Journalist James Kirchick’s first book is about Europe, not America, but throughout the reader will sense that it rests upon unvoiced axioms about America and its role in the world. These are axioms upon which no argument can rest confidently in the age of Donald Trump. As a consequence, although the book contains no obvious anachronisms, it feels as if it were written in another era, for a reader who no longer exists.
Kirchick was based in Prague and Berlin for much of the past decade, sending dispatches back to America about Europe and the former Soviet Union. During most of those years, I did the same thing from Istanbul and Paris. Every writer imagines his readers; Kirchick’s imaginary readers seem to be much like mine. Call them “post-war Americans” — Americans who feel it important to take a lively interest in the rest of the world; who are familiar, roughly, with the history of the two world wars and the Great Depression, and instinctively feel the lessons of these catastrophes; who understood that the relative global order in which Americans flourished for some 70 years did not emerge sua sponte but was created, deliberately, by great post-war statesmen and maintained by American power.
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