Five books to help us make sense of 2020

• Published date: 07 January 2021
• Date: 07 January 2021
• Author: JAMES STAVRIDIS
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

Can you really understand France without reading Camus and Sartre? To comprehend Russia, including the mindset of Vladimir Putin, I've found more illumination in Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and, above all, Gogol than in most CIA reports, with all due respect to the agency.

So as 2020 ends, I want to offer five books that have helped me make sense of a confusing world in the past year.

Let's start with a sweeping look at some of the most important global trends: The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations, by Pulitzer Prize-winning analyst Daniel Yergin (disclosure: Dan is a colleague of mine at the private equity firm Carlyle Group). Yergin's 1990 book about the oil industry, The Prize, is a standard text in most graduate schools of international relations.

By the way, the world still depends on oil, gas and coal for 80% of its energy – roughly the same as it did when he wrote the book 30 years ago. But so much else has changed.

In The New Map, Yergin weaves geopolitics into his energy and climate analysis. Consider, for instance, his study of the Chinese territorial claims in the South China Sea. In that massive body of water, we find vast deposits of oil and gas, close to 40% of the world's shipping, warming water, overfishing, and increasingly dangerous military competition between the US and China.

Yergin lays out the need to shift to greener sources of energy, but points out how hard this is going to be – and how the competition (perhaps the conflict) between the US and China will color the next two decades. This should be mandatory reading for President-elect Joe Biden's incoming team.

A second powerful read is The Missionaries, a novel about Colombia by Phil Klay. A combat veteran, Klay won the 2014 National Book Award for Redeployment, a collection of short stories about the Iraq War, in which he participated as a US Marine.

In The Missionaries, he sets his sights on the supposedly successful American intervention in Colombia over the past several decades. Having spent three years as head of Southern Command, in charge of US support for the Colombian military, I can attest to the lethal accuracy of Klay's depiction.

The novel portrays the ugly 50-year war against the FARC, a Marxist guerrilla group. It contrasts the views of a hardened, yet somehow naive American female journalist, an American contractor serving as liaison to the Colombian military, a couple of FARC insurgents, and a Colombian military officer.

There are no clear...