Browsing by Subject "civilizational studies"

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    Book Reviews of Thucydides' Trap and 2 other books for China, ISCSC, 2018
    (2018-06-16) Andregg, Michael M.
    NB: Unlike many reviews, this will combine three books to compare their different perspectives on US – China relations. We will begin with the mechanics and topline of all three. Graham Allison, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s’ Trap? 2017, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston and New York. 288 pages of text with 20 pages of front matter and 76 pages of endnotes. This is an academic, theoretical text with a dark tone of impending doom. It was also very well publicized and reviewed, resulting in much buzz among policy professionals. John Pomfret, The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, 1776 to the Present. 2016, Henry Holt & Co., New York. This is the most detailed history of US-China relations among these three, written by a long-time correspondent for the Washington Post who married a Chinese woman and clearly loves the country. 637 pages of text with 54 pages of endnotes and index. Howard W. French, Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China’s Push for Global Power, 2017, Alfred A. Knopf, New York. 288 pages of text with 42 pages of endnotes and index. This was the most useful for me to help understand historical roots of Chinese thought. It is less detailed than Pomfret, and less theoretical than Allison. French was also a correspondent for the Washington Post, and later a bureau chief for the New York Times in many countries including China.
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    Climate Change and U.S. National Security
    (US Government Printing Office, 2020-05) Andregg, Michael M.
    In October of 2014 the U.S. Department of Defense published an “Adaptation Roadmap” for climate change that started with: “Climate change will affect the Department of Defense’s ability to defend the Nation and poses immediate risks to U.S. national security.” Then Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel was quoted saying: “Climate change does not directly cause conflict, but it can significantly add to the challenges of global instability, hunger, poverty, and conflict. Food and water shortages, pandemic disease, disputes over refugees and resources, more severe natural disasters – all place additional burdens on economies, societies, and institutions around the world.” This chapter will detail what those challenges and burdens are, with emphases on national security implications and consequences for U.S. Army personnel in particular. But it cannot and should not be narrowly focused, because this is a global problem with global consequences that affect the entire U.S. military. It affects alliances, flashpoints, basing issues, geopolitics and budgets in complex ways we will try to exemplify with specific cases, like Syria and South Asia. Propaganda can influence assessments in any war zone. So that is not new, but it is an especially pernicious problem with climate change. , , , , For example, at Minnesota’s leading public policy institute we have been talking about, and some studying, climate change since at least 1982. It took 31 years before Andy Marshall commissioned the first publically known, Pentagon study of national security implications of climate change in 2003. Yet this author was told personally at the National Intelligence University in 2005 that officers there had been “ordered not to talk about that subject.” This was all because of a sustained campaign by legacy industries to suppress discussion of something profound that they already knew was guaranteed to occur.