The Foreign Service Journal, March 2022

88 MARCH 2022 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL prison.” There they were held for weeks or months until they signed over assets, resigned positions and pledged their loyalty to MBS. In the process, at least one detainee died, and dozens of others alleged mis- treatment bordering on torture during interrogations. Yet Rundell seems to regard the episode as a regrettable but necessary signal to the monarchy’s oppo- nents that times were changing—and even says it succeeded. Similarly, he condemns the brutal murder in October 2018 of Washing- ton Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi at the hands of Saudi govern- ment agents inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. But Rundell believes the motive was not Khashoggi’s very public attacks on the regime or his contacts with the Muslim Brotherhood, but ingratitude. For while he and his family had long benefited from their royal ties, Khashoggi had publicly denounced his benefactors as corrupt and unfit to rule. And that con- stituted treason in their eyes. In a triumph of understatement, Run- dell observes: “Such reasoning may jus- tify kidnapping or killing in Riyadh but, like public beheadings, it flies in the face of acceptable Western norms.” He makes the point even clearer in his concluding admonition: “It [the West] cannot ignore the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, the detention of political activists or the war in Yemen—yet it should not let these events overshadow the genuine improve- ments taking place.” Whether Vision 2030 has actually pro- duced “genuine improvements” worth such trade-offs, or is a mirage, Rundell need not worry. In fact, the West has largely ignored those developments, at least publicly. While President Joe Biden has refused tomeet or even speak withMBS, he dispatched National Security Adviser Jake Sherman to Riyadh to do so last Septem- ber—just before the third anniversary of Khashoggi’s murder. And we continue to support Saudi Arabia’s brutal proxy war against Iran in Yemen, albeit with less zeal than the previous administration showed. Vision or Mirage has much to offer readers, but they should take its conclu- sions with several heaps of salt—or sand. Steven Alan Honley, a State Department Foreign Service officer from 1985 to 1997, went on to serve as editor-in-chief of The Foreign Service Journal from 2001 to 2014. He is the author of Future Forward: FSI at 70—A History of the Foreign Service Insti- tute (Arlington Hall Press, 2017). Navigating a Major Transition Three Days at Camp David: How a Secret Meeting in 1971 Transformed the Global Economy Jeffrey E. Garten, HarperCollins, 2021, $29.99/hardcover, e-book available, 435 pages. Reviewed by Harry Kopp Jeffrey Garten served in government in Democratic and Republican adminis- trations, under presidents Nixon, Ford, Carter and Clinton. He was a successful investment banker onWall Street. He was dean, and now is dean emeritus, of the Yale School of Management. He is the on-camera second banana to his spouse, cooking star Ina Garten, whichmakes him very likely the best-fedman in America. He has more than enough laurels to rest on, but to his credit and our gain, he has gone to work and given us this terrific book. Three Days at Camp David covers the 1971 U.S. decision, thrashed out over an August weekend, to break its international obligations and free the dollar from its link to gold. But this is no treatise on monetary policy. Garten was not present (he joined the administration only in 1973), but he has interviewed every living major partici- pant and read deeply in the public record. His account of how the weekend played out is vivid and immediate: the reader feels the interplay of character, calcula- tion, policy and ambition at the top of the Richard M. Nixon administration. The economics are taken care of in two brisk and deft opening chapters. The wartime Bretton Woods agreements of 1944 had as their linchpin a U.S. pledge to exchange gold for dollars on demand at a price of $35.00 an ounce. Other countries tied their currencies to the U.S. dollar at a fixed rate, which could be changed only under extraordinary circumstances. This rigid system provided the stability needed for postwar recovery, but as the world’s economies changed and diverged, it became increasingly unworkable. By 1971, the global supply of dollars far exceeded what the U.S. could redeem for gold. As redemptions rose and the gold reserve dwindled, Treasury officials saw the threat of a market panic, and President Nixon saw a threat to his reelection. Determined to act, Nixon ordered his economic advisers to Camp David the weekend of Aug. 13-15. Garten sketches the principals: President Nixon; Treasury Secretary John B. Connally Jr. and his undersecretary, Paul A. Volcker Jr.; Arthur F. Burns, chair of the Federal Reserve; George P. Shultz, director of the Office of Management and Budget; and Nixon’s assistant for international economic policy, Peter G. Peterson. Garten describes this group as “a team of men with diverse backgrounds and economic philosophies,” but “diverse” is stretching a point. Except