If the US is – in the words of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright – the "indispensible nation" then the economic, democratic and institutional alliance between the US and the EU is the “essential partnership”. So argues Tony Gardner, Barack Obama’s ambassador to the EU and advisor to Joe Biden’s campaign for president in his new book Stars with Stripes: The Essential Partnership between the European Union and the United States (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020),

The EU-US partnership has its frustrations and failings, he writes, but has quietly delivered on trade liberalization, data management, defense and law enforcement, leverage against Russia and Iran, and energy security. If Biden wins in November, these joint projects will be expanded and the fight against climate change brought to the forefront but “time will be short and pressure will be really high” to prove that working with allies achieves more than unilateralism.

Tony Gardner was US ambassador to the EU from 2014-2017 and a member of Bill Clinton’s National Security Council in 1994-1995. He is now a managing partner at Brookfield Asset Management, a board member of Iberdrola, and senior counsel in the law firm Sidley Austin where he works on trade, data privacy and cybersecurity.

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors.

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On November 3, 1969 Richard M. Nixon addressed the nation in what would come to be known as “The Silent Majority Speech”. In 32 minutes, the president promoted his plan for a “Vietnamization” of the war and called upon “the great silent majority of my fellow Americans” to support his plan “to end the war in a way that we could win the peace”. Arguing against the immediate cessation of hostilities, Nixon warned of a Communist bloodbath should American troops leave too quickly. Hypocritically, he spoke of peace as he made plans for a massive expansion of the murderous American air campaigns, which would include the criminal bombardment of neutral Cambodia.

While he asked for unity, the term “silent majority” stood in sharp contrast to Nixon calling anti-war activists on campus “bums” and the range of racist terms he used for African Americans, Jews, and the LatinX community. In The 'Silent Majority' Speech: Richard Nixon, the Vietnam War, and the Origins of the New Right (Routledge, 2019), Scott Laderman argues that this speech was part of Nixon’s rhetorical strategy of using divisive “dog whistle” terms such as “law and order” to cover up his racist appeals to the white working class. According to Laderman the speech was a historical turning point in American political history, opening the way for the Lee Atwaters and Donald Trumps to come. While he shows how this foreign policy speech can work as a prism to understand the later years of the American War in Vietnam, aka the Second Indochina War, Laderman further demonstrate that this speech was an important moment in American domestic politics as it signaled the creation of the New Right.

Scott Laderman is a professor of history at the University of Minnesota, Duluth – home of the best surfing in the upper Midwest.

Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not quietly reading or happily talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California.

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At the end of the 20th century, the liberal international order appeared unassailable after its triumph over the authoritarian challenges of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Twenty years later, however, the assumptions underlying the system appear discredited as international relations devolve into confrontation and conflict. In The New Twenty Years' Crisis: A Critique of International Relations, 1999-2019 (McGill-Queen's UP, 2020), Philip Cunliffe considers the factors in this decline and the question of what lies ahead. As Cunliffe details, the explanation lies within the liberal international order itself, particularly in the utopian thinking that ignores key factors in international affairs. Cunliffe identifies similarly flawed concepts within international relations theory, which grounded itself on assumptions that led to idealistic thinking over the growing evidence of contemporary events. These dual crises, Cunliffe concludes, demand a reconsideration based on the realities of the modern international order rather than the discredited ideas that seemed unquestionable two decades ago.

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As the 2020 presidential campaign begins to take shape, there is widespread distrust of the fairness and accuracy of American elections. In Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust, and the Threat to American Democracy (Yale UP, 2020), Richard L. Hasen uses riveting stories illustrating four factors increasing the mistrust. Voter suppression has escalated as a Republican tool aimed to depress turnout of likely Democratic voters, fueling suspicion. Pockets of incompetence in election administration, often in large cities controlled by Democrats, have created an opening to claims of unfairness. Old‑fashioned and new‑fangled dirty tricks, including foreign and domestic misinformation campaigns via social media, threaten electoral integrity. Inflammatory rhetoric about “stolen” elections supercharges distrust among hardcore partisans.

Taking into account how each of these threats has manifested in recent years—most notably in the 2016 and 2018 elections—Hasen offers concrete steps that need to be taken to restore trust in American elections before the democratic process is completely undermined. This is an indispensable analysis, from the nation’s leading election-law expert, of the key threats to the 2020 American presidential election.

Professor Hasen’s election law blog can be found here.

Arya Hariharan is a lawyer in politics. She spends much of her time working on congressional investigations and addressing challenges to the rule of law. You can reach her at [email protected] or Twitter.

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What if outer space is not outside the human environment but, rather, defines it? This is the unusual starting point of Valerie Olson’s Into the Extreme: U.S. Environmental Systems and Politics Beyond Earth (U Minnesota Press, 2018), revealing how outer space contributes to making what counts as the scope and scale of today’s natural and social environments. With unprecedented access to spaceflight worksites ranging from astronaut training programs to life science labs and architecture studios, Olson examines how U.S. experts work within the solar system as the container of life and as a vast site for new forms of technical and political environmental control.

Olson’s book shifts our attention from space’s political geography to its political ecology, showing how scientists, physicians, and engineers across North America collaborate to build the conceptual and nuts-and-bolts systems that connect Earth to a specifically ecosystemic cosmos. This cosmos is being redefined as a competitive space for potential economic resources, social relations, and political strategies.

Showing how contemporary U.S. environmental power is bound up with the production of national technical and scientific access to outer space, Into the Extreme brings important new insights to our understanding of modern environmental history and politics. At a time when the boundaries of global ecologies and economies extend far below and above Earth’s surface, Olson’s new analytic frameworks help us understand how varieties of outlying spaces are known, made, and organized as kinds of environments—whether terrestrial or beyond.

John W. Traphagan is a professor in Department of Religious Studies and Program in Human Dimensions of Organizations at the University of Texas at Austin.

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In my old age, I try to argue more quietly, though I still believe that sharp disagreement is a sign of political seriousness. What engaged citizens think and say matters; we should aim to get it right and to defeat those who get it wrong. I understand the very limited impact of what I write, but I continue to believe that the stakes are high.

– Michael Walzer (2018)

These thoughts, from the preface of A Foreign Policy for the Left (Yale University Press, 2018), reflect the understated wisdom of a highly regarded 85-year old political theorist, Michael Walzer. His many books include the influential Just and Unjust Wars, and others mentioned in this interview including: Thick and Thin – Moral Argument at Home and Abroad, Spheres of Justice – A Defense of Pluralism and Equality, and Obligations: Essays on Disobedience, War and Citizenship – the last one being published in 1970 at the height of the divisive Vietnam War era when Walzer was teaching at Harvard.

Much of the material for Michael’s books derives from his long affiliation with Dissent magazine – he apprenticed as a young leftist partisan under the prolific Irving Howe whose writing, social role and politics helped shape the young Walzer. Evidence of Michael’s current and ongoing political engagement, as well as the clarity of his thought and seriousness of his message can be seen here: ‘A Note on Racial Capitalism’ from Dissent in July 2020. In his note Michael references K. Sabeel Rahman’s Dissent article ‘Dismantle Racial Capitalism’ in his first paragraph; a month later two scholars write ‘A Reply to Michael Walzer’ from which comes: ‘A Reply to Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò and Liam Kofi Bright’.

Professor Walzer published his first Dissent article in 1956 which provides some timeline context for one of the first questions in this interview about whether the Hiss-Chambers testimonies before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (1948) might represent the opening confrontation of our polarizing culture wars. As you will hear, Michael thinks it could date back further; and shares a few thoughts on teaching at Harvard in the sixties, and pivotal moments in his career as a young leftist partisan. He comments about scholars like Rawls, Nozick and Geertz; and offers opinions related to our current polarization including a recent Rolling Stone article, the origins of resentment, engaged citizenship and voting, 9/11 and its aftermath, justice, ‘complex equality’, ‘formative’ books and a poet.

An overview of Michael’s life and work, Justice is Steady Work – A Conversation on Political Theory (Polity Press 2020) with Astrid von Busekist at SciencesPo (originally published in French) out soon.

Michael Walzer is professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and editor emeritus at Dissent magazine. Professor Walzer studied on a Fulbright Fellowship at Cambridge and completed his PhD in government at Harvard University.

Keith Krueger lectures at the SHU-UTS Business School in Shanghai.

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The articles presented in Decentralization, Regional Diversity, and Conflict: The Case of Ukraine (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) aim to explore the current political and administrative challenges that Ukraine is facing.

The volume draws particular attention to the issues that have been escalated and intensified since the inception of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict. From a diversity of perspectives, the contributors explore the nature of the current challenges, as well as possible ways for dealing with them. One of the central points and issues that the volume highlights is regional diversity. As the editors and contributors make it clear, diversity can be used as an advantage and a disadvantage on both political and legal levels: the current conflict between Ukraine and Russia illustrates a number of ways in which regional diversity can be manipulated and misused. The volume emphasizes that Ukraine is a multiethnic country which has always hosted a diversity of ethnic groups, with a number of linguistic traditions: this factor should be presented as one of the aspects for managing the consequences of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict, in which ethnic issues have been extensively manipulated by the Russian authorities. One of the largest contributions of the volume lies in the terminological clarification, with an emphasis on the Russo-Ukrainian conflict, including the Crimea annexation, which produces an effective legal platform for the integration of Ukrainian issues into the European and global contexts.

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Political scientists Alan Chong and Quang Min Pham bring with their edited volume, Critical Reflections on China’s Belt and Road Initiative (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020), originality as well as dimensions and perspectives to the discussion about the Belt and Road that are highly relevant but often either unrecognized or underemphasized.

The book is about much more than the material aspects of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. In fact, various chapter authors use the Belt and Road to look at perhaps the most fundamental issue of our times: how does one build a global world order and societies that are inclusive, cohesive and capable of managing interests of all stakeholders as well as political, cultural, ethnic and religious differences in ways that all are recognized without prejudice and/or discrimination?

In doing so, the book introduces a moral category into policy and policy analysis. That is an important and commendable effort even if it may be a hard sell in an increasingly polarized world in which prejudice and bias and policies that flow from it have gained new legitimacy and become mainstream in various parts of the world.

Nonetheless, it allows for the introduction of considerations that are fundamental to managing multiple current crises.

One just has to look at the pandemic the world is trying to come to grips with, the need for a global health care governance that can confront future pandemics, and the world’s environmental crisis to realize the relevance of former Singaporean diplomat and public intellectual Kishore Mahbubani’s description of the nation state system as a boat with 193 cabins and cabin administrators but no captain at the helm.

In his contributions to the book, Chong looks for answers in the experience of ancient Silk Road travellers. That may be a standard that a Belt and Road managed by an autocratic Chinese leadership that is anything but inclusive would at best struggle to meet.

That does not detract from the book being an invaluable and unique contribution to a vast literature on the Belt and Road.

Dr. James M. Dorsey is an award-winning journalist and a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore. He is also a senior research fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute and the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer, a globally syndicated column and blog.

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On July 1, 2020, China introduced a National Security Law into Hong Kong partly in an attempt to quell months of civil unrest, as a mechanism to safeguard China’s security. In this new book, China’s National Security: Endangering Hong Kong’s Rule of Law? (Hart, 2020), Cora Chan and Fiona de Londras bring together a host of internationally renowned authors who question whether a national security law will challenge Hong Kong’s rule of law, and the liberal ideals safeguarded in its legal system, which have become a mark of national identity and pride for many Hong Kongers.

The book examines the question in three parts. Firstly, it considers whether national security poses a threat to Hong Kong’s rule of law, in particular, under the unique ‘One Country, Two Systems’ model. In the second part of the book, there is an examination of the sources of resilience in Hong Kong’s politico-legal culture, which may provide resistance to the erosion of the rule of law. In particular, authors examine administrative law, the judiciary, the legislature, and civil society. In the final section of the book, authors examine the limits and scope of national security legislation in Hong Kong, and consider how it should be interpreted in line with Hong Kong’s common law traditions.

To understand the current political unrest in Hong Kong, this book is a must read. It is also essential for understanding China’s security concerns, and what this means for the rest of the world.

Jane Richards is a doctoral candidate in Human Rights Law at the University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include disability, equality, criminal law and civil disobedience. You can find her on twitter @JaneRichardsHK where she avidly follows the Hong Kong’s protests and its politics.

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In his new book, The Nazi Spy Ring in America: Hitler’s Agents, the FBI & the Case that Stirred the Nation (Georgetown University Press, 2020), Rhodri Jeffreys Jones tells the dramatic story of the Nazi spy ring in America. In the mid-1930s just as the United States was embarking on a policy of neutrality, Nazi Germany launched a program of espionage against the unwary nation. The Nazi Spy Ring in America tells the story of Hitler's attempts to interfere in American affairs by spreading anti-Semitic propaganda, stealing military technology, and mapping US defenses.

This fast-paced history provides essential insight into the role of espionage in shaping American perceptions of Germany in the years leading up to US entry into World War II. Fascinating and thoroughly researched, The Nazi Spy Ring in America sheds light on a now forgotten but significant episode in the history of international relations and the development of the FBI.

Using recently declassified documents, prize-winning historian Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones narrates this little-known chapter in US history. He shows how Germany's foreign intelligence service, the Abwehr, was able to steal top secret US technology such as a prototype codebreaking machine and data about the latest fighter planes.

At the center of the story is Leon Turrou, the FBI agent who helped bring down the Nazi spy ring in a case that quickly transformed into a national sensation. The arrest and prosecution of four members of the ring was a high-profile case with all the trappings of fiction: fast cars, louche liaisons, a murder plot, a Manhattan socialite, and a ringleader codenamed Agent Sex. Part of the story of breaking the Nazi spy ring is also the rise and fall of Turrou, whose talent was matched only by his penchant for publicity, which eventually caused him to run afoul of J. Edgar Hoover's strict codes of conduct.

Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones is Emeritus Professor of History in History at the University of Edinburgh.

Craig Sorvillo is a PhD candidate in modern European history at the University of Florida. He specializes in Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust. He can be reached at [email protected] or on twitter @craig_sorvillo.

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