Review | Amy Chua on US’ blindness to identity politics abroad and at home, from Vietnam to Afghanistan to Trump’s election
In Political Tribes, a book bristling with stinging home truths, Tiger Mom author blames American exceptionalism for decades of foreign-policy disasters and failure to grasp the mind-blowing tribalism that decided the 2016 election
by Amy Chua
Bloomsbury
3.5 stars
“In our foreign policy, for at least half a century,” Amy Chua writes of her homeland, America, in the introduction to her new and fifth book, Political Tribes, “we have been spectacularly blind to the power of tribal politics.”
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This statement will no doubt find little argument among non-US citizens. But there’s more to Political Tribes than this truism. Chua takes a torch to conventional American thinking on everything from foreign policy to identity politics, Nascar and narco saints in this provocative narrative.