Book Review: The Silence of the Rational Center.

I just finished re-reading The Silence of the Rational Center: Why American Foreign Policy is Failing, by Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke. I originally read it last summer and found it to be one of the 2 best books on politics/ government I read all of last year. The main argument of the book is that foreign policy, more than any other area of government requires thoughtful, fact-based analysis that rarely makes for entertaining debate and doesn't exactly fit into a 30-second sound byte. The overarching point is that we, as Americans prefer what the authors term "the Big Idea". From "Manifest Destiny" to "Imperialism of Righteousness" to "Freedom on the March", we prefer a grand vision to boring analysis of pros and cons of a particular action. At times this has been a good thing, for example the idea of personal liberty laid out in the U.S. constitution has served us well. In recent times an over-simplified cable-news-friendly view of events has not. The experts on foreign policy issues generally take a much more pragmatic approach. This group constitutes the "rational center".
Analysed in the book are:
-Cable news, which far from shedding light on a subject usually either involves name calling between 2 or more opposing talking heads who usually have no expertise in whatever they're discussing but are picked for their fiery rhetoric.
-How the "rational center" is supposed to function. Keeping emotion from carrying policy makers off during times of national stress, balancing ideals and actual policy in times of crisis, and how it has failed miserably at certain instances (McCarthyism, the lead-up to the Iraq war.)
-The disastrous results when "big ideas" combine with "big media" to shape public opinion through a format that de-emphasizes rational discussion, and turning complex policy challenges into undifferentiated, apocalyptic threats to the nation's very existence. This format also conditions viewers to imagine that foreign policy consists of clear, binary choices.
-The use of blind patriotism and fear to make people more susceptible to the "big idea".
-A good deal of the book examines the role of "think tanks" that look to advance their agendas by twisting data to fit a preconceived notion, and the phenomenon of "false expertise".
- A chapter is devoted to "experts" like Noam Chomsky or Paul Krugman on the left and several prominent "neocons", many of whom are famous for political positions on areas they have no special training, experience, or insight into.
-A chapter is dedicated to "elites and the use of force". Many people think we have a hawk party and a dove party in this country, but looking at our political history, a more accurate description would be a hawk party (Democratic) and a super-hawk party (GOP). Examined in this section is how political elites view military force as a policy tool.
-A chapter is spent looking at fighting insurgencies. The most interesting part of this to me is that almost no Democratic nation has fought a successful counterinsurgency campaign on foreign soil since at least 1940. This is followed by a 4-page list of conflicts and the results in that time span. The only successful counter-insurgency mentioned in the book is the one China fought against Tibet, using tactics not generally available to democratic nations (i.e. genocide). The failure rate of insurgencies is very, very low.
-The problems facing intelligence gathering agencies are detailed.
-The last section of the book examines the future of U.S. relations with China. A "big idea" leading to war with Iraq is one thing, but the same thinking leading to a confrontation with China would be catastrophic. The authors then lay out potential areas of conflict (for example, in another 20 years China will very likely demand at least 99 million barrels of oil per day. The world currently produces 84 million a day, a number that is not likely to rise.) and several ideas for how to deal with our relations to China as an ascending superpower.
-The book goes into a lot of detail, but I'm trying to keep this post shorter than the actual book. Overall an excellent read for anyone interested in political discourse that doesn't involve calling people idiots, traitors, etc. but deals with subject matter in a more scholarly fashion.