Overreach: The Inside Story of Putin and Russia’s War Against Ukraine

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Shirk’s prescription for US Presidents handling the Chinese Leviathan in international affairs is to fix democracy at home and slowly feed incentives to the Chinese leadership to want to cooperate with its neighbours so that they will bully them less. By mid-March, even Matthews himself has to leave for a while, fearing that his 19-year-old son, a Russian passport holder, may get drafted. Yet amidst this chaos and personal upheaval, he has produced a book that is not merely the first full account of the war, but may set the standard for some time to come. While Shirk doesn’t go quite this far, it is both ironic and fitting that Xi’s prdecessors, incl. Hu Jintao and Jang Zemin, ultimately built governments of such self-dealing and logrolling it would have made the bureaucracies of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush blush with shame.

Overreach: The Inside Story of Putin’s War Against Ukraine

But in the real world the US and its ally the United Kingdom are arming Australia with nuclear subs to police the South China Sea.The author details the development of Russian nationalist attitudes from the fall of the Soviet Union and up the invasion. He also gives a detailed account of many of the idealogues that introduced Putin to Russian Ultranationalism and Fascism, in addition to figures in his inner circle. The portraits painted of figures such as Nikolai Patruschev are in particular quite chilling, being if anything more steeped in paranoia and conspiracy theory thinking. Patruschev is also thought to have been behind the planning and execution of both the Litvinenko assassination and the attempted assassinations of Sergei and Yulia Skripal. Susan L. Shirk’s Overreach remarkably charts the changes of Chinese leadership at home and their actions abroad since the demise of Mao Tsedong. The noted conservative economist delivers arguments both fiscal and political against social justice initiatives such as welfare and a federal minimum wage. The use of second-hand sources, though, is the only way to provide a proper overview: in a war this big, no reporter can be everywhere. And besides, much of this book’s value is in exploring the war’s deeper roots.

Overreach by Owen Matthews | Waterstones Overreach by Owen Matthews | Waterstones

Writing with authority and clarity, Matthews weaves disparate events into a bloody tapestry of invasion and resistance.c) A country that gives brownie points to citizens who don’t jay walk using social media and high-powered facial recognition technology?