I like to use my last column of the year to wrap up the major developments of the previous 12 months. But the events of 2024 feel fundamentally un-wrappable: The news is just moving too rapidly.
Still, there are a few core insights that I’ve returned to as lenses for understanding the year’s wild ride.
International law isn’t an antidote to geopolitics
The Israel-Hamas war has put international law back in the spotlight — and not always in a favorable way.
Many people expect international law to serve as a kind of escape from geopolitics — a “rules-based order” that can prevail over material and strategic interests.
When it turns out that is not the case, that can lead to the angry conclusion that international law is nothing more than meaningless hypocrisy: If it can’t help the civilians in a war zone, what is it good for?
One of the more useful books I read to help me understand the events of this year was Kate Cronin-Furman’s “Hypocrisy and Human Rights.” She writes that the best way to understand international law is as something between meaningless and all-powerful.
International pressure to comply with human rights standards can have political consequences. It can lend itself to a very compelling political argument: We all agreed this is wrong, and that none of us would do it, but these guys did it anyway.
In reality, that argument rarely deters perpetrators. But it does add an incremental cost, harming the reputations of bad actors and their allies. Sometimes perpetrators attempt “quasi-compliance” strategies like creating meaningless tribunals in an effort to minimize the damage.
Empty apologies and quasi-compliance certainly look a lot like international law is failing. But the glass-half-full viewpoint from Cronin-Furman’s book is that international law enables persecuted groups to impose some marginal costs on those who harm them. That’s not exactly justice, and it’s definitely not a rules-based order that transcends geopolitics — but it ain’t nothing.
Democratic backsliding has a playbook
I read so much about democracy and autocracy this year that by September, it looked like I was trying to build a fort out of the books on my desk.
Two books stood out from the pile. “How to Save a Constitutional Democracy,” by Tom Ginsberg and Aziz Huq, lays out the steps that nearly all autocratic leaders follow as they dismantle democracy from within.
Once you know the steps, it’s easy to spot them in the wild.
Until recently, I’ve thought that the United States was relatively safe when it came to the very first item in the autocratic playbook described in the book: “the use of constitutional amendments to alter basic governance arrangements.”
The U.S. Constitution is famously difficult to amend, so it seemed that it would be essentially impossible to do so in an environment as politically polarized as U.S. politics is today. But as my Times colleagues reported earlier this week, there are growing concerns that Republicans might try to convene a constitutional convention, an event that many Americans consider a historical relic, and make wholesale changes to how the country is governed.
“Democracy Erodes from the Top,” by Larry Bartels, makes a good companion volume. His data suggests that voters don’t tend to choose autocratic leaders because they want political extremism or authoritarian policies. Rather, such leaders often take advantage of scandals that discredit their opposition to win office, running on platforms more moderate than the ones they pursue once they’re in power.
Bartels also notes that voters tend to support leaders when their economies are doing well and things are otherwise stable, even if the leaders in question are dismantling democracy in order to preserve their own power.
A ‘Friends’ rule of politics
A great deal of politics comes from people trying to predict what others are going to do, and strategizing accordingly. This is the fundamental insight of game theory, which I’ve used as a lens for understanding Middle East instability and democratic backsliding this year.
But it’s a basic enough element of human behavior that it crops up in other contexts, too, including the classic “Friends” episode “The One Where Everybody Finds Out,” in which the main characters play a series of escalating pranks on each other by exploiting secret information to manipulate each others’ choices. (“They don’t know that we know they know we know.”)
Thomas Schelling’s work, including “The Strategy of Conflict” and “Arms and Influence,” lays out basic principles of game theory in international relations. But for a more accessible introduction to it, you might try “Jane Austen, Game Theorist,” by Michael Chwe, a political scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. He uses Ms. Austen’s novels to explain the dynamics of strategy and manipulation, a lighthearted approach that makes a serious point about how people and nations behave.
As always, thank you for reading the Interpreter. It’s a privilege to be in your inbox. See you in 2025.
The post Five Books That Explain the Chaos of 2024 appeared first on New York Times.
