From the bestselling author of *Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother* and Yale Law School Professor Amy Chua, a bold new look at how longstanding false assumptions about group behavior have been the undoing of America's best laid plans, particularly in our foreign policy
We all want--no, are compelled--to be part of the group. Sports teams, churches, companies, nations, races--some groups we belong to voluntarily, others we find ourselves enrolled in at birth. These groups shape our identities. Indeed, in some parts of the world, people kill and die for their group. But where Americans see divisions of ideas--capitalism vs. communism, democracy vs. authoritarianism, the "Free World" vs. the "Axis of Evil"--others see older and deeper group identities, not national or ideological but ethnic, religious, sectarian, and tribal. Time and time again this tendency has undermined American foreign policy. In the Vietnam War, an inability to apprehend the importance of Vietnamese nationalism, and an insistence on seeing the conflict through the lens of the Cold War, brought America to its knees. Several decades later, American leadership badly misapprehended the significance of Pashtun identity and loyalty in Afghanistan. In Iraq, we failed to take stock of the potential for violence between Sunnis and Shias. It's time to cure ourselves of this myopic one-size-fits-all view of group behavior in our foreign policy.
But just as America has been willfully blind to the significance of group behavior abroad, we have remained intractably in thrall to it at home. Political leaders and commentators alike refer to the "black vote," the "Evangelical vote," the "non-college-educated white male vote," "the suburban white female vote," and so on. Despite our constitutional commitments to individual liberty and equality, we have always been intensely group conscious as a nation, from our original sin of slavery to Dred Scott to the Chinese Exclusion Act to Jim Crow. Given how political mobilization is characteristically organized around group-based movements that increasingly reject universalist rhetoric, should we be so surprised by the disturbing recent rise in anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, and racist rhetoric?
In characteristically persuasive style, Amy Chua explodes this most American of paradoxes: how can we be so group blind abroad and yet so acutely group conscious at home? She argues forcefully that we need to be far more knowledgeable and strategic about ethnic, religious, and tribal identity in our foreign policy, and far more unified at home. Enough false slogans of unity, which are just another form of divisiveness. It is time for a more difficult unity that acknowledges the reality of group differences and fights the deep inequities that divide us.
Autorentext
Amy Chua is the John M. Duff, Jr. Professor at Yale Law School. She is a noted expert in the fields of ethnic conflict and globalization, and the author of the bestselling titles World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability, Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance -- and Why They Fall, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, and her most recent book, The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America, co-written with Jed Rubenfeld. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut, with her husband and two daughters.
Klappentext
The bestselling author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Yale Law School Professor Amy Chua offers a bold new prescription for reversing our foreign policy failures and overcoming our destructive political tribalism at home
Humans are tribal. We need to belong to groups. In many parts of the world, the group identities that matter most - the ones that people will kill and die for - are ethnic, religious, sectarian, or clan-based. But because America tends to see the world in terms of nation-states engaged in great ideological battles - Capitalism vs. Communism, Democracy vs. Authoritarianism, the "Free World" vs. the "Axis of Evil" - we are often spectacularly blind to the power of tribal politics. Time and again this blindness has undermined American foreign policy.
In the Vietnam War, viewing the conflict through Cold War blinders, we never saw that most of Vietnam's "capitalists" were members of the hated Chinese minority. Every pro-free-market move we made helped turn the Vietnamese people against us. In Iraq, we were stunningly dismissive of the hatred between that country's Sunnis and Shias. If we want to get our foreign policy right - so as to not be perpetually caught off guard and fighting unwinnable wars - the United States has to come to grips with political tribalism abroad.
Just as Washington's foreign policy establishment has been blind to the power of tribal politics outside the country, so too have American political elites been oblivious to the group identities that matter most to ordinary Americans - and that are tearing the United States apart. As the stunning rise of Donald Trump laid bare, identity politics have seized both the American left and right in an especially dangerous, racially inflected way. In America today, every group feels threatened: whites and blacks, Latinos and Asians, men and women, liberals and conservatives, and so on. There is a pervasive sense of collective persecution and discrimination. On the left, this has given rise to increasingly radical and exclusionary rhetoric of privilege and cultural appropriation. On the right, it has fueled a disturbing rise in xenophobia and white nationalism.
In characteristically persuasive style, Amy Chua argues that America must rediscover a national identity that transcends our political tribes. Enough false slogans of unity, which are just another form of divisiveness. It is time for a more difficult unity that acknowledges the reality of group differences and fights the deep inequities that divide us.