Tag Archives: Book review

Arts, Books, Denmark, Europe, Greenland, Society, United States

Book Review: Polar War

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: As Trump sets his sights on Greenland, Kenneth Rosen’s new book asks whether the Arctic region is the next site of global conflict

Following the extraordinary rendition of Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela, Donald Trump has ramped up his threats to seize control of Greenland. The acquisition, which he clearly perceives as a “large real estate deal”, has been on his mind for almost a decade. “I think we’re going to get it,” he said in an address to Congress last year. “One way or another, we’re going to get it.”

Polar War by Kenneth R Rosen is provocatively titled and hugely timely. It contends that the whole Arctic is warming up for a fight. Eight nations, including Russia and the United States, already maintain “research” bases in the region. All five military academies in the US now offer a course on the Big Northern White, and in 2021 India declared itself “a near-Arctic state”. “The possibility of conflict” up there, Rosen declares, “now feels inevitable”.

But does it? In a series of short chapters arranged loosely by circumpolar geography, Rosen makes a mostly convincing case that trouble lurks behind the bergs. The Arctic is warming four to five times faster than the rest of the world, and the author demonstrates how “complex dovetailing of national interests and disinterests” – hydrocarbon extraction and strategic ambition – poses far greater dangers now that it is paired with rapid climate change. In today’s world, as the commander of the Norwegian navy tells Rosen, “What happens here, happens everywhere.”

Russia, rather than the US, is “leading the charge”. “With more military bases in the Arctic, greater competency in cold weather operations, and a fleet of icebreakers that dwarfs the maritime Arctic fleets of every other nation,” it has become far and away the region’s biggest player. Another Norwegian naval commander tells Rosen, “Putin is saying, ‘I’m the boss in the Arctic,’ and he is.”

Russia has raised concerns, as in their 2020 Arctic Strategy report, about the region’s declining population, inadequate development, and hobbled natural resources exploration industry posing threats to their national security. However, Rosen thinks that the invasion of Ukraine, along with “interventions in Western elections” and so on, “might indicate that Russia thinks as far as the Arctic is concerned, (that) it has already won” the polar war, and can therefore move on to other zones of strategic value.

Meanwhile, China is building icebreakers (four are already in service) to open up an exciting “Polar Silk Road”. Rosen suggests that the nation is “teaming up” with Russia to spy on NATO on or off Norway’s northern rim, citing a new Chinese satellite in Kiruna, Sweden. Its spectral exterior is enough to rouse suspicions of covert surveillance. In the same area, Russia “is probing Sweden’s defences” with “hybrid attacks” that “remain deniable on Russia’s part”.

American unpreparedness is a major theme that runs through the book, and hawks in the White House might (but won’t) take heed as they turn their eyes to Greenland. The author points out that “historically, the American desire to control Greenland has existed nearly as long as America itself… It was not Trump’s rhetoric of a takeover that struck me… It was the ineptitude surrounding the idea.” Such failure, incompetence even, might allow rivals to secure control of the Arctic, or trigger clumsy, uncoordinated US manoeuvres that tip a tense region into the war of the book’s title.

And, yet, who is paying attention to these tremors? Rosen paints a good picture of polar talking-shops, at which delegates emit hot air in the saunas of five-star hotels viewing the Northern Lights. At the 2023 Arctic Circle Assembly in Reykjavik, the US delegation numbered 160. An increase in militarised fishing vessels across the region (warships, essentially, in disguise) also merits serious attention.

Although the UK doesn’t have a permanent military base in the Arctic, these troubled polar waters could break on our shores. Rosen doesn’t mention it, but recently a House of Lords committee picked out the “evolving interests of Russia and China” as a key reason why Britain must keep its Arctic strategy under review.

The author is an American reporter who has spent several years up on the ice, and he’s at his clinical best when he extrapolates from experience. In one thrilling chapter, he does a two-week stint on a US Coast Guard cutter on routine patrol in Alaskan waters.

In more abstract sections, however, his prose style can be opaque. Pages gain immediacy from the narrative present tense (“we head north”), but at the same time lose gravitas, or any notion that the author has reflected on the issues he is reporting. To some extent he has reflected, but why, the reader should ask, has he chosen to limit his prescriptions to an eight-page Appendix framed as a “policy note” to Washington? It would have been much better to have seen this woven into the main text. This would have allowed the book to present a coherent, argued whole.

By the end of this volume, compelling as it is, the reader should think whether polar war is “inevitable”. Grandstanding is one thing, but surely nations would pull back from costly all-out war on the unforgiving ice. Many leaders have spoken in defence of beleaguered Denmark in recent days, the UK referring to Denmark as an “allied nation”.

Rosen says little of those on whom conflict would have the most devastating effect. He dedicates the book “To the people of the north, from whom we have taken so much and granted little” – but their voices are not heard. The polar indigenous peoples are powerless in the global skirmishes over the land of which their ancestors were proud custodians. That is the real tragedy of this new Cold War.

– Polar War by Kenneth Rosen is published by Profile, 320pp. The author is a veteran correspondent known for his reporting from conflict zones like Syria, Iraq, and Ukraine

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Arts, Books, Philosophy

Book Review: The Score

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: If you feel like your life is just a game, this book explains why. As philosopher C Thi Nguyen explains, have we let metrics twist our values? The author argues that when we use simple, clear metrics to measure success, we often “capture” our complex values and shrink them down to fit those metrics

In the Domesday Book of 1086, a manuscript record of the Great Survey conducted at the behest of William the Conqueror, philosopher C Thi Nguyen tells us, English surveyors measured land by the “hide”: the area an average family needed to sustain themselves. No doubt that was a useful measure, but you need local knowledge to use it. Some places are more productive than others, so how much land, exactly, would the average family need? It could be 40 acres, or 60, or 120.

If decisions are taken locally, there’s little issue. But as soon as authority and powers begin to centralise, units such as the “hide” disappear, replaced by standardised measures that are easier to record and act upon. Local knowledge is forgotten. The more centralisation advances – and in our modern age it has only advanced – the greater the problem grows.

– Nguyen examines how institutions and bureaucracies use game-like scoring to control behaviour, often at the cost of our autonomy and personal joy

The Score is part polemic and part philosophical inquiry. At its heart, Nguyen’s argument is that in an effort to be objective and unprejudiced, our governments have turned metrics into targets and built rules around them. The result is that our civic life has become a superficially efficient but fundamentally amoral – not to mention inescapable – game. As well as being a philosopher, Nguyen is a lover of board games, video games, technical climbing, and even yo-yoing; or, in other words, he understands the utility of rules. Yet, he writes, that, in the desire to make life ever more frictionless and reasonable, we’ve let metrics twist our values.

Early on, for instance, he mentions a pastor who, instructed to meet a baptism quota, finds himself ignoring the pastoral needs of the rest of his flock. At least the pastor works in a setting where the problem can be aired. For most of us, fixated on annual targets in various settings, the number of likes on social media, and the steps recorded on our fitness apps, external metrics work beneath our notice, replacing our original values. ‘I have 1,000 friends and took 10,000 steps today’: supposedly makes the claimant healthy and popular.

Academia, to no one’s great surprise, is far from immune either. Nguyen argues that the US News & World Report university rankings “no longer celebrate academic distinctiveness”, because prospective students now outsource their reasoning to the US News algorithm. Do you want to fight for social justice or make a killing on Wall Street? Either way, you’ll apply to the same law school – the one at the top of the list.

More ominous examples follow. There is, for example, a US department of state metric called Tip (Trafficking in Persons), which measures the effectiveness of policies to reduce modern slavery, and sex trafficking in particular. It is well established that slavery flourishes in areas of extreme poverty. But if a country reduces its ambient poverty and, as a result, reduces sex trafficking, the Tip report’s metrics indicate failure – because conviction numbers drop off. As Nguyen explains, the metric “incentivises countries to keep sex trafficking around so that there will be plenty of traffickers to convict.”

The author’s most profound insight lies in plain sight: to quote Wordsworth, “our meddling intellect misshapes the beauteous forms of things”. Games do exactly that, and offer a refreshing refuge – for a few minutes or a few hours – from the ambiguities of the real world. The gamification of real life, on the other hand, traps us all, with no prospect of an ending.

So how do we escape a gamified world? Read more books? Take up the violin? Stick it to The Man wherever we can? Such things don’t sound like a call to revolution, and I’m not sure Nguyen’s heart is in the fight. Individuals may recover their agency – and this book will help them do so – but it’s hard to see why businesses, governments, and bureaucracies of all kinds would abandon their self-empowering rhetoric of “objective” metrics.

In the early part of the narrative, Nguyen says: “I had an entire theory about games, in which clear and simple scoring systems were the magic ingredient that opened the door to a whole world of delightful play. And I had an entire theory about metrics, in which clear and simple scoring systems killed what really mattered.” This is well put.

In an otherwise trenchant and entertaining book, critics may well point to the fact that Nguyen follows the rules of his genre very closely. Like every “popular thinker” on the shelf, he can’t resist sharing his personal journey to enlightenment. If you’ve ever read The Very Hungry Caterpillar to children, you’ll know how much young readers delight in repetition. Nguyen, to many readers, is the Eric Carle of philosophy. For those up to speed with his topic, his steady circumspection may prove exasperating.

But don’t discard him. A book, too, is a kind of game, in which “we adopt a goal in order to get the struggle that we really want.” It’s about going the long way, a particular way, using a particular method. If we truly want to understand our civic plight – and not just merely tick off some talking points – then The Score should be read. You’ll find that Nguyen has planned this particular long way round with adeptness.

– The Score: How to Stop Playing Someone Else’s Game is published by Allen Lane, 368pp    

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Arts, Books, Christianity, Culture, Middle East

Book Review: The Vanishing and The Twilight of Christianity

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: Janine di Giovanni provides a deeply personal and journalistic account of the rapid decline of Christian communities in the Middle East. As a former war correspondent, and a practicing Catholic, di Giovanni blends political analysis with oral testimonies and histories to document what she describes as a “vanishing” world

THE veteran war reporter Janine di Giovanni roams far and wide to find out why 2,000 years of Christianity and its history in the Middle East may be nearing an end. In trying to understand the exodus, she tours monasteries in Syria’s warzones, visits embattled enclaves in Egypt, and meets Iraqi Christians from Mosul, who had “N” for “Nazarene” daubed on their doors by Islamic State.

Yet, among the more poignant symbols she notes are not the bombed-out churches on the frontlines, but the crucifix tattoos on the young restaurateurs who serve her lunch in the tranquil northern Iraqi city of Irbil. The tattoos are not hipster affectations, but symbols of a creed whose adherents no longer know their place – “the garish link depicting a permanence belied by their current predicament”.

Di Giovanni spoke to them about their insecurities. She sought to understand how they had been separated from family during the ISIS invasion, how they fear the future, and how they are saving their wages in a quest to pay illegal smugglers to get them out of Iraq. “But once out, where would they go?” she asks. 

To quite a few places, actually. Such has been the turbulence in the Middle East over the last half-century that its Christians have been forced out: diasporas range from Chicago to Ealing in west London. The exodus is particularly marked in Iraq and Syria, where the Christian minority had traditionally enjoyed the protection of secular strongmen such as Saddam Hussein and Bashar al-Assad. In Iraq, where an estimated 1.4 million Christians once lived, there are now only 250,000. In Syria, around 700,000 Christians of the pre-civil-war population of 1.1 million have departed.

The author, who has been covering the Middle East for more than three decades for high-end publications such as Vanity Fair, is well placed to chronicle the mass retreat – and astute enough not to blame it all on some sinister grand scheme by the region’s Muslims. In recent years, after all, some in the West have been quick to portray this as close to a genocide, underplayed by a liberal media that now finds Christianity a bit embarrassing. But while Christians have suffered at the hands of Sunni fanatics like ISIS, so too have many Muslims, Yazidis in northern Iraq, and other minorities: the reason they are fleeing is often just the general lawlessness, lousy government, and a desire to seek a better life abroad.

Still, di Giovanni makes it clear why many Christians in the Middle East feel their fortunes to be particularly on the wane. After 1945, they often formed an educated middle class, whose acumen in commerce, medicine, and teaching was appreciated by progressive-minded despots. For example, the courteous and urbane Christian Tariq Aziz, Iraq’s foreign minister, was for many years the acceptable face of Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Even after Saddam’s 2003 downfall – which many saw as a US “crusade” – there were no organised reprisals against the invaders’ co-religionists. And while al-Qaeda’s Sunni extremists focused on murdering fellow Muslims, Christians in the region also suffered. Then, in 2010, Islamic State gunmen stormed Our Lady of Salvation Church in Baghdad, killing 58. The group’s subsequent seizure of northern Iraq, including ancient Christian towns such as Qaraqosh, was for many the final straw. Many are leaving because there is no life and very little or no incentive to stay.

In Syria, things are scarcely better. Christians have had little choice but to rely on the Mafia-like protection of President Assad, himself a minority Alawite. A Syrian bishop tells di Giovanni that only Assad can hold Syria together – aware, presumably, that by taking sides, his flock may be tainted.

Indeed, the only Christians whose future seems reasonably assured in the Middle East are Egypt’s Copts, who, at up to 10 million, are perhaps simply too numerous to be pushed out. Ironically, it is here that community tensions seem worst. In 2013, mobs attacked 42 churches, and in the Christian districts di Giovanni visits, locals bitterly complain of being treated as second-class citizens.

Di Giovanni writes elegantly, her reporting and careful analysis informed partly by being a Catholic herself. However, the focus of this book is likely to surprise many readers’: nearly half of it is about Christians in Egypt and Gaza, where now barely 1,000 live. It is a source of amazement her editors didn’t ask her to concentrate mainly on Iraq and Syria, where the Christian decline has been at its most dramatic.

As such, it underplays some key chapters in the “exodus” narrative. The reason Christians first fled post-Saddam Iraq in droves was because their prosperity made them targets for criminal activity, and because they tended to turn the other cheek rather than form militias. There is no mention of how the Baghdad Christian enclave of Doura – once labelled “The Vatican” – was overrun by al-Qaeda in 2006, or how the Iraqi capital’s Christian flock is now among those most at risk of becoming extinct, having reached a tipping point where most Christian families have more relatives outside of Iraq than in.

On which note, it would also have been interesting to read about life for the diaspora in the “Little Baghdads” of Chicago and Ealing. The irony is that, by offering Christian sanctuary, the West is inadvertently hastening Middle Eastern Christianity’s demise all the more.

– The Vanishing: Faith, Loss, and the Twilight of Christianity in the land of the Prophets is published by Bloomsbury, 272pp      

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