The Foreign Service Journal, November 2021

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | NOVEMBER 2021 45 ambassadors and how it varied sharply from past practice,” Jett says. “When it came to ambassadorial appointments, Trump’s approach was much the same story: doing what was best for him rather than the country. He appointed the highest percentage of political appointee ambassadors of any president since World War II.” During Dennis C. Jett’s 28-year career as a State Department Foreign Service officer, he served as ambassador to Peru and Mozambique, among many other assignments. He is currently a professor of international relations and founding faculty member of the School of International Affairs at Penn State University. He is also the author of Why Peacekeeping Fails (2019) and Why American Foreign Policy Fails (2016). Stronger: Adapting America’s China Strategy in an Age of Competitive Interdependence Ryan Hass, Yale University Press, 2021, $27.50/hardcover, e-book available, 240 pages. Ryan Hass harbors no illusions about Beijing’s revisionist ambitions, particularly those directed at coerc- ing Taiwan’s 23 million residents to abandon their democratic principles and accept unification with the mainland. As a former political reporting officer for Xinjiang, he calls out the regime’s repres- sion there, as well as its campaign to dilute the universal reach of values that he promoted as an American diplomat. He also sees plainly the unfair nature of China’s state-led mercantilist economic model and its effects on hardworking Americans. Yet, as Hass observes, outrage is an ineffective emotion for managing relations among great powers. Instead, he advocates competitive interdependence as the framework for understanding the nature of U.S.-China relations. And he is refreshingly optimistic that relations can improve, observing that “no immutable diplomatic laws of gravity determine that intensifying competition between a rising power and an established power will lead to conflict.” Even with China’s ongoing surge in strength, he says, the United States still holds a stronger hand. But it must play its cards well. Ryan Hass was a Foreign Service officer from 2003 to 2017, serving in Beijing (where he earned the State Department Director General’s award for impact and originality in reporting), Seoul, Ulaanbaatar and Washington, D.C. He is now a senior fellow and the Michael H. Armacost Chair in Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution, where he holds a joint appointment to the John L. Thornton China Center and the Center for East Asia Policy Studies. He is also the Chen-Fu and Cecilia Yen Koo Chair in Taiwan Studies.  Global China: Assessing China’s Growing Role in the World Edited by Tarun Chhabra, Rush Doshi, Ryan Hass, and Emilie Kimball, Brookings Institution Press, 2021, $37.99/paperback, e-book available, 428 pages. Whatever one thinks about Beijing’s rise, there can be no dispute that it has emerged as a truly global actor, both economically and militarily. With that trend in mind, Brookings Institution scholars conducted research over the past two years, culminating in Global China: Assessing China’s Growing Role in the World . The project is intended to furnish policymakers and the public with hard facts and deep insights for understanding China’s regional and global ambitions. Former FSO Ryan Hass is one of the four editors of this compilation. MEMOIRS Three Years in Afghanistan: Bamiyan, Balkh, and Bagram: A Photo Journal John Wecker, independently published, 2021, $9/Kindle, 100 pages. John Wecker’s three one-year Foreign Service tours in Afghani- stan were all clearly very meaningful for him, both personally and professionally, as this handsome photo book attests. From 2008 to 2009, Wecker was the sole American FSO assigned to serve with the New Zealand Defence Force’s provincial reconstruction team (PRT) in Bamiyan—among the earliest coalition troops to enter the province. It was, by all accounts, a perfect match between the Kiwis and the Hazara,