Flashpoints: Promise and Peril in a New World

by Robin Wright, Doyle McManus

At the dawn of a new political era, the world is witnessing both violent upheaval and new opportunity on a scale unknown since the discovery of the New World. Reporting from all six inhabited continents, with new material on the Soviet Union’s collapse, award-winning journalists Robin Wright and Doyle McManus draw a vivid map of emerging trends that will shape the twenty-first century. It is a world in

• Democracy is facing the same challenges socialism did; many new democracies will fail.
• Economic strength is more important than military might; the superpowers are being replaced by “major powers” like Japan and Germany.
• Ethnic and nationalist conflicts are redrawing the world map; dozens of new nations will be born in this decade.
• Weapons of mass destruction are proliferating despite the Cold War’s end; smaller countries now pose the same threat as the bigger powers.
• Migration, at a record high, has become a dangerous political issue dividing the wealthy North from the poorer South.
• The power of the individual is spawning a new generation of unconventional leaders, rising from the masses, not the elite.

Praise for Flashpoints
 
“Alarming . . . intriguing . . . a cogent and thoughtful work . . . [by] two of America’s more accomplished journalists.” — San Francisco Chronicle
 
“A timely and stimulating book.” —Senator Richard G. Lugar, Senate Foreign Relations Committee
 
“A brilliant primer . . . fascinating.” —Walter F. Mondale

272 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Robin B. Wright is an American foreign affairs analyst, author and journalist who has covered wars, revolutions and uprisings around the world. She writes for The New Yorker and is a fellow of the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Woodrow Wilson Center. Wright has authored five books and coauthored or edited three others.

Reviews

[Christoph · Rating 4 out of 5]

So, listening to a recent interview on NPR on one of the nuances of the current "Arab spring", I hear discussion with a clearly learned individual named Robin Wright. When I look up her bibliography, I find this book written some 20 years ago and figure to give it a try. I was surprised the ability to track this down was pretty quick, which I wondered if it meant it was a mass-market flop of the time. Actually, I still cannot be certain, but nonetheless, I was impressed with the book.

This collaborative work comprising, and this is the secret to their success, 100s of interviews with a ridiculously broad-range of disciplines from religion to science, from politics to sociology, parses the views of said interviewees into a grand narrative of significant events of the time, most notably of course the collapse of the Soviet Union. But this book is far more than a post-Soviet we-got-them. The thesis ultimately was that a pluralistic future was in store for a tumultuous world under crisis from ethnic diversity clashing, ideological difference, and global contagion. To be sure, it was a safe bet, but not necessarily common wisdom of the time.

Really, the thesis is not the interesting point to this book, moreso the nuanced reporting from nuanced points on the globe is much more productive. The authors were reporting on hot-spots that just were not in the mainstream consciousness of the time and were very forward-looking. The most interesting point in retrospect is the mirroring of today's events in so many ways. To some degree, this book reads like something out of today's headlines. Crisis in Afghanistan (which was predicted and reported as CIA-funded militants with a grudge against the West), crisis in the Baltics (multi-ethnic tensions centuries under repression ready to boil over), crisis in Africa (OK, that's a give me :/), crisis in China (Uighars?!), crisis in Russia/USSR (rise of oligarchy/mafia), crisis in the Middle East (decades of foreign-based repression leading to an urge for Islamic-styled democracies, including lengthy discussions on Libya and Iraq), on and on and on.

Besides learning that Ms. Wright was amazingly insightful and prescient, I more importantly find that nobody took seriously finding solutions to the post-modern crises of a pluralistic world. Instead the US resources (the only ones being coherent and organized enough to address these problems) and interests being unilateral, selfish, and antithetical to global success at best ignored them and in many cases intensified them. I wont go into whether it was intentional or not, but one thing is certain, it appears this selfish exercise of maintaining (the virtual) American empire has not only failed for the American people and questionably for the American masters who designed it, but certainly for the global village amassing on its fringes.