Review Essays

Three new books look at poverty from the bottom up, painting a vivid portrait of the lives poor people live. In focusing on individual behavior, however, the books neglect a crucial political question: how to get governments to improve the situation.

John Lewis Gaddis’ magisterial authorized biography of George Kennan tells the story of a brilliant diplomat who helped define postwar U.S. foreign policy -- especially America’s successful Cold War strategy. Yet the public triumph was matched with private frustration, and the prickly Kennan never won the influence he craved.

China is hardly the first great power to make authoritarian development look attractive. As Jonathan Steinberg’s new biography of Bismarck shows, Wilhelmine Germany did it with ease. But can even successful nondemocratic political systems thrive and evolve peacefully over the long run? The answer depends on whether authoritarian elites can tolerate sharing power.

Every invasion of Afghanistan has eventually come to naught, either because the invaders paid insufficient attention to local culture or because they sought to impose centralized control. If the United States is interested in leaving behind a better Afghanistan than the one it found, it needs to take those experiences to heart.