‘Our Team’ of Guardians

Review by Bill Doughty––

Navy and Marine Corps veterans play a pivotal role in bending the arc of history toward justice in “Our Team: The Epic Story of Four Men and the World Series that Changed Baseball” by Luke Epplin (Flatiron Books, 2021).

Sailors and Marines as guardians of democracy have key roles in this fascinating book about baseball’s history. It’s a timely book as the team from Cleveland plays its last home game as the “Indians” September 27. The team has been renamed the “Guardians,” as announced by the team owner Paul Dolan and as presented in a powerful video by Tom Hanks*.

Seventy-five years ago the Cleveland team was led by owner Bill Veeck, who enlisted in the United States Marine Corps after Imperial Japan attacked Pearl Harbor/Oahu (and after Veeck said he saw the military drafting young fathers). Veeck would be wounded in an artillery accident at Bougainville in the South Pacific and would return to quickly rebuild the postwar Cleveland Indians.

Feller takes the oath from boxer Gene Tunney and joins the Navy.

Cleveland’s star pitcher and a national sports icon was Bob Feller. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Feller signed up for the Navy at the encouragement of heavyweight boxing champion Gene Tunney, who told Feller he would help recruit young Americans if he, too, joined. Feller reported to gunnery school and became a chief petty officer in charge of an antiaircraft battery aboard USS Alabama (BB 60). He served in the North Atlantic and South Pacific.

Larry Doby in WWII

One of the team’s eventual top hitters and outfielders worked his way up from the Negro Leagues and became the first African American in the American League: Larry Doby. (Doby would forever be in the shadow of Jackie Robinson, the first African American to break the color barrier and play in Major League Baseball.)

Veeck (rhymes with “heck”) would eventually lose part of his leg to his war injury. He was known as one hell of a showman. Epplin calls him “the most eccentric and forward-thinking executive of his era.” Veeck brought fireworks, gate prizes, bands, clowns, vaudeville acts, tightrope walkers, and quiz shows to baseball stadiums. He oversaw the planting of ivy along Wrigley Stadium. He was one of the first owners to embrace radio broadcasts and night games. Later in his career, Veeck famously recruited 3'7" little person Eddie Gaedel to bat, creating an impossible strike zone for the opposing pitcher.

In the mid 1940s, Veeck, the Marine Corps Veteran, took a swing at integrating baseball and connected. He recruited Negro Leagues veteran pitcher Satchel Paige and Navy veteran Larry Doby as well as Major League Baseball’s first black executive, Louis Jones, the Cleveland team’s director of public relations.

Satchel Paige and Bill Veeck

Jackie Robinson, Army vet.

The great Jackie Robinson is justifiably honored as the first African American to play in the major leagues, recruited by the Brooklyn Dodgers of the National League after being discharged from the Army. But what the Cleveland team created with Satchel Paige, Larry Cody, and Louis Jones –– combined with Veeck’s relentless welcoming of black fans –– also deserves the spotlight.

Fortunately, “Our Team” enlightens readers with great storytelling about the ups and downs and behind-the-scenes lives of interesting and complicated characters, none more complicated than Veeck, Feller, Paige, and Doby. The stories are set in an era of Jim Crow segregation and discrimination, when black baseball players could not stay in most white hotels or eat in white restaurants, especially in the South. It was also a time when the military had not yet embraced equality of opportunity.

When Larry Doby joined the Navy after attending an integrated high school in Paterson, New Jersey, he was “shocked” by what he experienced at Great Lakes Naval Training Station in a segregated section for black sailors. Doby said he dealt with the indignities of segregation by shutting down. “I didn’t crack up,” Doby recounts, “I just went into my shell.” Epplin writes:

“It was a familiar feeling for many black recruits arriving at Great Lakes. For decades, no branch of the armed services practiced segregation as rigidly as the Navy. Almost immediately after the battleships docked in the wake of World War I, the Navy closed its ranks to black Americans. They were allowed to enlist again in 1933, but solely as stewards and mess attendants, tending to white troops during the day and retiring to separate quarters at night. The bombing of Pearl Harbor spurred change, but only to a degree. Though black recruits soon would be admitted as apprentice seamen, they were not treated equally. Clark Clifford, who acted as President Harry Truman’s naval adviser during World War II, looked back on the compulsory segregation of that period with disgust. ‘I thought the Navy at times resembled a Southern plantation the had somehow escaped the Civil War,’ he wrote in his memoirs.”

Doby played baseball for the Great Lakes black Bluejackets. Later, Bob Feller, after returning stateside from fighting in the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot aboard USS Alabama, would oversee the white Bluejackets baseball team at Great Lakes.

USS Alabama (BB 60)

In building and promoting his team, Veeck took advantage of the great migration of blacks from the South to industrial centers, including Cleveland, to bring in massive crowds and record-breaking profits, embracing a slowly building wave of greater integration.

Veeck told the press, “I don’t think any man who has the ability should be banned from Major League Baseball on account of his color.”

Epplin writes, “It was (Veeck’s) belief that the war had ‘advanced us in regard to racial tolerance.’” But Veeck was a realist. He advised Cody –– just as Jackie Robinson had been advised –– to never show anger and to not respond to racial taunts by white supremacists.

Veeck valued and rewarded military veterans. Navy veteran Eddie Robinson played first base for Cleveland. Veeck recruited two young Cleveland pitchers –– Gene Bearden and Bob Lemon, who together had starring roles in the World Series of 1948 –– both Navy veterans.

USS Helena (CL-50), center, fires during the Battle of Kula Gulf, just before being torpedoed and sunk. The next ship astern is Saint Louis (CL-49). Photographed from Honolulu (CL-48). Official U.S. Navy photograph, National Archives, 80-G-54553.

Writing about Bearden, Epplin reports:

“While serving in the Navy during the war, he'd shipped out to the South Pacific aboard the USS Helena. During a skirmish with Japanese forces in the Solomon Islands in 1943, three torpedoes struck the ship, flooding its interior and throwing Bearden from a ladder. An officer, slinging the unconscious Bearden over his shoulder, lugged him onto a rubber life raft. There, they bobbed about before being saved by a rescue team. Bearden had a fractured skull and a crushed right knee. Aluminum plates were slotted into both.

“Some doctors told him that his pitching days were done. But Bearden was persistent. Unable to lift his right leg high during his windup, the southpaw compensated by learning to throw his own peculiar version of a knuckleball.”

Feller visits his teammates before shipping out.

Cleveland’s star pitcher and combat veteran Bob Feller goes under the microscope and is revealed as a somewhat tarnished “hero.” In Cleveland’s run toward the World Series Feller sets up a military-grade telescope to spy on other teams’ pitching signs from the opponents’ catchers. Feller had obtained the three-foot-long telescope from USS Alabama! The sign-stealing "espionage" by Feller and some of his teammates wouldn't be revealed till decades later.

A remarkable entrepreneur, Feller established a transactional relationship with Satchel Paige in barnstorming exhibition games. Feller nevertheless was a product of his time regarding race issues. “He seemingly continued to view racial matters through the prism of his own life story, which sometimes blinded him to the barriers that grit, hard work, and self reliance alone couldn’t topple.”

Characters from the past drift in and out of this book, a treasure trove for baseball history aficionados: Leo Durocher, Dizzy Dean, Buck O'Neill, Branch Rickey, Effa Manley, Abe Saperstein, Joe DiMaggio, Lou Boudreau, Warren Spahn, and Fay Vincent, among others.

You have to read this book to get the full effect and meaning of a special photo that personifies advances in baseball in the pivotal year of 1948. The iconic photo, included with other photos in the book, is of teammates Steve Gromek and Larry Doby at the end of game four of the World Series.

Steve Gromek and Larry Doby embrace after game four of the 1948 World Series.

The true standout hero in this book, though, is maverick Bill Veeck, a man who was a forward-thinking innovator who worked to bring greater equality to American society through baseball. What he lost along the way because of his singleminded passion is also an important part of this book, which in many ways is written for and about guardians of our democracy.

*Tom Hanks video announcing the Cleveland Guardians above.

Top Photo: Marine Corps Private Bill Veeck reads.

‘It Got Me Thinking’ … More!

Review by Bill Doughty––

Hope Jahren quotes a bit of eye-opening graffiti at the very end of her latest book, “The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here” (Vintage Books, Penguin Random House; 2020).

Jahren –– gifted scientist, teacher, painter of words, and author of “Lab Girl” –– looks all around for inspiration, and she finds it in trees, fish, cornfields, slaughterhouses, sanitation systems, memories, history, prehistory, and, yes, graffiti. More about the graffiti in a moment.

Ford, Edison, and Firestone –– and trees.

In this beautiful, funny, but melancholy personal reflection on climate change, Jahren examines the survivability of our species and the choices we make. Can we help each other and the planet we share? She’s not sure. But Hope drives her points home: use less, share more.

“The Story of More” opens with a meeting between Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and tire magnate Harvey Firestone. Edison said, as a brilliant insight, “The sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.” Then, Jahren imagines Ford and Firestone, after listening to Edison’s insight, “nodded politely, finished their drinks, and went straight back to motorizing the planet.”

By the way, Jahren admits her disdain for the automobile:

“While pursuing the ever-elusive more, we inadvertently trapped ourselves into metal boxes. Now we spend our mornings and our evenings maneuvering among the other metal boxes, watching each other through the glass.”

But she really, really hates “crap cars.” She’s convinced, rightfully so, that most Americans (especially those over the age of forty) have a story of a “crap car” from college with doors that would fall off, windows that wouldn’t crank open, starters that wouldn’t start, or, as in the case of Jahren's car described in "Lab Girl," where you could look down while driving and see the street whizz by.

Hope and beloved dad celebrate her birthday.

There are other ties to her wonderful first book “Lab Girl” –– her childhood in the heartland; Coco, the family Chesapeake Bay Retriever; co-worker Bill; and loving memories of her scientist dad who loved to always say, when served a Coke with lunch, “Coke with chow; wow!”

Of course, her fond memories and other ties to the past are her way to tie in science. “Coke with chow; wow!” leads to discussion of sugar production and consumption. When Coco jumps into Kailua Bay and swims toward the waverider buoy, it’s a disarming way to discuss a scientific instrument that measures sea levels and shows a rise of seven inches since 1969, the year Jahren was born. That's around the time I read Paul Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb” and Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring.”

The 1960s is when “ecology” first became a buzzword in high school and college campuses, and a year before Earth Day started, recognizing the damages of overpopulation, fossil fuel production and consumption, and a decline in forests and animal species.

Jahren speaks frankly that we are on the way toward a sixth mass extinction, with 25 percent of species expected to be extinct by the year 2050:

“All species will go extinct eventually, even our own: it is one of nature’s imperatives … [but] we still have control over our demise –– namely, how long will it take, and how much our children and grandchildren will suffer. If we want to take action, we should get started while it still matters what we do.”

What can we do?

Jahren provides the answers in one of the book’s several appendices, with steps to examine values, gather information, consider personal activities, evaluate personal investments, and see how to move institutions “toward consistency with your values.” Imagine how big a difference can be made if each person makes enlightened decisions to doing something to counter climate change, environmental destruction, and mass extinctions.

“Knowledge is responsibility,” Jahren says, and people can have hope, but “having hope requires courage” not fear or “lazy nihilism” as an excuse not to roll up our sleeves and make personal choices –– even as simple as what foods we choose to eat, how much water we use, and where we get our energy and how we use it. 

It’s also important to consider the source of information we receive. What’s believable? What’s backed by science –– even if scientists can be “both right and wrong,” as she illustrates early in the book. She examines claims by Aristotle, Thomas Malthus, M. King Hubbert, and Henry George, who “came the closest to being right about population growth” –– population kept up with food production (at least so far). Also, according to George:

“Most of the want and suffering that we see in the world today originates not from Earth’s inability to provide but from our inability to share.”

Jahren also examines claims from a Norwegian explorer and U.S. Navy experts.

“Back in 1969, the Norwegian explorer Bernt Balchen noticed a thinning trend in the ice that covered the North Pole. He warned his colleagues that the Arctic Ocean was melting into an open sea and that this could change weather patterns such that farming would become impossible in North America ten to twenty years hence. The New York Times picked up the story, and Balchen was promptly shouted down by Walter Whittman of the U.S. Navy, who had seen no evidence of thinning during his monthly airplane flights over the pole.

“As is the case with most scientists most of the time, Balchen was both right and wrong in his claims. By 1999, the submarines that had been cruising the Arctic Ocean since the 1950s could clearly see that polar sea ice had thinned drastically during the twentieth century –– thinned by almost half. Nevertheless, it’s been fifty years since Balchen graced the pages of the Times and American agriculture has yet to feel the full effect of any melting. Which, technically, means that Whittman was also both wrong and right.”

Jahren says that it’s not good science or good strategy to incite panic about fossil fuels running out. “Scientists have been accused of crying wolf since 1939, when the director of the Naval Petroleum Reserves informed Congress that America’s oil reserves would not outlast another world war.”

Scientists are better off when they maintain their skepticism, humility, and sense of awe in the face of chaos and the unknown. “Studying biology,” Jahren writes, “is like studying a Hieronymous Bosch painting: The chaos that you sense from a few steps back only increases as you lean forward to examine it more closely.” Case in point: Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights":

And it’s important, Professor Jahren says, to teach and not preach. “My own goal is to inform and not to scare you, because teaching has taught me to know and respect the difference. I’ve found that fear makes us turn away from an issue, whereas information draws us in.”

“An effort tempered by humility will go much further than one armored with righteousness,” she concludes.

Which brings us back to the humble line of graffiti she credits in the acknowledgements at the end of “More.” Along with tons of scientific papers, journals, and other sources she cites is this random bit of wisdom at the corner of Blindernveien and Apalveien in her home of Oslo, Norway:

“We worship an invisible god and slaughter visible nature –– without realizing that this nature we slaughter is the invisible god we worship.”

Jahren thanks the anonymous author and concludes, “It got me to thinking.”

In “The Story of More” Hope Jahren presents a wake up call to people who might otherwise prefer to sleep through reality without thinking –– or deny the nightmare of environmentally devastating climate change.

(It was a career highlight to sponsor Hope Jahren for a visit to Pearl Harbor in 2017, where she spoke at NOAA's Daniel K. Inouye Regional Center about many of the same themes in this book and the need to address climate change. Jahren toured USS Halsey (DDG 97) and learned how the Navy helps protect the environment while protecting the nation.)

Above: Dr. Hope Jahren, a geobiologist and New York Times bestselling author, speaks to audience members during a science and leadership seminar April 10, 2017 at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration facility in Pearl Harbor. Jahren's visit was part of an open discussion on science, leadership and facing challenges in the workplace, as well as readings from her book "Lab Girl,"which documents her adventures studying plant life throughout the course of her career. (MC2 Jeff Troutman)

Top photo: Airman Apprentice Nicole Duquet, aviation machinist mate, left, and Seaman Kimberly Usrey, boatswain's mate, both assigned to Transient Personnel Unit Norfolk, plant flowers during a base-wide Earth Day cleanup in 2009 at Naval Station Norfolk. (PO3 John Suits)

BJR2: ’The World As It Is’ post-9/11

Review by Bill Doughty––

A "found haiku" while reading Ben Rhodes:

the tension between

the world as it is and … the

world that ought to be

“After the Fall” (reviewed in the previous Navy Reads post) drops onto book shelves three years after writer Benjamin J. Rhodes’s other reflections, similarly profound and just as achingly personal: “The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House” (Random House, 2018), where Rhodes dissects, among other things, the “forever war.” This is a sweeping look back at the United States after September 11, 2001.

In announcing the beginning of bombing of Afghanistan twenty years ago, just weeks after 9/11, then-President George W. Bush told military service members: “Your mission is defined; your objectives are clear; your goal is just. You have my full confidence, and you will have every tool you need to carry out your duty.” Then, in 2003, Bush and neoconservatives invaded Iraq under false pretenses.

Unfortunately, the original mission to fight terrorists in Afghanistan morphed into a long-term counterinsurgency initiative and a doomed nation-building effort in the middle of a perpetual virtual civil war, with no end in sight.

While some progress was made in Afghanistan over two decades, especially for women and girls, the changes were neither deep nor long-lasting, as evidenced by the immediate fall of the government and Afghan military and ascension of the Taliban.

Just as Reagan invited the mujahideen to the White House in the early 80s (photo above), Trump invited the Taliban and Afghan government to Camp David two years ago this week, a secret meeting that was canceled at the last minute after it became public knowledge. Then, Trump and his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made a deal with the Taliban but did not include the Afghanistan government. Trump announced there would be a U.S. withdrawal by May 2021, but Biden postponed the withdrawal till the end of August.

Future historians likely will not question whether the American war in Afghanistan should have continued after twenty years; rather, they will dissect how the end of the war evacuation was conducted. Some have already asked why the United States stayed so long, left so much infrastructure and equipment behind, and provided (albeit unintentionally) so much combat training to the Taliban and regional terrorists. Why didn’t we leave sooner?

In “The World As It Is” Rhodes takes us back to nearly the mid-point of the twenty-year war in Afghanistan, to Obama’s Afghan Review. Rhodes was in the room where it happened. In fact, he provided a critical role as an advisor to Obama. Other advisors who weighed in as part of the Afghan Review included Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, CIA Director John Brennan, General Stanley McChrystal, General David Petraeus, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen*.

Rhodes writes:

“Gates argued that he wasn’t for a CT (counterterrorism) strategy or a full COIN (counterinsurgency) strategy –– he was for something in between, something that promoted a strong, effective government that delivers services to the people. When the shortcomings of the Afghan government were pointed out, Gates said that we should not give ‘one dollar or soldier’ for a corrupt government –– even though that’s exactly what we were doing. Petraeus said our goal was not to defeat the Taliban but to deny them population centers. Mullen talked about the psychological piece –– the need to create the impression that the Taliban will lose. For the same reason, Clinton said that putting in troops wouldn’t work but you still need to put in troops. It seemed to sum things up perfectly: We had created political pressure on ourselves to send in troops based on a theory of COIN; the review was determining that COIN couldn’t succeed; but all of the arguments still pointed to sending in the same number of troops. We are not going to defeat the Taliban, Obama kept saying. We need to knock them back to give us space to go after al Qaeda.”

Vice President Joe Biden was against any escalation, and CIA Director John Brennan recommended a limited surge just in order to target al Qaeda. When Obama asked Rhodes for his opinion, Rhodes said he agreed with Brennan –– and Obama. “Target, train, transition” became their framework for their strategy and tactics.

“Ultimately, Obama decided to send thirty thousand American troops to Afghanistan, with NATO getting us the rest of the way to forty thousand. We would announce it as a temporary surge –– in eighteen months, the troops would start to draw down. We’d secure Afghanistan’s major population centers, then shift to training and counterterrorism –– essentially endorsing the Petraeus-McChrystal approach for two years, and then shifting to the Biden-Brennan approach sooner than the military wanted. At Biden’s suggestion, Obama had all the principals memorialize their agreement with the plan in writing. It felt like a big much, but his was the lesson from Vietnam: Limit escalation.”

Prior to Biden, three presidents were unable to end the war in Afghanistan. But Obama ended the war in Iraq, ordered the killing of Osama bin Laden, and greatly reduced the cost of lives and cost of war in Afghanistan. Rhodes notes:

“Obama wanted to extricate the United States from the permanent war that had begun on 9/11. On the day he took office, there were roughly 180,000 troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. By late 2014, the number of troops in Afghanistan was down to 15,000. All U.S. troops were out of Iraq. These were meaningful achievements; they saved American lives, as casualty numbers fell from nearly a hundred Americans killed each month to nearly zero, and the cost of war shrank by tens of billions of dollars.”

*Rhodes now cohosts the podcast Pod Save the World. On a recent episode he noted how former CNO and CJCS retired Adm. Mike Mullen (pictured below with then-SECDEF Gates) expressed regret for not ending the American war in Afghanistan sooner.

In an interview with veteran journalist Martha Raddatz on ABC’s This Week, Mullen said, regarding the Afghanistan government and security forces, ” I thought we could build the army and give them a chance to create structures which would run a country in a much more modern fashion. That just is not the case.” Mullen added, “What I thought we could do and I advised President Obama that –– accordingly is I thought we could turn it around. Obviously, I was wrong.”

Mullen said, “I don't think it was possible for us to just abruptly walk away right after we killed bin Laden. But, clearly, we could have gone earlier than we did. As I look back and -- and a lot of people are critical of the president right now, President Biden had it right back then. He was focused singly on counterterrorism. His advice was along those lines. And he certainly said that. And I give him credit for that.”

(Ben Rhodes is President Obama’s former National Security Advisor for Strategic Communication and Speech Writing.)

Top photo: President Barack Obama meets with his national security team on Afghanistan and Pakistan in the Situation Room of the White House, June 23, 2010. Seated at the table are, from left, General David Petraeus, head of US Central Command, Admiral Michael Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, Vice President Joe Biden, the President, National Security Advisor Gen. James L. Jones, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, Deputy National Security Advisor Tom Donilon, and John Brennan, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

BJR1: ’After the Fall’

Review by Bill Doughty––

In “After the Fall: Being American in the World We’ve Made” by Ben Rhodes (Random House, 2021) a great thinker “worries about the danger of where the blend of nationalism and authoritarianism can lead.”

This is a must-read about not only “how did we get here?” but also “where are we heading?”

“After the Fall” is divided into four parts –– I, The Authoritarian Playbook; II, The Counterrevolution (mostly Soviet- and Russia-related); III, The Chinese Dream; and IV, Who We Are: Being American, which includes a chapter called “Forever War.”

Rhodes, a deep thinker, considers whether American exceptionalism and supremacy still exist in a world turning away from liberal democracy and more toward authoritarian, even totalitarian, rule:

“Ironically, once they were unbridled, the very forces that enabled this nation’s rise would accelerate its descent. The globalized spread of profit-seeking capitalism accelerated inequality, assaulted people’s sense of traditional identity, and seeded a corruption that allowed those with power to consolidate control. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, this nation’s sense of purpose was channeled into a forever war that hemorrhaged resources, propagated a politics of Us versus Them, and offered a template and justification for autocratic leaders who represented an older form of nationalism. This nation’s new technologies proliferated like an uncontrolled virus before we understood their impact, transforming the way that human beings consume information; at first hopeful, the unifying allure of the Internet and social media segmented people back into lonely tribes where they could be more easily manipulated by propaganda, disinformation, and conspiracy theory. Somehow, after three decades of unchecked American capitalism, military power, and democracy itself, bringing back those older forms of nationalism and social control in new packaging.”

Then-President Bush meets with Orban in 2001

As a prime example, Rhodes takes a deep look into Hungary’s transformation under dictator Viktor Orban. Like many leaders, Orban is a complicated figure who seems to have gravitated to a need for more power, a man who claims grievances in establishing a populist blood-and-soil nationalism.

Rhodes explains “how Viktor Orban had transformed Hungary from an open democracy to a largely authoritarian system in the span of a decade.” Orban shut down a free and open media, and promoted a national religion (Christianity) and national racial identity (white). Orban politicized the nation’s supreme court, gerrymandered voting districts to favor nationalists, and changed voting laws to suppress dissent and political rivals.

Rhodes sees a similar “landscape for nationalism” in the United States, particularly in the past decade. Even since his book was published we see an increase in polarity, extremist-fascist ideology, and even vigilantism, where neighbors are encouraged, even paid, to turn in neighbors.

“In America, as in Hungary, the right wing has embraced a nationalism characterized by Christian identity, national sovereignty, distrust of democratic institutions, opposition to immigration, and contempt for politically correct liberal elites.’

Putin’s Landcape and Xi’s BRI

Navalny

Of course, a modern architect for such a nationalist “landscape” is Russian President Vladimir Putin. Rhodes says that Putin’s view of the world is “a place in which truth and individual human beings are incidental to the raw will to power.”

Putin allegedly ordered the poisoning and imprisonment of one of his nemeses, Alexey Navalny, who had dared to threaten Putin’s power. Navalny, who has been imprisoned more than a dozen times, became politically conscious in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union after witnessing privatization schemes that consolidated wealth to a handful of oligarchs. He saw corruption schemes in action in Moscow courts. Navalny told Rhodes, “The Soviet Union was an empire based on a lie. And Putin’s Russia is a country based on a lie.”

Attack exercise at a People’s Liberation Army base in Shenyang, China, Aug. 16, 2017. (PO1 Dominique A. Pineiro)

Rhodes then outlines how China embraced American globalization and capitalism while “carefully removing the freedoms” –– Shanghai’d as it were. 

He takes us on a poignant visit to Hong Kong, where young people fight for freedom, democracy, and the right to express themselves without constant surveillance; where booksellers are arrested –– and “The most shocking thing is that it was not shocking.”

Rhodes shows how China is trying to control sea lanes and wrap other Asian nations in their tightening “Belt and Road Initiative.” China, through corruption, exports authoritarianism but expels human rights, he says; the Communist Chinese Party’s treatment of the Uighurs seems based on a version of the U.S. Patriot Act.

Is China’s blend of capitalism, militarism, and stolen technology the future of global power? Is the nationalism/authoritarianism landscape growing and breeding identity-based polarization?

And, how does all of that apply to the United States in the wake of Trump, Russian interference in our elections, the COVID-19 pandemic, the killing of George Floyd, and the January 6 coup attempt at the Capitol? Rhodes says, “You have to look squarely at the darkest aspects of what America is in order to fully, truly love what America is supposed to be.”

“American democracy doesn’t offer us immunity from human fallibility,” Rhodes writes, “but it does offer second chances.”

Afghanistan and Saudis

This book was especially relevant to read during the ending of the nearly 20-year war in Afghanistan –– a war that may actually be almost twice that long. Rhodes reminds us in Chapter 23, “Forever War,” how in 1983 President Reagan “welcomed the mujahideen to the White House as freedom fighters, men of God, comparing them to George Washington.” The United States supported those fighters in their war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s, but some of those same fighters became part of the Taliban in the 1990s.

According to Rhodes, “Our effort in the 1980s had generated unintended consequences like the birth of al Qaeda just as our post-9/11 wars have generated all manner of unintended consequences, including the creation of al-Qaeda in Iraq, which became ISIS. In this way, the forever war has actually been a forty-year enterprise at war with itself.”

Among unintended consequences over many decades have been the results of America’s relationship with the House of Saud. What was the role of Saudi Arabia on 9/11? What is the U.S. role in Saudi Arabia’s war with Yemen? What kind of legitimacy and support do we give to Saudi Prince Mohamed bin Salman?

“In 2015, Saudi Arabia –– the birthplace of Osama bin Laden and fifteen of the 9/11 hijackers, the source of the oil money that fueled decades of radicalization around the world –– went to war in Yemen. A Houthi sect that had long been a rival to the Saudis had seized control of the capital. The Houthis were aligned with Iran. The new Saudi defense minister and heir apparent to the throne, Mohamed bin Salman, wanted to send a message that he was an assertive character while using the war to consolidate his control over the kingdom’s foreign policy. He was, according to some reports, thirty years old.

“Tentatively at first, America participated, providing logistical and targeting support. The Saudis were, after all, our allies, and the machinery of the government was built to support them. Obama was ambivalent, but he was ultimately persuaded that by participating, we could be a moderating force not the Saudis. It was soon apparent that this wasn’t the case, and this war would escalate when Donald Trump came to office, offering a full embrace of Mohamed bin Salman. Hundreds of thousands of people would be killed, displaced, put at risk of famine. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula was fighting the same Houthi enemy as the Saudis were. So the United States, nearly two decades after 9/11, was fighting on the same side as al-Qaeda and Saudi Arabia in Yemen. Such was the logic of the forever war.”

Rhodes reflects on his “list of things we’d done wrong” while Obama was in office: “for instance, supporting the Saudi-led war in Yemen, surging troops in Afghanistan, or failing to more forcefully confront the Republican Party’s efforts to undermine democracy.”

He describes the normalization of a no-longer-surprising-but-still-shocking dynamic over the past decade.

“This whole dynamic was reinforced when Mohamed bin Salman traveled across the United States in early 2018. By that time, it was clear that he was a brutal dictator –– imprisoning his own family at home, waging an increasingly out-of-control war in Yemen, briefly kidnapping the prime minister of Lebanon, lavishly supporting autocrats across the Middle East. Yet he was fully embraced … He may have been a brutal dictator, but he had bottomless cash and supported the War on Terror. Those were America’s preeminent interests. It’s no wonder he felt a sense of impunity. A few months later, Jamal Khashoggi –– an outspoken critic of Mohamed bin Salman and a journalist for The Washington Post –– would be chopped up in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.”

Threats to our own democracy are reflected in the book’s epigraph, a quote from Turkish journalist and author Ece Temelkuran:

“The final takeover does not happen with one spectacular Reichstag conflagration, but is instead an excruciating, years-long process of many scattered, seemingly insignificant little fires that smolder without flames.”

Where are we heading as threats to democracy smolder?