Rob Blackhurst

Politico's Publishing (September 15, 2004)

The Foreign Policy Centre Newsletter

The Beauty Queen's Guide to World Peace isn't the kind of primer that will fly off the shelves before Spring Break on an average US campus. There are no potted descriptions of the UN or handy definitions of the caliphate that those perfect 10s will be able to regurgitate under questioning. More enjoyably, there are over 300 pages that more resemble a freewheeling dinner party conversation than a reference guide. Plesch swivels from defending the UN mandate for the Second World War to outlining the risks of Japanese/North-Korean conflict via a lengthy disquisition on the ills of shareholder privilege. He'll cut to Oliver Cromwell and the shortcoming of royalist histories before unveiling a grandiose plan for world government. This is security issues at their most elastic. Perhaps Plesch should write more - for there are at least three good pamphlets - on terrorism, corporate law and democratic reform – uncomfortably yoked together here.

These days author Dan Plesch is more likely to be seen consorting with retired Generals on BBC 24 than unfurling his CND banner, but he still retains the high-octane mixture of terrifying fact and dark prediction that he learned as an anti-nuclear campaigner in the early eighties. Refreshingly, he rehearses the power of nuclear weapons and the horrors of a nuclear winter - familiar enough for those of us brought up with When the Wind Blows and Greenham Common protests but probably unknown to a whole new political generation who can't remember Thatcher. But elsewhere, he predicts apocalypse with almost comic ease. A future war in the Gulf "could result in the near collapse of the industrialised economies", while nanotechnology "might turn the world into grey sludge", quite aside from those nukes. The alternative whiggish view - that billions are being swept out of poverty by economic growth and that the world is far less dangerous than when rival superpowers faced each other – doesn't get a look in.

But Plesch also ignores some difficult questions. Though a political radical in the tradition of George Mombiot and Naomi Klein, his worries about military interventions to protect human rights ("virtue runs amok") and defence of traditional state sovereignty sound exactly like the louche pronouncements of the late Alan Clark. Plesch doesn't say whether the thinks states should forfeit the rights to sovereignty when they mistreat their populations. And he assumes that our biggest dangers will come from nuclear wars between strong states: he has little to say on the arguably greater danger that weak states (particularly in sub-Saharan Africa) will collapse. But if the shape of his book his baggy and uneven, then, like the best teachers, Plesch compensates with a rich fund of memorable anecdotes. Any book that tells the story of how in 1995 a startled Boris Yeltsin was woken in his pyjamas with news that the US had launched a nuclear onslaught is worth the cover-price, regardless of your waist measurements.

Rob Blackhurst is Editorial Director of the Foreign Policy Centre