Friends of The Weekly Standard are so prolific that it can be easy to lose track of all their projects—so we wanted to take this opportunity to highlight a few recent books by some of our cherished and most frequent contributors.
Elliott Abrams defends democracy promotion in Realism and Democracy: American Foreign Policy after the Arab Spring. A long introductory essay, itself worth the price of the book, examines America’s Cold War record on human rights. (This includes a description of Abrams’s own involvement during the Reagan administration; he helpfully reprints the text of his 1981 memo that begins “Human rights is at the core of our foreign policy, because it is central to America’s conception of itself.”) Abrams then discusses U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East under several administrations and makes the case for the robust promotion of human rights and the indispensability of American leadership. Foreign policy realists who think the United States should forsake human rights to make deals with dictators will have to grapple with Abrams’s arguments for years to come.
Four decades ago, Paul Cantor argued in Shakespeare’s Rome: Republic and Empire that Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra contain within them a political philosophy worthy of study. That book has been reissued this year, along with a new one, Shakespeare’s Roman Trilogy: The Twilight of the Ancient World. In the new book, Cantor revises and extends his thinking and says much more about the third Roman play, Julius Caesar, showing what the trilogy can teach us about eros, virtue, tyranny, and much else. Can reading Shakespeare help us better understand what it means to be human beings and citizens? If so, Cantor is as wise a guide to the bard’s political wisdom as can be hoped for.
In Seablindness: How Political Neglect Is Choking American Seapower and What to do About It, Seth Cropsey sets out the stark choice we face: Either we “demand the U.S. Navy do more with less, or provide the money needed to grow the fleet.” But his historically informed and technologically savvy case for American seapower is not just about expanding the Navy’s fleet and modernizing its weapons. It is also about morale: The strain we put on our Navy and Marine personnel and their families can contribute to lower retention rates and to veterans’ physical and mental health problems. And it is about morality: Seapower is necessary for our self-defense, and “the moral imperative of self-defense,” Cropsey writes, “cannot be separated from our—or any people’s—natural right to life.”
Judging just by its title, Jeremy Rabkin and John Yoo’s new book Striking Power: How Cyber, Robots, and Space Weapons Change the Rules for War might seem very futuristic. But about a quarter of the book looks backwards, to describe the historical evolution of the law of war. This is a necessary chore, since Rabkin and Yoo believe that recent international agreements intended to codify and extend laws of war have actually undermined their protections—and that this problem will become more obvious and dangerous as cyber, autonomous, and space weapons advance. While Rabkin and Yoo argue hopefully that these “new technologies create weapons of less destruction, not mass destruction,” they are measured in their conclusions and believe that better and clearer thinking in this area is needed—a goal to which their book helpfully contributes.
