The Foreign Service Journal, June 2020

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JUNE 2020 73 The question posed in the final sec- tion of the book is whether democracies can fend off the wave of populism and anti-West authoritarianism, which is vitiating the order set up after the end of the Cold War. The authors conclude on a positive note, portraying the United States as a country that has the capacity to regener- ate and reengage. They quote President Franklin Roosevelt, who stated in 1943: “I have distinct reservations as to how good ‘the good ole days’ were. I would rather believe we can achieve new and better days.” One shortcoming of the book is that it is a bit austere, without many of the illustra- tive vignettes that can add to prose. The final section, and its review of events of the last 30 years, also seems hastily put together. That said, To Build a Better World is a valuable book. The authors make clear how well served the United States was by a foreign policy apparatus led by Secretary of State James A. Baker, and that included, among many other outstanding public servants, Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger and Ambassador to the Soviet Union Jack Matlock (both career diplomats). The larger point made by Zelikow and Rice is a vital one: the art of diplomacy is a serious business, and success (as shown in 1989-1991) requires coordi- nated policy planning, steadiness of purpose and tactical skill. Joseph L. Novak, a Foreign Service officer, serves as a senior adviser in the Bureau of International Organization Affairs at the State Department in Washington, D.C. The Wrong Kind of Leadership Democracies Divided: The Global Challenge of Political Polarization Edited by Thomas Carothers and Andrew O’Donohue, Brookings Institution Press, 2019, $34.99/paperback, ebook available, 280 pages. Reviewed by Steven Alan Honley Although the coronavirus crisis has temporarily pushed the 2020 U.S. presidential campaign into the shadows (to the relief of many voters, I suspect), this book could not be more timely. Democ- racies Divided is the first book-length comparative analysis of the impact of political polarization on democracies, old and new, around the world. EditorsThomas Carothers, senior vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Andrew O’Donohue, a former fellow in that program, have assembled an excel- lent lineup of authors who bring deep local knowledge and experience to their assessments of the state of democracy in Bangladesh, Brazil, Colombia, India, Indo- nesia, Kenya, Poland and Turkey—and the United States. The inclusion of that last case study by Carothers may surprise some readers. But while careful not to draw the comparison explicitly, Carothers makes a solid case that the decline of democratic norms in America represents a sort of canary in the global coal mine. To illustrate what I mean, here are quotes from three of the case studies. See if you can guess which of the countries they describe: • Polarization has eroded fact-based public debate, facilitated a dramatic retrenchment of democracy, divided civil society and hurt social cohesion. • Writers, scientists and intellectuals are being attacked and derided solely for expressing even the slightest differences in perspective on political or cultural matters. • A number of pro-democratic and anti-racism grassroots organizations have been organizing pro-refugee rallies and demonstrations, but the ruling party and right-wing media have widely promoted the narrative that refugees are a threat to both national security and cultural identity. Remarkably, none of those critiques appears in the chapter examining the United States—but they all could have. (The first is about Turkey; the second, India; and the third, Poland.) Democracies Divided is not simply a diagnosis of what has gone wrong, how- ever. Each case study discusses actions that concerned citizens and organizations in these societies are taking to coun- ter polarizing forces, whether through reforms to political parties, institutions or the media. And in the final chapter, the book’s editors distill from the case stud- ies a range of possible ways for restoring consensus and defeating polarization in the world’s democracies. But that list of remedies is quite short, alas. And when one looks at what has happened in most of these countries (particularly India) since the book was published last September, it bears out Carothers and O’Donohue’s rueful wis- dom on the last page: “In key respects, polarization is a type of negative externality—those who play the most significant role in producing it