology or the importance of headshots (replete with rigorous citations of George Romero movies, lest the reader simply think these issues existed only in Drezner's imagination), are what make the book such a thoroughly irreverent, nerdy read.

Whimsy aside, Zombies still serves as a satisfactory introduction to international relations theory. All the major modern paradigms are introduced and covered fairly, or at least as fairly as one has right to expect from a short, lighthearted work. The chapter on neoconservatism, in particular, deserves to be required reading, if only to quell the rampant abuse the term seems to take in internet comment sections (and for Drezner's crack that the neoconservative response to zombie outbreak may be to "invade Iraq again out of force of habit", which stands out as the book's funniest and most self-deprecating joke).

A fair introduction to international relations for the complete beginner and a fun afternoon read for the more well-read on the subject, Theories of International Politics and Zombies has something for everyone, and is the best written and most well-rounded short non-fiction I've read in a very long while.

Credit for this book goes to Dunlop's sister, who gifted it to me along with the considerably denser and less playful Islam and Capitalism , by French Marxist sociologist Maxime Rodinson, to be reviewed shortly.

The cover image is a mural by the Norwegian artist Per Krohg which adorns a wall of the UN Security Council chamber in New York. It shows people working together as a phoenix rises from the ashes, symbolising the rebirth of the international order following World War Two, or alternatively, a zombie pandemic.

Days of Rage
America's Radical Underground, The FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence
Bryan Burrough, 2015

One of my absolute favourite places on the internet is The Atavist Magazine. A rare cut above the fleeting distractions of thinkpiece journalism, the Atavist publishes focused, polished gems of long-form journalism, intensely researched and powerfully written, on fascinating yet esoteric stories from long forgotten history. Bryan Burrough’s Days of Rage reminded me of The Atavist in more ways than one. Interesting, thoroughly researched, and certainly well written, Burrough's subject here is the 1970's heyday of the American radical underground and the larger than life characters who inhabited it.

The old revolutionaries of the early 70’s seem a world apart from us today, remembered condescendingly as minor inconveniences or mere vandals, if at all. Perhaps we moved on to more exciting times. Perhaps the Western hegemon simply can’t tolerate the memory that some of its sons and daughters wanted so desperately to bring the whole thing crashing down. Perhaps (as seemed more and more likely as I progressed through Days of Rage), the whole episode just seemed too bizarre to be real. And to be sure, the story is certainly a bizarre one. LSD-fueled revolutionary orgies, Harvard professors breaking out of prison, FBI assassinations, former Black Panthers trying to set up a world government in Northern Africa, and Puerto Rican terrorists on the floor of Congress are only a handful of the wonderful anecdotes that Burrough’s research turns up. These are all told with an excellent hand for narrative, coloured with painstaking detail from interviews with every major character still alive, free, and willing to tell their tale.

Burrough’s research goes far beyond storytelling though. More than simply a polished collation of past work, Days of Rage represents a genuinely original contribution to the public understanding of 70’s revolutionary terrorism, as Burrough unearths new details and conspiracies. Of particular note is the discovery of Weatherman’s secret “bomb guru”, which Burrough has described in an excerpt of Days of Rage published in Vanity Fair. Perhaps most important is Burrough’s insistence on holding revolutionaries to account, reminding his readers that however they may have sought to be remembered, his subjects were genuine terrorists. The accounting of Weatherman’s dreams of bombing army bases and subway stations casts them in a harsher, but more honest light than the tales of them as bathroom-bombers. On a topic bound up in so much posturing and regret, an impartial historian is needed to prevent the script being rewritten by the players, or by moralistic commentators who let their halo biases wash away the sins of well-written murderers.

At times, Burrough's sharp focus risks isolating his subjects from their historical context. The subtitular domain of the book is the left-wing radical underground of the 1970's, but focusing on this alone obscures how that movement was posed as a response to right-wing terrorists of the KKK and their ilk. Already well over 500 pages of intensely researched work, we can hardly blame Burrough for drawing the line somewhere, but even an extra chapter from secondary sources would have helped to insulate against any claims of bias here. Similarly, while far from uncritical of the FBI, the investigation of law enforcement takes a back seat (I suspect mainly out of a lack of willing penitents) to the story of those they were (at times overzealously) chasing. Perhaps because they're always framed in response to the actions of the various revolutionary groups (and thus diffused throughout the book, whereas each revolutionary group gets their own chapter), the FBI never feel like main characters. Contrast this with the richly detailed story of the FBI in Lawrence Wright’s 9/11 investigation The Looming Tower (which Dunlop has reviewed here, with my review forthcoming), who admittedly benefit from having a single adversary and a clearer claim to being the good guys.

It was all a mistake. People weren’t ready.
- Sekou Odinga

While Days of Rage is a triumph of investigative reporting, Burrough’s narrative approach means that it’s not really an academic work. Readers looking for research on the psychology of radicalisation or the history of militant vigilantism in American black ghettoes will need to look elsewhere. But despite this intention, Days of Rage still has a great deal to contribute to the academic literature. The historical distance allows Burrough to trace the entire course of his characters lives, not only their complaints and their crimes but their reflections and regrets as well; important acts that are all too often omitted from the terrorist script. Days of Rage makes a valuable contribution to an important topic, wrapped up in a fascinating tale of a forgotten history, and I would not hesitate to recommend it to anyone I know.

The cover image shows a modern tribute to the Black Panther Party for Self Defense in downtown Los Angeles. The bicycle in front carries a commercialised Mao Tse-Tung satchel bag. The thought of the Black Panther Party and the revolutionary writings of Mao were two of the largest sources of inspiration for the 1970s radical underground. The image is provided courtesy of
archie4oz on flickr, under a CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license.

Condemned to Crisis
Will the relationship between Australia and Indonesia always be volatile?
Ken Ward, 2015

Another Lowy Institute monograph from the publishing initiative that gave us The Embarrassed Colonialist, Condemned to Crisis seeks to explain the fractious relationship between Australia and Indonesia, as seen through the eyes of foreign policy veteran, Ken Ward.

Despite the forward-looking subtitle, Condemned is mostly diagnostic, with little in the way of prognosis or prescription. Ward's priority is to lay down a solid description of the relationship, as well as the politics - on both sides of the Timor Sea - responsible for its tensions. Ward takes two key drivers, Australian politicking and Indonesian intransigence, and uses these to build a framework to explain some of the more public crises between the two nations in recent years. The result is a work that is simple yet focused, and which succeeds at making some sense of both Australian and Indonesian foreign policy, though with little applicability outside its specific domain.

The first pillar of this framework is recognising the true origins of most Australian policy regarding Indonesia. When campaigning for the Australian Prime Ministership in 2013, Tony Abbott promised that his foreign policy would be "more Jakarta, less Geneva", a biting rebuke of the Gillard government's futile bid for a seat on the UN Security Council^[1]. Despite this pledge, Ward shows that the Abbott government was merely one more in a long line of Australian governments allowing their Indonesian policy to be driven exclusively by domestic political concerns. Rather than Jakarta or Geneva, Australian policy remained mostly Canberra.

Indeed, Abbott would soon aggravate Indonesia with his policy of towing back boatloads of asylum seekers, a key component of his six point plan to Stop the Boats. Accidental incursions into Indonesian waters by Royal Australian Navy vessels involved in the towbacks only further inflamed tensions. When Abbott tried to salvage his failing immigration policy with a campaign to buy Indonesian fishing boats, directly interfering the Indonesian economy without consulting Jakarta, the Indonesian government certainly didn't feel like a valued partner in Australia's regional policy.

We can't lay the blame entirely at the foot of one political party of course, no matter how much that seems to be the natural democratic tendency. On the other side of the parliamentary aisle, the Australian Labor Party infuriated Indonesia in 2011 by banning live cattle exports, a response to domestic outrage over a television exposé of slaughtering practices in Indonesian abattoirs. Paul McCartney has famously said that "if slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegetarian". As a vegetarian myself (and as a direct result of this Visiting Enki project in unrelenting autodidacticism^[2]), I certainly hope that's the case, but I can't say for certain. What I do know is that for one brief moment in 2011, Indonesian slaughterhouses had glass walls, and it seemed to turn all Australians into marginally ethical eaters, at the very least. Despite the commendable moral stance behind the live export ban, the fact remains that it was enacted for a domestic audience, a piece of foreign policy set with utterly no regard for foreign nations. That the ban came just as poor Indonesians were preparing to purchase expensive beef for the annual Lebaran feast only confirmed that the problems of Indonesians were only a minor concern in Australia's Indonesian policy.

Ofcourse, inflexible Indonesian politics also plays a large part in straining the relationship with Australia, and this is the second element of Ward's framework. Though Indonesia is a disparate coalition of ethnolinguistic minorities, its citizens possess a strong sense of unified national identity, born in the centralised and standardised education system of Dutch colonial rule^[3], and later amplified by anti-colonialist revolutionaries who identified political power with the number of citizens they could lay claim to. As with many members of the Non-Aligned Movement, Indonesian politicians have long made electoral hay with demands for great-power status while loudly decrying the influence of other nations. President Sukarno's famous "Go to hell with your aid!" response to US Cold War policy remains a famous expression of this idea all around the globe. Indonesia's status as the most populous and economically powerful nation in South-East Asia only compounds the sense of disrespect that many Indonesians feel, as "a nation of coolies and a coolie amongst nations", as expressed again by President Sukarno.

Ward makes an interesting claim that Indonesia's revolutionary history makes it difficult, if not impossible, for Indonesian leaders to make progress in their negotiations with other nations. Calm and compromising diplomacy does not seem fitting for politicians seeking to inherit Sukarno's rebellious mantle. It's certainly a believable suggestion, but the focus of Condemned is policy rather than sociology, and Ward is far more interested in the consequences of this phenomenon than its causes, or even defending his claims about its existence. Anyone seeking an explanation of Indonesian nationalism should read Imagined Communities (review forthcoming), anyone wanting to understand how Indonesian nationalism effects the stories they see in the newspaper would be well served with Condemned.

These two ideas are the complete theoretical basis of Condemned. With the rest of the book, Ward uses this framework to analyse the major political crises between the two nations in recent years, providing a detailed view of the specifics of these issues while also serving as a tutorial on how to apply the template to newspaper stories in the future.

This simple and specific approach is Condemned's primary virtue, as well as its principal failing. Focused on policy rather than academia, Ward's analysis has little application to other international relationship, and offers little of the deep understanding necessary to make significant change to Australian-Indonesian diplomacy. Though Ward sacrifices complexity, he does so to purchase parsimony, and the result is a short, sharp, readable work, which still provides definite value within it's intended domain. Readers with prestigious degrees in international relations (and I know Visiting Enki has a few of them) will likely find little new in Condemned. However, it provides an accessible overview of an important and little-understood subject, and the value of that is not to be overlooked. Short and highly readable, Condemned would make an excellent addition to Australian high school curricula, and is a productive, albeit not profound, way for anyone to spend an afternoon

The cover image is my own work, a photo of the Buddha statues at the Borobudur temple in Central Java. The statues are headless as the neck is a natural structural weak point, not due to intentional damage. Yogyakarta, the nearby city, is a must see for anyone visiting Indonesia.

Command and Control
The Story of Nuclear Weapons and the Illusion of Safety
Eric Schlosser, 2014

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world

It took me a long time to get around to reading this book. Over and over I'd pick it up in bookstores, only to sigh and place it back on the shelf. A history of nuclear weapons seemed interesting to be sure, but it was too distant, too academic, too irrelevant to the present day. Perhaps I'd read one of Schlosser's excellent New Yorker features on the subject, but 500 pages was a touch extravagant.

Once I finally gave in, the depth of my ignorance became radically, fascinatingly, terrifyingly apparent. Command and Control is shown to be an unnervingly ironic title, as Schlosser shines a light on just how little we've had of either, and leaves the reader simply awestruck by the fact that we've been so lucky thus far.

Command and Control unfolds in two interwoven strands. The first is a conventional yet compelling history of nuclear weapons. The second is a harrowing account of the 1980 Damascus Incident, when a Titan II intercontinental ballistic missile exploded in its silo under the soil of rural Arkansas, throwing its 9 megaton W53 warhead hundreds of feet into the air, though thankfully without detonating it. Bill Clinton would be much more famous as the governor who lost half of Arkansas if it had.

Throughout the book, Schlosser draws heavily on Charles Perrow's seminal work Normal Accidents. While it may be simple to attribute the explosion at Damascus to a dropped socket from an improperly sized socket wrench, Perrow's study of "trivial events in non-trivial systems" regards the cause as an inevitable result of the architecture of the system. Key to Perrow's risk typology is the idea of tightly coupled systems, where, during a failure mode, system components can interact in new and unforeseen ways, and in a way that doesn't permit simple intervention at one point by a human operator. As Perrow states, "No one dreamed that when X failed, Y would also be out of order, and the two failures would interact so as to both start a fire and silence the fire alarm". For compelling examples, it's worth checking out the (surprisingly captivating) YouTube channel of the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, which features detailed reconstructions of major industrial accidents, and the complexity that underlies them.

While this concept underlies the entire book, Schlosser fails to note it explicitly until the epilogue. This makes Command and Control one of the rare books where I suggest reading the epilogue first, as the rest of the book is far more engaging when equipped with the appropriate framework for understanding the events taking place. Schlosser quotes Scott Sagan, professor of political science at Stanford and special assistant to the Joint Chiefs of Staff on strategic nuclear policy, that "Nuclear weapons may well have made deliberate war less likely, but the complex and tightly coupled nuclear arsenal we have constructed has simultaneously made accidental war more likely", a disquieting thought indeed.

When thinking of nuclear weapons, perhaps the most obvious instance of a complex system is the weapon itself. Schlosser shows his ground work through the entire book, but nowhere more than when discussing the engineering details that less insightful authors would have readily abstracted away. Armed with a battery of interviews with senior engineers from Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories, Schlosser gives not only the interesting details of exactly what lies within the belly of the bomb but, more importantly, an idea of how they can fail. Without a doubt, nuclear weapons - and US nuclear weapons in particular - are some of the most carefully engineered devices on the planet. Firewalls are placed, safety switches are set, key components of the firing system are physically separated to prevent them interacting. But the very nature of accidents is that they occur outside, often well outside, the remit of normal operation. Physical damage can smash together two circuit boards that were supposed to be air-gapped, crossing wires that were never supposed to meet. In extreme cases, one failure can defeat multiple safety systems. A fire sustained by jet fuel can not only melt the safety switches of a bomb, it can then discharge the capacitors, simulating a firing signal.

Above all, the lesson of normal accident theory is that complex systems rarely permit simple solutions. Knowing the risks of fire, the US Air Force adopted a policy of removing the locking pins from bombs during takeoff and landing, permitting them to be jettisoned away from the plane's burning wreckage during the most dangerous stages of flight. However, when Fortuna closes a door, Eris all too often opens a window, and the policy has resulted in the accidental bombing (with the nuclear cores removed, thankfully) of the US mainland on two occasions, as crew-members clutched at the manual release handle for support during turbulence.

Zooming out a level, Schlosser shows us that engineering is not an island (as much as every engineer I've ever met sorely wishes it was) and that these design choices are part of larger systems, both operational and political. Essential maintenance and upgrading of existing weapons falls by the wayside in a congressional environment where shiny new designs are the path to publicity, and poor maintenance on complex systems introduces all manner of unanticipated failure modes. In parallel, if the value of nuclear weapons lies in their capacity as a deterrent, they must be relied on to launch the moment they're needed, and this mindset accounts for a great deal of military intransigence to new safety features. In fact, for a full decade after locks were installed on the US ICBM fleet (a radical idea, I know), the Air Force insisted that they all be set to '00000000', in order to avoid the risk that crews would be stuck unable to launch if the need ever came.

In the words of the game theorist Oskar Morgenstern, "The human mind cannot construct something that is infallible... The laws of probability virtually guarantee [a nuclear] accident". As Schlosser notes, nuclear weapons have, thus far, had a 100% safety rate, at least as regards actual core detonation. The sobering companion to this statistic is that, by Schlosser's calculation, hundreds of thousands of people may live in the one-bomb gap between 100% and 99.99857%.

Every man, woman, and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness.

Whilst Schlosser makes chillingly clear the impact of a failure in the electromechanical systems of nuclear destruction, he then notes that these risks pale in comparison to those inherent in their political systems. As the bomb became the centrepiece of cost-efficient military deterrence on both sides of the Cold War, the risk of extinction, accidental or deliberate, became a very real one for our species. True to the book's title, Schlosser talks in depth about the nuclear command systems of the United States, and the terrifying definiteness they possessed. In a recent article in POLITICO, Princeton researcher Bruce Blair notes the power of the presidency in times of nuclear crisis, going so far as to describe the office as that of a "nuclear monarch". To be sure, this is more a function of ballistics tahn of politics - the missile flight time between Russia and New York affords little time for sober democracy - but the result is the same. Of particlar concern is the US blueprint for armageddon, the Single Integrated Operational Plan (or SIOP). A plan so brutal that even Henry Kissinger, the quintessential realpolitik apparatchik, referred to it as a "horror strategy". In short, the SIOP provided the president with two options: launch nothing, or launch everything. Until a redraft under the Reagan administration, at the conclusion of the Cold War, limited strikes were not an option. At the command of the president, thousands of warheads would destroy every military base and civilian city in the USSR.

The logic behind the SIOP, popularly known as Mutually Assured Destruction has taken several names through its history. Massive retaliation. The atomic blitz. Peace through strength. The Samson option. It's likely thanks to this that we've managed to last nearly seventy years in the atomic bipolar age without an attempt at a first strike. The political scientist Elspeth Rostow even suggested that the bomb be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Callous though it may seem, the game theoretic foundations are as solid as the pillars of a Philistine temple, but with similarly tragic consequences when toppled. What Command and Control reveals is that this safety from intentional destruction may have been purchased at the cost of enormous risk of accidental annihilation, the inevitable consequence of normal accidents in vastly dangerous systems.

We have...made accidental war more likely

If a ballistic missile is a good example of a tightly coupled system, the holistic political-military-technological nuclear system is a brilliant one. When a faulty radar in Greenland mistakes the moon for a salvo of Soviet missiles or a broken chip confuses a test message for a launch warning, only minutes exist to determine whether the attack is real or not. Until The Cuban Missile Crisis, no hotline existed between Washington and Moscow, no potential to de-escalate a crisis. In order to defend against electronic hijacking, missiles can not be diverted or deactivated once launched. Once the ball starts to roll, it can not be stopped.

Like any wicked problem, the situation resists even the cleverest attempts to nullify it. Ronald Reagan's Star Wars program (the Strategic Defense Initiative, if you insist), was intended to defend against an attack, to give the United States more time to come to a sober decision when it mattered most. In reality, the program would never have been able to deal with more than a few dozen missiles, to defend against what remained following an American first strike, and would likely have actually increased the risk of war, with Soviet General Secretary Yuri Andropov going so far as to publicly call the plan 'insane' (ironic, given the fact that the Soviet Perimiter system operated through Andropov's entire term). For nations with limited stockpiles, credible deterrence relies on a broad distribution of weapons, impossible to wipe out in a single stroke, but more likely to be stolen by terrorists or insurgents. When belligerents are in proximity, the exact location of nuclear sites become vital in purchasing the time needed for a credible response. Anyone moderately familiar with the geography of Pakistan will know what parts of the country are furthest from the Indian border, and understand the risks of decentralised nuclear sites there. The rest of you will likely sleep easier if you don't figure it out.

Which brings this to the question of just how can we manage these dangers? In the famous essay Do Artifacts Have Politics, Langdon Winner wrote that nuclear weapons could never be managed with a democratic spirit, that "the internal social system of the bomb must be authoritarian; there is no other way". Nuclear weapons and everything that surrounds them are held in the tightest possible control by the governments that possess them. In the United States, nuclear secrets are "born secret", classified automatically by legislation, rather than by conventional review. In the world of cryptography, this is an idea known as "security by obscurity". The reputation of that idea in computer security circles goes a long way in explaining some of the more baffling items in Schlosser's catalogue of nuclear errors, and yet nobody in their right mind would suggest turning nuclear secrets, let alone control, to the general populace.

Thus the question of nuclear control remains, and becomes increasingly pressing. If more democracy if not the answer, perhaps the answer lies in the opposite direction. In 1946, 54% of Americans agreed that the United Nations should have sole control over nuclear weapons, including those of the US. A manifesto for international control, One World or None, became an international bestseller. Even the ardent pacifist Bertrand Russell argued that the UN should rain nuclear fire on the Soviet Union, and any other state which sought to develop weapons of its own.

That moment has passed now, and the multipolar order has taken over, sustained first by our fear, later our apathy. The question of how to manage it remains, but no good solutions exist. Command and Control is a first-rate work of history and a damn fine guide to complex risk, but its lasting value lies in Schlosser's chilling reminder that these weapons are more than simply curiosities of a different era. Command and Control may not be a book that interests everyone, but the world would be a safer, more sober place if it were.

The cover image is taken from U.S. Military footage of the Desert Rock IV exercise, conducted in parallel with the Dog test detonation of Operation Tumbler-Snapper. It shows U.S. Marines ordered to walk towards a 19 kiloton detonation, in order to test the effect that nuclear weapons would have on the psychological willingness of enemy soldiers. Many of these marines suffered severe radiation poisoning, as detailed in a brilliant piece by the Center for Investigative Reporting. Much like us, they incorrectly believed that nuclear weapons were safe.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Jane Jacobs, 1961

As an Australian, I'm used to living in the land that urbanism forgot. Australian cities were mostly founded in the post-industrial age, unconstrained by the tightness of medieval city walls or the cost of purchasing land from local owners (Australia does not have a great history when it comes to respecting indigenous land rights). Moreover, the vast majority of Australia's development has taken place in the post-automobile era, and after removing pseudostates like Luxembourg, we rank third in the world for motor vehicles per capita. All of this combines to give Australia some of the lowest density, least walkable, least mixed use cities in the world. Sydney, where I both Dunlop and I have formerly lived, has become a global laughing stock, a shining example of some of the most regressive (and outright corrupt) urban design on the planet, and there seems to be little political will to change any of this.

Of course, this last paragraph begs the question. We need a model of good urban design before we can suppose to point out poor examples. From whence does that model come? Countless restatements of that question have come to the same answer: it comes from The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

Such is the impact of Death and Life that, to paraphrase Whitehead, it is not entirely unfair to say that all work on urban planning since 1961 can best be characterised as a series of footnotes to Jacobs. Death and Life came after decades of urban planning as a branch of architecture, the focus on the majestic skyscrapers rather than the slums left in their shadows, the grand highways and bridges built with no attention paid to the communities that stood in their way. Nobody personified this tradition more than Robert Moses (The Power Broker, Caro's famous biography of Moses, is high on my list), the modernist master builder of New York City. Originally a broadside against this architectural model of urban design, Death and Life retains its importance more than half a century after its initial publication and remains the bedrock that a great deal of urban theory is still rooted in today.

The power of Jacobs's sociological approach to urban planning owes largely to her unique style, which breezily wanders between poetic anthropology and detailed engineering. The radicalism of Death and Life stems from the chapters written simply ex visu of urban life, the descriptions of the delicate 'sidewalk ballet' observable from the author's stoop. Yet Jacobs is no hopeless romantic, and the book would not have nearly the same impact if not for the work elucidating the finer points of housing project finance and red light timing systems, and this dual approach is one of the many features that makes the book a classic. The dualism of this method cements the core thesis: Urban planning must acknowledge the impact of the environment on the communities within it, without devolving into nothing but the tectonic study of the built environment.

Of course, Death and Life is more than simply style subsuming substance. The other feature that made it a classic is the raw fact that it was a truly pathbreaking book for urban planning, introducing a number of insights that seemed radical at the time, but are seen as thoroughly commonsense today. Like a Schrödinger for the urban planning profession, Jacobs is one of the first people to actually elucidate the issue of what is a city, and why it matters. Unlike suburbs or small towns, cities are, by definition, full of strangers. Any attempt to replicate more primitive communities in a modern city is bound to either fail entirely, or to shatter the totality of the city into little more than a disappointing assortment of monotonous distinct suburbs, sharing little more than having their offices all located in the same place (this being the approach favoured in places such as Los Angeles, or Australia).

Rebelling from this prescription for failure, Jacobs makes an impassioned case for the value of a vibrant city of strangers. None of the answers to the greatest questions facing our species have ever come, or will ever come, out of the desolate homogeneity of suburbia. The rich tapestry of a diverse community of strangers not only allows us to broaden our horizons, it frees us from our uniform allotments of race and class, from the entanglements and embarrassments of having every neighbour know our every move. If we side with Fromm on the last point, the conclusion is clear: Stadtluft macht frei, as much as it ever did.

Once we sight the vista that we're seeking, the question naturally turns to one of navigation, and it's at this point that Death and Life gains the technocratic balance that made it a classic. Jacobs identifies that the central feature of a city, the places where its citizens interact freely and without barrier, are not its buildings or blocks, but its streets. She paints an inspiring vision of the 'sidewalk ballet', of all kinds of people coming and going at all times of the day, heading to every destination imaginable, for every reason imaginable. The entire complexity of every want and need of our species, not the regimented march of office workers observed in the suburbs. This, in a scene, is the vitality of the city. To this end, the single most important attribute for any city is mixed use, and the most lasting section of Death and Life is Jacobs's discussion on how to bring this about.

In order to have true mixed use, every part of a city must serve at least two primary functions, to be a destination for people at all times of the day. Note the importance of being a destination, somewhere that people actively seek out. A residential suburb with a few shops that serve only the local residents is not a mixed use district. The partitioned city, the post-automobile zoning model of cleaving cities into cores of offices surrounded by sprawling suburbs is the single worst way we could build a community, and yet it's the way we build cities all over the world.

In the partitioned city, business districts are left desolate and dangerous on nights and weekends, with no crowds on the street to deter would-be criminals. Government subsidised mortgages encourage developers to build oceans of monotonous housing developments, further and further away from the urban core. Pheidippidean distances eradicate natural human powered mobility, and anaemic population density makes public transport infeasible. The suburban population readily gorges on deadly cars and toxic oil (both eagerly subsidised by national governments), spewing poison into the air and propping up petro-despots around the globe. Strict delineation of single-use districts gives way to predictable transport patterns, quickly codified into eight-lane highways and damn the (predominately poor) communities who must be bulldozed to clear the path. The vast majority of citizens move around by cars, dangerous steel boxes (hermetically sealed to protect them from the exhaust of the other cars) and are wholly excluded from the human contact with strangers that is supposed to define a city. Most retail and entertainment takes place in suburban shopping centres, pre-fab monoliths protruding from the tarmac wasteland of parking spaces that feed them. Built solely for convenience, never a true destination in their own right, these shopping centres stand abandoned most of the week, and survive only on brief rushes of traffic during weekends and late night shopping. The only businesses that can survive in this environment are the economy-of-scale, low-cost, high-turnover, no-risk megachains.

Now that last paragraph (and perhaps a few of those before it) may seem extreme, and I'll admit that there's a certain atavistic reward to polemic. But it also contains the filament that burns on every single page of Death and Life: Cities matter. From technological progress, to climate change and petro-dictators, through to obesity or the simple struggle of finding a decent cup of coffee, cities matter. Jane Jacobs not only recognised that, she had an extraordinary vision of what to do about it. And at a time when more than half the people in the world live in them, it's not a message we can afford to ignore any longer.

Shout out to Abbeys's Books in Sydney, where I picked this up, and many thanks to Dunlop, who first introduced me to it.

Innovative State
How New Technologies Can Transform Government
Aneesh Chopra, 2014

Like too many public policy books, Innovative State suffers the problem of simultaneously being both too long, and too short. Too long because, once the scaffold of Chopra's case is laid out, much of the book consists of filling it with examples that don't actually drive new insights. Too short because Chopra's keen eye for history lets him hint at some more fundamental, transformational ideas about the role of government in the technological age, which are unfortunately not fully developed, and left as little more than hints.

More than twenty years ago, Jim Pinkerton wrote What Comes Next, an attempt to start the conversation about the changing role of government in the information age. At the time, Pinkerton's book was derided by reviewers, most using language such as 'extreme', 'science fiction', or (my personal favourite) 'cybernetic jargon'. Two decades later, Innovative State serves as a field dispatch from the world those reviews said would never come.

One of the neatest concepts from Pinkerton's book, now picked up by Chopra, is the idea of government as an operating system for society. It's a shame that the concept is used only once as a throwaway line in Innovative State because I think that, with a bit more fleshing out, the concepts of computer operating systems design have some genuine insight to provide on the functional roles and workings of the modern state. Technological neophytes would be well served here by reading Neal Stephenson's masterpiece In the Beginning... Was the Command Line for a wonderful introduction to the workings of operating systems, and paleophytes should take the time to read it as well, if only to enjoy what is surely the single greatest piece of writing in existence on the topic of computer design.

At their very core, operating systems serve two principal functions. They manage shared resources, and they provide valuable abstractions for commonly used functions. Not every single programmer wants to replicate the functionality to write data to a magnetic disc, so they're happy to outsource that work to a single 'SAVE' utility provided by their operating system. Providing a central repository for these commonly used functions enables individual programmers to focus on what they're actually experts at, and the powerful modern app ecosystem is the result. In much the same way, having a government helps me avoid the burden of needing to negotiate separate "let's not steal from each other" contracts with everyone I meet, and this is the necessary framework for the free and open transfer of capital and labour in the modern economy. See Bagehot's Postulates of the English Political Economy for the best concise expression of the importance of this idea. The irony of the modern technolibertarian culture is that a group of people who owe their livelihoods to the existence of shared abstractions fail to realise that the concept was still a good idea when it was invented thousands of years ago.

As for the management of shared resources, the analogy to government is fairly obvious. In public choice economics, public goods are taken to be those which are both non-excludable (non-payers can't realistically be excluded) and non-rivalrous (one individual's consumption does not substantially reduce the amount available for others). National defence, highways, and low Carbon emissions are all canonical examples of public goods, though one of those might appear in the economic literature more often than it's acknowledged in government policy. By providing these common resources, government can act not only as a distributor but a facilitator, an enabler of individual ingenuity, allowing private enterprise to generate the diverse solutions required for complex problems. Chopra understands the underlying logic of public goods, and cleverly casts the current push for technology platforms in government as the next generation of this classic idea. At the same time, he remains clear that the historical context does not diminish the radical changes made possible by the torrent of information now available to every citizen, and that's what makes this an exciting book to read.

Along these lines, Innovative State hints at the potential for technology to expand Hoover and Wilson's dreams of the associative state, but the idea is far too vast for this book and is not pursued through to its conclusion. Chopra is neither the Max Weber nor the William Blackstone (that would be Benjamin Wittes, in my humble opinion) of the information age, but he is ahead of his time in raising the questions that will be answered by those greats in years to come.

Much appreciation here for the magnificent Strand Books in New York. In a city packed with enough sights to fill a lifetime, Strand Books stands out as a must see.

The Embarrassed Colonialist
Australia Must Come to Terms With its Role as a Former Colonial Master and Revive its Engagement With PNG
Sean Dorney, 2016

I love these Penguin Specials. For those of you who don't hang around bookshops as often as I do, Penguin Specials are an Australian imprint of short, sharp, tightly focused monographs, printed cheap and sold for a few dollars. Of particular note is this series written by members of the Lowy Institute, a highly regarded Australian foreign policy think tank.

The Embarrassed Colonialist deals with Australia's uncomfortable relationship with Papua New Guinea, and the challenges and promises that await the two in the coming decades. Few people, even few Australians, are aware that Australia is one of the few countries in history that has played the part of both servant and master in the colonial drama, having annexed Papua in the late 19th Century, and taking a League of Nations mandate over New Guinea at the conclusion of the First World War.

The tawdry rule of kings is a painfully incongruous memory for a country that places so much of its national pride in its multiculturalism, and which still nurses a bitter taste from its experience with British rule. The resulting treatment, a collective submission to amnesia, helps explain why PNG, Australia's closest neighbour and largest recipient of aid, does not feature on a single Australian school curriculum, is not home to a single foreign correspondent, and is treated as little more than a racist joke by most Australian media. These days, only a handful of Australians know anything about PNG beyond the sensationalised tabloid stories of crime in Port Moresby, the capital city. Few Australians born since PNG independence in 1975 even realise that PNG was once an Australian colony.

One of the Australians who does realise, of course, is Sean Dorney, a veteran journalist who spent over forty years living amongst the 600 islands that make up PNG. In The Embarrassed Colonialist, Dorney displays his extensive local knowledge to paint a picture of the problems that the country still faces, and the importance of the role that Australia has to play in championing development. It's at this point that it becomes slightly unfortunate that Dorney is a PNG expert, rather than a more general development scholar. The story of Australia's role in the region, far from being historically unique, is a variation on one of the main colonial themes that undergirds so much of the world's history and misery. By failing to place Australia's actions in this context, Dorney not only misses out on a vast intellectual reservoir, but unwittingly risks helping Australians sustain the lightly proferred laurel that our colonialism was somehow different.

In the historical context, Australia's role in PNG most closely resembles the 'thin white line' of indirect rule favoured by British and French colonialists in West Africa. With the obvious exception of the cocoa-bearing British Gold Coast (modern day Ghana), West Africa had little in the way of natural resources to be extracted, and colonialism in the region was largely motivated by the pre-emptive defence of shipping routes. The acquisition of resource poor (at the time, natural gas has since been discovered) PNG was similarly designed to shore up Australia's northern approach. With scant enthusiasm for the toil of serf and sweeper, colonialists in both cases invested few resources into the development of their newly acquired territories. In 1921, Australia spent a grand total of £12 on education in PNG, a number that somehow actually declined over the next two decades. When the conversation about independence started in earnest in 1970, PNG had 6 university graduates, and 122 students in their final year of high school, out of a population of over 5 million.

The lack of investment spreads far wider than simply education, of course. All Australian administration was sparse on the ground, with a pre-war peak of merely 150 patrol officers (or kiaps in the local pidgin) amongst a diverse population of nearly a million residents. Isolated in the Papuan jungles, the kiaps became authorities unto themselves, with the powers of not only judge, jury, and jailer, but tax-collector, doctor, and mayor as well. Much like their French equivalents, les rois de le brousse, the Australian kiaps were famously independent of headquarters, so much so that they were seen as rulers in their own right, rather than as agents of the state. A post-independence radio program examining the role of the kiaps was unsubtly titled "God's Shadow on Earth".

The echoes of the kiap system still ring today in the chambers of the PNG parliament. One of the world's most diverse countries, with over eight hundred languages and a clear regional split between the Highland and Lowland regions, PNG has little in the way of national unity to speak of. In the wake of independence, local administrators often assumed that they would gain the powers of the kiaps, and were surprised to learn that they were actually going to have to deal with an electorate and an independent court. Moreover, with many rural Papua New Guineans suddenly elevated from the status of tribesmen to citizens, local Members of Parliament came to be regarded as local Big Men, rather than national representatives.

With little common cause to hold the country together, corruption has become the norm in PNG, and MPs who don't return a profit to their voters are quickly replaced at the next election. However, Dorney reminds us at length that PNG is far from a failed state, with a strong rule of law and a stable and professional military. One of the highlights of the book is Dorney's retelling of the Sandline Affair (a subject on which he is a first rate expert, having written about the subject at length in his other books), when a military takeover seemed almost imminent, and was thankfully avoided. Dorney claims that PNG's saving grace was an impartial, professional military, and notes in particular the fact that the PNG military has been deliberately structured to integrate soldiers from different regions and ethnicities, rather than the more common colonial attempt to create a national military from a series of balkanised commands. This traditional model, while simple to construct, has arguably proven to be one of the worst legacies of the British tradition of lazy nation-building, with consequences as dire as the North-South schism in the Nigerian military following the Major's coup in 1966 (and the deaths of millions in the Biafran War that followed), and as timely as the ongoing dysfunction of the confessionally divided post-Saddam Iraqi Army in the fight against the Islamic State.

In The Origins of Political Order (review forthcoming), Francis Fukuyama outlines a compelling tripod of political stability: a competent independent bureaucratic state, a strong rule of law, and democratic accountability. With a strong independent court, democratic elections, and a professional military, PNG is well on the way to stable development, though plenty of work remains to be done. PNG politics, while democratic, is highly unstable and energetically populist, with Prime Ministers replaced every few months. Despite the successes of the military, the less bellicose sectors of the public service remain thoroughly captured by political patronage networks, and jobs are handed out by local politicians in return for loyalty and campaign support.

It's on these frameworks that Dorney's book stumbles. Whilst a first-rate chronicler of the specifics of the Papua New Guinean experience, neither the history nor the future of the country can be properly understood without first grasping the deeper theoretical underpinnings, rather than the particulars of how this script has played out in the Southwestern Pacific. Without this foundation layer, the reader is asked to simply accept at face value Dorney's claim that now is the time that we dare not stoop to less, instead of being able to understand how the necessary conditions for stable development have been laid. But Dorney proceeds without pause for doubters, and The Embarrassed Colonialist concludes with a detailed list of simple proposals to help improve life for the average Papua New Guinean. Some of Dorney's proposals deal with the opaque bureaucracy of foreign aid budgets, but most are aimed at improving cultural links between the two nations, by fostering tourism, improving access for journalists, and even adjusting visa regulations to get more PNG players in the Australian National Rugby League. These measures seem modest, but the implicit argument is that bolder action will remain politically infeasible as long as the Australian public continues to retreat from PNG as "our unfortunate illegitimate child that we are ashamed of". Ultimately, the first thing that Dorney is calling Australians to is awareness.

Reading The Embarrassed Colonialist would be an excellent first step.

Credit here goes to Embiggen Books, a cromulently titled independent bookstore in my home town of Melbourne. Always one of my first stops whenever I return.

The cover image is shows an Australian kiap patrol officer working side by side with Papua New Guineans to launch a traditional fishing canoe. It is part of a collection from the National Archives of Australia

The Box
How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger
Marc Levinson, 2006

First of all, yes. This is a book about shipping containers. Niche choice, I know. I came across this one on Gates Notes, the non-fiction book review website run by Bill Gates (in a way, this puts me in competition with Bill Gates. Hopefully it doesn't end too poorly). The underlying tale of creative destruction is certainly an important one, and so I think it's unfortunate that The Box didn't do enough to try to place its particular story in the context of a broader, more general archetype of innovation.

Make no mistake, shipping containers are damned important. Levinson's opening chapter is titled The World The Box Made, and it's hard to believe that we could be living in anything but. On the face of it, it's rather obvious that containerisation (a real word) made long distance freight cheaper, more reliable, safer, and faster. The vast implications of that, however, are not so obvious. With massive reductions in cost came the sundering of the historical geographic ties between production and consumption, changing the economic geography of the planet forever.

The examples are obvious. The rise of the Asian Tigers took place on the back the container, and nobody in their right mind thinks that Singapore would be half as rich today if not for their prodigious location on the Strait of Malacca. More broadly, the larger trade jurisdictions enabled by the container have given rise to levels of specialisation never seen before. The gains from specialisation are indeed one of the most important insights to ever have come from economics. Important enough that Adam Smith chose specialisation to be the topic that he begins with in his foundational epic The Wealth of Nations. Mancur Olson, one of the most important minds of the past several decades in my opinion (see my reviews of his Logic of Collective Action and The Rise and Decline of Nations, forthcoming) has some fascinating (if brief) work on the significance of jurisdictional integration in his booklet How Bright are the Northern Lights, available online for free thanks to the Institute of Economic Research at Lund University. It's highly worth the hour or so it will take to read.

However, most of The Box focuses less on the importance of the container, and more on the story of how it came to be. Levinson recounts in detail the story of Malcom McLean, shipping magnate extraordinaire, and the way he changed the world forever. It's a reasonably interesting story, and Levinson is certainly a good author, but at the end of the day, nobody is buying this book for the narrative. Levinson's research is comprehensive, and takes us through everything from the engineering challenges to the business brilliance of McLean's endeavour. However, I ultimately found that a good deal of the detail was superfluous to the central themes that I was reading the book for, and I thought it was a much better read the second time around, when I only read the passages I'd highlighted the first time.

As with all the great tales in the growing genre of Disruptive Heroism, The Box is as much a tale of triumph over government regulation as it is about human domination over steel and sea. Regulations from the Interstate Commerce Commission, focused on ensuring the reliability (taking precedence over efficiency) of the nationally important cargo industry, hamstrung the container by restricting the ability to move cargo between modes, and limiting the prices that carriers could charge. Levinson offers the interesting example that, until recently, 'logistics' was a military term. Companies didn't have supply chains, they had warehouses, and purchased shipping services on an ad hoc basis when they needed to move something. It wasn't until shipping deregulation in the 1980's that manufacturers were able to sign long term contracts with shippers, with guaranteed standards for regular service. Levinson calculates that if sales to inventory ratios were at the level they were before shipping deregulation, US nonfarm inventories would be more than $1 trillion than they actually are, costing the economy over $80 billion in inventory costs every single year. Deregulation did more than merely lower shipping prices, it enabled the creation of a massive new supply chain industry.

Of course, as always, scratch even slightly beneath the surface and the technolibertarian veneer starts to wear off. No doubt, companies like Uber have every right to complain about patronage subsidies to the taxi industry. But those who see this as reason for an utterly minimal government might want to ask where Uber would be without GPS signals, provided free of charge from a constellation of US Air Force satellites (my review of Innovative State develops this idea in far more depth). Similarly, the shipping container owes its timeliness, if not its entire existence, to the subsidised sale of retired WWII ships to McLean's shipping line; the Operation Bootstrap subsidies for companies to set up supply lines to Puerto Rico; and most importantly, the Pentagon's decision to use shipping containers to supply the Vietnam War, the greatest logistical exercise ever taken, and the inflection point of the container age. As in all heroic epics, things are more complicated than the seem.

Lastly, no tale of creative destruction is truly complete until we hear the story or those who got destroyed. In this case, it was the stevedores who had been loading and offloading ships by hand for generations (often literally, in this father-and-son trade), and who saw their livelihoods shattered, unable to compete with the majestic efficiency of the box. Famous for both their cohesion and their militancy (a characterisation I'm not at all ashamed to say I'm basing mostly on season two of The Wire), it should come as no surprise that the port unions did not go gentle into their good night. In fact, it was likely the port unions that delayed the introduction more than any other single factor. Regulated inefficiencies were rife. Union contracts often required ships to use gangs with more than twice as many workers than were needed, and at one point the International Longshoremen's Union tried to pass 'strip-and-stuff' rules, requiring that every container be unpacked by hand and repacked immediately, for no real reason other than to undermine the efficiency of the container. These rules were, of course, enforced with near-constant strikes, and frequent outbreaks of extreme violence against anyone who tried to cross the picket line. As a result, the ILA and the ILWU were both able to obtain compensation payments from shipping companies in return for their acquiescence (not unlike the recent requirement for Uber to compensate taxi owners in New South Wales, Australia). It's an interesting piece of trivia, and one that Levinson unfortunately doesn't expand on a great deal, because I think it's probably the most important part of the book for understanding the coming debates about creative destruction.

At the end of the day, The Box does have a great deal of relevance to the conversations we're having today around creative destruction. It's not a focused analysis of the issue, but it is an important example that shines a lot of light of many aspects of the question we're still struggling with. However, a lot of this importance is buried under Levinson's emphasis on the particular story of Malcom McLean and his shipping containers, and the real value does take some work to extract, and I think most readers would be better served by going directly the source, and reading Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (or at least the relevant chapters). The Box certainly remains an interesting book, but unfortunately not quite as interesting as I had hoped.

The cover image is courtesy of Håkan Dahlström on flickr, and is provided under a CC BY 2.0 license.

@War
The Rise of Cyber Warfare
Shane Harris, 2014

First things first, this book is way more interesting than the title might suggest. While it sounds like it could be just another rehash of the same tired arguments we've had beaten into us since Snowden went public, it’s actually some extremely well researched and original work on state-level military cyberwarfare, plus some phenomenal hints towards the larger questions of how the internet fits into our existing ideas about government, and how the government will fit into our existing ideas about the internet.

It's because of those hints that I'm not sure how I feel about the distribution of the approach here. By and large, the book tilts far more towards accounting than analysis, which makes sense given that the author, Shane Harris, is a journalist. Not to mention, this is the first time a lot of this stuff has been released to the public before, so obviously a large part of the book needs to be dedicated to simply laying out the facts. However, Harris steps beyond the bounds of the reporting profession and gives some seriously original thought towards the end, and it’s easily the best part of the book. While @War is a good book, the last few chapters definitely feel like the pitch for a revolutionary book, whether Harris will be the one to write it or not.

Before that, however, comes nearly two hundred pages of rather dry taxonomy of major cybersecurity incidents from the past decade or so. It’s important information no doubt, but the nature of the topic means that it’s a series of more or less isolated incidents, constraining the first part of the book to be more of a data dump than an interesting narrative. You can probably skip most of it if you’re willing to take the following list as gospel.

• Cyber surveillance played a huge role in mapping insurgent networks in Iraq, and was one of the main drivers of the successes of 07–08
• China stole the plans for the F-35 by hacking defence contractors
• China hacked the emails of the Obama and McCain campaigns in 2008
• The US military have demonstrated a capability to launch attacks on infrastructure in wargames
• Iran have massively ramped up their cyber capability following Olympic Games/Stuxnet
• Someone staged a massive attack on Saudi Aramco in 2012, probably Iran
• And obviously a lot more, but those are enough to paint the picture

As I've said, the really interesting stuff comes at the end, when Harris starts to explore the relationships that are developing between governments and the internet, and what those are going to look like in the years to come.

We have come to depend on [cyberspace] as a public utility — like electricity and water. But it’s still mostly a collection of privately owned devices.

I’ve long held that it’s a tragedy that Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf aren’t household names, and the fact you probably just opened up a Wikipedia tab confirms it. The unrecognised genius of the founding fathers of the internet lies in the fact that they created not just an efficient data shuttling system, but a wholly new mode of social organisation (new to humans at least, TCP/IP has some incredible functional similarity to message passing in harvester ant colonies), coalescing private devices into a public network with a total absence of central control.

This is terra incognita for orthodox concepts of governance built around central control and clear delineation between the private and public spheres. As Harris points out, the problem is only compounded by the fact that anaemic public service salaries are increasingly sending talented people to private security startups. The increasing power of dedicated security firms and security-interested firms like Google or financial institutions is raising them to the status of what I’m calling ‘near-state actors’, and we’re genuinely nearing the point where a private company will be able to launch a damaging military strike against a large nation state in cyberspace, if we’re not there already.

So far, governments have responded to this change in two different ways. The first is the US model, which is what Harris, an extremely well regarded US National Security journalist, focuses on. @War details the degree to which Presidents Bush and Obama have massively expanded the responsibility of US government cyber resources to defend all American computer networks from serious threat, contrasted with their prior role of simply providing network security for the government itself; much like the Army defend the entire country, not only government buildins. In addition, the US is starting to form strong links with the tech industry, both through open resource and information sharing programs (not unlike conventional relationships with defence contractors), but also covertly buying secret exploits from hackers (the polite term is ‘security researchers’) on the global black market, a process Harris likens to a 21st century system of letters of marque. It’s a shame my version of @War was published with the subtitle The Rise of Cyber Warfare, because the US edition bears the much cleverer and more relevant The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex. I suppose some publisher figured Australians weren't up to date on their Eisenhower quotes.

The other response to this change, and the one I personally think is more interesting, is the model being followed by almost every country other than the US: Complete and utter ignorance. Harris’s research in the first part of the book destroys any remaining ambiguity as to whether or not computer networks are a domain of war or not. They are. And it’s a domain where most world governments have have been sleepwalking for too long to notice that they've completely ceded their Weberian monopoly. We’re already starting to see this in the ‘Going Dark’ debate, with Apple bringing in iPhone encryption that completely vetoes the governmental power of search and seizure, search warrant or not. @War was an excellent book about the way the US government is adapting to world that’s starting to change, but it suggests a truly great book, a book about just how much the fundamental position of government is changing and how little governments are aware of it. That’s the book I want to read.

Hat tip for this one goes out to the Steptoe CyberLaw Podcast, via the Lawfare Project at Brookings, probably my favourite site on the entire internet. Read it daily and listen to the podcast every week, trust me.

The cover image for this review is a randomly selected block of code from the partially decompiled source code of the Stuxnet worm. Credit goes to Laurelai on GitHub.

The Shia Revival
How Conflicts Within Islam Will Shape the Future
Vali Nasr, 2007

Sitting down to write this review, I'm immediately stuck by two things. The first is that I remember this being a really good book when I first read it. The second is that, rereading it today, it doesn't seem as good as I remember.

The reason for both of those is this: The Shia Revival is a brilliant introduction to the confessional split in Islam, and the impact it has had on politics in the Middle East. Indeed, unless you're extremely comfortable with your knowledge of the doctrinal differences between Sunni and Shia Islam, and the political implications they've had right from Karbala to Sadr City, you absolutely owe it to yourself to read this book. The Shia Revival is an excellently-written, accessible guide to one of the most important and least understood issues facing the world today, and if it were up to me it would absolutely be on every high school curriculum in the West.

The converse of this is that, as an introduction, it begins to lose its shine the more its reader knows about the subject. As a rough guide, if you know who Ayatollah Sistani is (and if you check to make sure you were right, and find out he's not the Iranian guy), you'd likely be better served passing your copy of The Shia Revival to a more neophytic friend, and reading something else instead.

Despite the publisher-friendly subtitle, Nasr's gaze here is definitely cast rearward, shooting an arrow that threads its way cleanly from the death of the prophet right to the debates taking place in Najaf and Qom today. Along the way we're introduced to every dimension of the peculiar mix of politics, demography, geography, and theology that make up the Shia community. Born in Tehran, Nasr has clearly inherited the Persian gift of language, and even readers who don't find the subject interesting are bound to be captivated with the fittingly magisterial way that the epic of Shia history is retold.

All of this is offered in a loose, freewheeling narrative that makes for a superlatively readable narrative, but offers little in the way of a framework to understand current, let alone future, events. Nasr explains the importance of Shia governance in post-Saddam Iraq, but doesn't spend much time stepping through the full extent of its implications for the region (though he does in his more policy focused book The Dispensable Nation, review forthcoming). That being said, it's almost impossible to dispute the central claim that the Iraq war has been an inflection point in the Shia story. Pointing out it's status as the first Arab Shia state, Nasr makes a compelling case that the new Iraq has been a powerful force in emboldening previously marginalised Shi'a communities throughout the Islamic (and especially Arab) world, the effects of which are still reverberating throughout the resonant cavity of the Persian Gulf, and beyond.

Ultimately, the full importance of the developments that Nasr identifies is not written between the covers of The Shia Revival. The full importance is being written on the front pages of our newspapers every single day. But for the vast majority of Westerners who lack the background necessary to understand those developments, I can not reccomend a better introduction than The Shia Revival.

Random further reading:

• Following the 2005 elections, Iraq is now the first Arab Shia state in history. For the single best history you're going to get of post-Saddam Iraq in under 50 pages, you should read Kenneth Katzman's Congressional Research Service Report, Iraq: Politics, Governance, and Human Rights.
• Just as in Northern Ireland and the former Yugoslavia, religious conflict in the Middle East often straddles the line between theological dispute and nationalist signalling device. For a novel and extremely interesting look at the latter dimension of the problem, F. Gregory Gause at the Brookings Doha Center has an excellent paper examining recent events in the Middle East through the lens of an Iran-Saudi Arabia Cold War.
• It occurs to me that the last sentence of the main review ignores the fact that most newspapers have pathetic coverage of the Middle East, and that subscriptions to NYT and WaPo aren't cheap. The Brookings Doha Center sends out a free daily news e-mail of everything newsworthy that's happened in the region.

The cover image is my own work, a photo from the inside of the Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque in Isfahan, Iran