Foreign Affairs

"Russia's barbaric aggression in Ukraine has galvanized a remarkable response in the West," LBJ's Will Inboden writes with Kay Bailey Hutchison, former U.S. permanent representative to NATO and U.S. senator from Texas. "Past transatlantic tensions over NATO commitments, Europe's anemic defense spending and ties to Russia all dissipated within days of Russian tanks rolling across the Ukraine border. Instead the United States and our European allies have united around a potent set of economic sanctions on Russia and military and humanitarian aid to the valiant Ukrainians. The Biden administration deserves much credit for its diplomatic efforts and military assistance thus far. "Energy policy is also central to the war effort; here the Biden administration's response must be more robust. The United States has two immediate energy goals in the Ukraine war: keep our European allies fueled with stable energy supplies, and starve the Kremlin of oil and gas revenues. Now that the West's unprecedented financial sanctions have cut off Russian banks from access to international capital and crushed the value of the ruble, Vladimir Putin's main source of hard currency remains Russia's oil and gas exports — especially with oil prices above $100 per barrel. "The current bipartisan consensus in Congress and support by the president to ban U.S. imports of Russian oil and gas products is the right move. Our lead should encourage our European allies and Pacific partners to follow. This will be more difficult for European countries that rely on Russia for about 40 percent of their natural gas. U.S. dependency is much less, but we still sourced about eight percent of our liquid fuel (crude and refined) imports from Russia in 2021. But we must remember that every barrel of oil Russia sells fuels Putin's killing machine in Ukraine. "While banning their export to our countries is the right first step, the U.S. can do more." 

In the wake of Russia's brutal invasion of Ukraine, the world needs a massive international effort to liberate democracies from their dependence on oil produced by Moscow and other dictatorial regimes. In short, the world's democracies need a green energy Manhattan Project, patterned after the no-holds-barred World War II-era effort to harness the power of the atom. Unlike that famous nuclear program of decades ago, a modern-day effort should focus on the widespread production of green energy, leveraging the West's technological ingenuity and industrial might to usher the region into a future free of the influence of petrostates.

"Diplomats are often the heroes of history. They are the men who walk along the edges of battlefields and persuade the belligerents to lay down their arms, turning swords into plowshares. At the dawn of the 19th century, Prince Metternich of Austria famously negotiated a century of peace among the European kingdoms that had fought one another nonstop for a hundred years. He was the model diplomat of his age, and the inspiration for many followers, including the American national security adviser and secretary of state Henry Kissinger. "Martin Indyk's book places Kissinger in a class with Metternich and other 'masters of the game.' He is not the first to do this. Kissinger has made the case for himself in an outpouring of thick, ponderous books, most especially his more than 3,000 pages of memoirs, published in three volumes. Among modern statesmen, only Winston Churchill wrote more to promote himself."  

China's dismantling of the Mao-era rural commune system and return to individual household farming under Deng Xiaoping has been seen as a successful turn away from a misguided social experiment and a rejection of the disastrous policies that produced widespread famine. In this revisionist study, Joshua Eisenman marshals previously inaccessible data to overturn this narrative, showing that the commune modernized agriculture, increased productivity, and spurred an agricultural green revolution that laid the foundation for China's future rapid growth. Red China's Green Revolution tells the story of the commune's origins, evolution, and downfall, demonstrating its role in China's economic ascendance. After 1970, the commune emerged as a hybrid institution, including both collective and private elements, with a high degree of local control over economic decision but almost no say over political ones. It had an integrated agricultural research and extension system that promoted agricultural modernization and collectively owned local enterprises and small factories that spread rural industrialization. The commune transmitted Mao's collectivist ideology and enforced collective isolation so it could overwork and underpay its households. Eisenman argues that the commune was eliminated not because it was unproductive, but because it was politically undesirable: it was the post-Mao leadership led by Deng Xiaoping—not rural residents—who chose to abandon the commune in order to consolidate their control over China. Based on detailed and systematic national, provincial, and county-level data, as well as interviews with agricultural experts and former commune members, Red China's Green Revolution is a comprehensive historical and social scientific analysis that fundamentally challenges our understanding of recent Chinese economic history.