Jacob Heilbrunn, America Last: The right’s century-long romance with foreign dictators, New York: Liveright, 2024, 264 pp.  
 

To Heilbrunn, National Interest journalist and editor, the far-right’s love affair with Viktor Orbán and Vladimir Putin is only the latest expression of a time-honoured authoritarian bent in American politics: a consistent, albeit periodically quiescent desire for a sort of “foreign paradise,” more vital, more hierarchical and occluded to serve as a role model for the USA’s rule-bending, decadent, overly liberal democracy of the United States. 

Heilbrunn suggests that this tradition goes back at least to World War I, when writers such as H.L. Mencken and George Sylvester Viereck praised Kaiser Wilhelm II’s Prussia. Meanwhile, that current survived the inter-war period expressing itself in diplomat Richard Washburn Child’s praise of Benito Mussolini; American Legion chief Alvin Owsley’s promise to “protect [the] country’s institutions and ideals the way fascists dealt with the saboteurs threatening Italy”; tycoons like Merwin K. Hart, Henry Ford and Thomas Lamont cultivating relationships with fascists; and Charles Lindbergh’s pilgrimage to Adolf Hitler’s Germany, where he deigned to be decorated with the German Eagle Service Cross from Hermann Goering in 1938. We should remember at this point that Lindbergh himself warned of “inferior Asian blood” infiltrating America in 1939, a historical precursor of Donald Trump's tirades against migrants “poisoning the blood of our country.” 

This book brings a comprehensive perspective and points out a few throughlines that have so far eluded us. We’re watching it all play out again.   

Edward Wong, At the Edge of Empire: A Family’s reckoning with China, New York: Viking, 2024, 464 pp.

Edward Wong, former head of the New York Times office in Beijing, has written a comprehensive history of modern China, adding two personal narratives: his father’s, and his own. The book is at once ambitious and unusual. Wong has more of a history and family connection with China than former NYT editors-in-chief in Beijing, some of them having published memoirs and testimonials of their own. While he wrote a far-ranging history of China in the 20th century, Wong delves into a tale that few may know, taking us to places and times fading from memory into the past.

Born from Chinese immigrants in Washington, D.C., Edward Wong grew up surrounded by family secrets. His father worked at Chinese restaurants and seldom mentioned his homeland or the years he spent in Mao’s People's Liberation Army. Yook Kearn Wong came of age during the Japanese occupation of China during WWII and the communist revolution, and Mao’s spellbinding promises of a powerful China enraptured him. Yook Wong’s amazing journey as a soldier took him from Manchuria, during the Korean War, to Xinjiang, at the gates of Central Asia. In 1962, disillusioned with the Communist Party, he planned a desperate escape to Hong Kong.

Wong goes into minute detail on Chinese history and mentions more that once that the issues with Xinjiang and Tibet predate the People's Republic of China and the nationalist government of the republican era. He met the citizens that drive the country’s formidable economic growth and global expansion yet contend with the most unassailable leader since Mao, Xi Jinping, and his nationalist hold on power. Following in his father’s footsteps, Edward Wong witnessed interethnic conflict in Xinjiang and Tibet, as well as pro-democratic protests in Hong Kong.

A personal, historical, and journalistic account that will help you understand modern-day China.

Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc.: The dictators who want to run the world, New York: Doubleday, 2024, 224 pp.  

Almost three quarters of the world’s population live under autocracies or hybrid regimes. As to the latter form, democracy is either ailing or never properly took hold, and its credibility is eroded. Anne Applebaum’s new book points to the networked rise of parties, leaders, and cadres able to transform systems from within and articulate them in terms of doctrine and finance into global expression. As the author poses, globalized finance, countless places to hide, and democracies’ benign tolerance of foreign corruption now provide autocrats with opportunities few could have imagined a few decades ago. 

While in the 20th century most autocrats were brutal dictators whose goal was to subjugate their citizenry, 21st century autocracy has become much more sophisticated and ambitious. The Russian regime and others of its ilk have developed cross-border, kleptocratic financial networks, innovative security services, and professional propagandists, broadcasting the same messages on the weakness of democracies and all the ills of the West. They find support with allies in Western capitals who, blending ambition and ideological resonance, undermine democracies from within. For two decades now this has happened across Europe and the US, and the outcomes are on full display: structured polarization, partisan fragmentation, a diminished willingness to compromise, self-absorption, discursive hatred, and hamstrung multilateralism.