Shelf Life: Bring Down the Walls

If your heart beats with benevolence, and specifically with a high ethical commitment to raising up the poor people of the earth, you should be going to pro -globalization rallies. That's the contention of Swedish activist Johan Norberg in his marvelous new book In Defense of Global Capitalism (Cato, 331 pp., $12.95). Norberg, a fellow at the Swedish think tank Timbro, has compiled a detailed and convincing case that capitalism indeed offers the greatest hope for improving the material well-being of the world's poor. The facts he adduces about globalization are quite compelling:

Between 1965 and 1998, the average world citizen's income practically doubled, from $2,497 to $4,839, adjusted for purchasing power and inflation. That increase has not come about through the industrialized nations multiplying their incomes. During this period the richest fifth of the world's population increased their average income from $8,315 to $14,623, or by roughly 75 percent. For the poorest fifth of the world's population, the increase has been faster still, with average income more than doubling during the same period from $551 to $1,137.

In short, when things are going well -- which is to say, when freedom thrives and economic and political Berlin Walls tumble -- the rich get richer, but the poor get richer at an even faster rate. A study sponsored by the Norwegian Institute for Foreign Affairs found that, once the statistics are adjusted to account for purchasing power, inequality among countries has actually decreased since the 1970s -- and especially rapidly in the 1990s, when the trend toward globalization was in full force.

The global distribution of wealth remains dramatically unequal, admits Norberg, but this is because some poor countries still have too little capitalism -- while other poor countries, the ones that have chosen economic liberalization and free trade, "have had faster growth than [even] the affluent countries." U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan recognized this principle when he said: "The main losers in today's very unequal world are not those who are too much exposed to globalization. They are those who have been left out."

All this amounts to a forceful rebuke to the conventional wisdom of op- ed socialists and rent-a-mob slogan-chanters. Norberg is pointing the compassionate in a direction that will, in the end, make the objects of their compassion better off -- not just materially, but in terms of a more basic human fulfillment. "The most important thing of all," he notes, "is liberty itself, the independence and dignity that autonomy confers on people who have been living under oppression." We should love capitalism not chiefly because it means we can own more stuff, but because it gives us more power to be ourselves, to fulfill the nature God gave us. This is an eloquent and passionate book; a young man's book, but one full of mature wisdom.

-- Mavens of international affairs welcome just about any new book by Henry Kissinger. But Crisis: The Anatomy of Two Major Foreign Policy Crises (Simon & Schuster, 564 pp., $30) is captivating in a novel way: This highly suspenseful minute-by-minute account of the Arab-Israeli war of October 1973 and the fall of Saigon in April 1975 consists largely of the phone transcripts of then-Secretary of State Kissinger.

The phrase "fog of war" refers to the difficulty of making intelligent decisions in combat. Time is very short, the facts on the ground are rapidly changing, and your information isn't 100 percent reliable -- yet you are faced nonetheless with the necessity of choice. This book shows how similar diplomacy can be to combat, and gives the reader a fly-on-the-wall perspective on the nerve-wracking process of how crises are met and, if all goes well, contained.

Most of the volume is devoted to the Mideast war of 1973, in which Soviet attempts at overreach in the region risked touching off a war between the superpowers. The domestic backdrop further complicated the effort for peace: Even as Kissinger was negotiating with Brezhnev in Moscow one Saturday evening in October, President Nixon was perpetrating the notorious "Saturday Night Massacre" -- in effect, firing the people who were investigating his misdeeds -- and deepening the crisis that would destroy his presidency. Kissinger succeeded in thwarting the Soviets' proposal for a joint superpower intervention in the region, and also their backup threat of a unilateral Soviet move against Israel. But he describes how leaders in Congress reacted to this diplomatic success: "They were at once supportive, rudderless, and ambivalent. . . . Their support reflected more the Vietnam-era isolationism than a strategic assessment. They opposed a joint U.S.- Soviet force because they wanted no American troops sent abroad; the American component of the proposed force bothered them a great deal more than the Soviet one."

Kissinger's book offers readers a sometimes uncomfortably close look at the world of high-stakes diplomacy.