Contemporary Authors

• The Fix: How Nations Survive and Thrive in a World in Decline ( nonfiction) Crown (New York, NY), 2016

1. The fix : how nations survive and thrive in a world in decline LCCN 2015042529 Type of material Book Personal name Tepperman, Jonathan, [author] Main title The fix : how nations survive and thrive in a world in decline / Jonathan Tepperman. Edition First Edition. Published/Produced New York : Tim Duggan Books, [2016]. Description x, 307 pages ; 25 cm ISBN 9781101902981 (hardcover) 9781101903001 (trade pbk.) CALL NUMBER HD87 .T47 2016 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• Council on Foreign Relations - http://www.cfr.org/experts/human-rights-international-law-courts-and-tribunals/jonathan-tepperman/b16971

  Jonathan Tepperman
  Managing Editor, Foreign Affairs

  Expertise
  U.S. foreign policy, national security, international law, the UN, and the Middle East.

  BioPublicationsEventsPress
  Bio
  Jonathan Tepperman is the managing editor of Foreign Affairs magazine and author of the upcoming book, The Fix: How Nations Survive and Thrive in a World in Decline (Crown, September 2016).

  Tepperman has spent close to twenty years working on international affairs as an editor, writer, and analyst. He started his career in foreign policy working as a speechwriter at the UN in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1994. After stints as a reporter at the Forward and the Jerusalem Post, he joined Foreign Affairs in 1998 as a junior editor. He later moved to Newsweek International, where he was deputy editor (under Fareed Zakaria), and then worked as a political risk consultant before returning to Foreign Affairs in January 2011.

  Tepperman has written for a range of publications, including Foreign Affairs, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, the New Republic, and others, on subjects ranging from international affairs to municipal politics to food and fashion. Tepperman has interviewed more than a dozen world leaders, including Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, Japan’s Shinzo Abe, Brazil’s Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Mexico’s Enrique Peña Nieto, Indonesia’s Joko Widodo, and Rwanda’s Paul Kagame. He is the coeditor of the books The U.S. vs. al Qaeda (2011), Iran and the Bomb (2012), and The Clash of Ideas (2012).

  Tepperman has a BA in English from Yale, an MA in law from Oxford, and an LLM in law from New York University. He is vice chairman of the Halifax International Security Forum, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a fellow of the New York Institute of Humanities. He lives in Brooklyn with his family.

• Jonathan Tepperman Home Page - http://jonathantepperman.com/

  About

  Jonathan Tepperman Jonathan Tepperman is a journalist and author. He is currently the Managing Editor of Foreign Affairs magazine and the author of The Fix: How Nations Survive and Thrive in a World in Decline (Crown, September 2016).

  Tepperman started his career in foreign policy in the mid-1990s, working as a speechwriter for US Ambassador Morris B. Abram in Geneva, Switzerland. He then spent time as a foreign correspondent and studied law in England and New York. In 1998, he joined Foreign Affairs as a junior editor. A few years later, he moved to Newsweek, where he was deputy editor of the international edition. After a short stint as a political risk consultant, he returned to Foreign Affairs in 2011.

  Tepperman has written for a long list of publications, including Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic and others, on subjects ranging from international affairs to books to municipal politics to food.

  He has interviewed more than a dozen world leaders, including Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, Japan’s Shinzo Abe, Brazil’s Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Mexico’s Enrique Peña Nieto, Indonesia’s Joko Widodo, and Rwanda’s Paul Kagame.

  He is the coeditor of the books The U.S. vs. al Qaeda (2011), Iran and the Bomb (2012), and The Clash of Ideas (2012).

  Tepperman has a BA in English from Yale, an MA in law from Oxford, and an LLM in law from New York University. He is vice chairman of the Halifax International Security Forum, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a fellow of the New York Institute of Humanities. Born and raised in Canada, he now lives in Brooklyn with his wife and their three kids.

Quoted in Sidelights:

successful attempts to foster peace, security, economic growth, and equality alongside
multiculturalism and openness.

Tepperman does a wonderful job of illustrating that government leaders can
achieve great things if they put their minds to it. Widespread global progress suggests that many do­­and we should
expect nothing less.

Seven habits of successful nations: some unlikely
places around the world are tackling some of the
world's toughest challenges and winning
Charles Kenny
Washington Monthly.
48.11­12 (November­December 2016): p45.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Washington Monthly Company
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/
Full Text:
The Fix: How Nations Survice and Thrive in a World in Decline
by Jonathan Tepperman
Tim Duggan Books, 320 pp.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Jonathan Tepperman, managing editor of Foreign Affairs, is hardly sanguine about the state of the world. He points to
"the slow­motion disintegration of Westphalian nation­states in multiple parts of the world" and "a growing weakness at
the heart of the liberal, rules­based global order." But he hasn't given up hope. The Fix: How Nations Survive and
Thrive in a World in Decline sees Tepperman take a tour around successful interventions to deal with ten of the
"toughest and most persistent challenges states have faced in the modern era," put in place by "a tiny band of
freethinking, often underrated leaders," many of whom he interviewed for the book. The Fix suggests that such
successes could be replicated, if other world leaders were willing to be as brave and freethinking as their colleagues.
Tepperman's enjoyable and informative book demonstrates the power of politicians to make the world a better place. It
should be a welcome tonic for those who no longer believe that governments can do anything right anymore. But, if
anything, the book is not positive enough. The Fix presents its case studies as exceptions to the norm of a world in
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decline. Instead, they should be considered fine illustrations of why we are seeing such widespread and unprecedented
global progress.
The Fix begins with a grim recounting of recent miseries, from Iraq's disintegration and Russia's annexation of the
Crimea to the global financial crisis and the near collapse of the Eurozone project. It quotes General Martin Dempsey,
former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, suggesting it is "the most dangerous time" in his life­­impressive for a man
born during the Korean War who lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the
attacks on the Twin Towers. Tepperman suggests that our present travails stem from the failure of leaders to address ten
big problems: inequality, immigration, Islamic extremism, civil war, corruption, the resource curse, energy extraction,
the middle­income trap, and gridlock (twice). And he argues that "while the details of all of the troubles currently
wracking the world vary, they share an underlying cause: the failure of politicians to lead."
The Fix provides scant justification for why these problems are the big ten planetary concerns, and some of them don't
belong on the list (climate and threats to global health are obvious additions, and below are suggestions for some that
might be cut). Nor does the text really make the case that their solution would bring stability to the Eurozone or an end
to Russian adventurism in the Ukraine. But the opening discussion is a convenient appetizer for the (succulent) meat of
the book: chapters recounting successful attempts to foster peace, security, economic growth, and equality alongside
multiculturalism and openness.
The first case study Tepperman presents involves Bolsa Familia (Family Grant), a Brazilian antipoverty program that
gives cash payments to the poorest families in the country on the condition that their children be vaccinated and in
school, and that both mothers and children get regular health checkups. The transfers provide poor people what they
most need in order to be a little less poor­­money­­and the conditions both help make the program politically palatable
and improve health and enrollments. Bolsa Familia has been a big factor in a decline in the country's extreme poverty
rate, from 9 percent at the program's start in 2003 to less than 3 percent today. It has also played a role in dramatically
reducing inequality. Over a similar period, school enrollments have climbed, Brazil's infant mortality has declined by
40 percent, and deaths from malnutrition have fallen by more than half. All of this has come at a cost of around onehalf
of 1 percent of GDP. Bolsa Familia is a widely admired program, and former President Lula da Silva­­despite the
allegations of corruption recently made against him­­receives (and deserves) Tepperman's plaudits.
Next on the list of solvable intractables is immigration policy. Canada has one of the highest per capita immigration
rates in the world, with 20 percent of the country's population foreign born. Yet it was still a photo opportunity rather
than political suicide when the country's new prime minister, Justin Trudeau, welcomed the first of 25,000 Syrian
refugees into the country saying, "You're safe at home now." Immigration has helped turn "a small, closed, ethnically
homogeneous state into a vibrant global powerhouse and one of the most open and successful multicultural nations in
the world," suggests Tepperman, thanks to a long­lived and very deliberate strategy of promoting pluralism. Among
other interventions, a billion­dollar budget to support pro­immigration documentaries, teaching aids, and community
integration efforts helps to account for a country where 85 percent of the population thinks multiculturalism is
important to the national identity and two­thirds feel that immigration is one of Canada's key positive features.
The Fix also provides compelling case studies on security and stability. Indonesia has seen a significant decline in
terrorist attacks while preserving democracy and fostering development, thanks to political leadership that has kept
radicals "weak and off­guard." Tepperman notes that the country has treated terrorism 'more like a law­enforcement
problem than a military one," coopting more extreme parties rather than attempting to crush them, generally detaining
suspects only when there is good evidence, holding public trials for those it seeks to imprison, and attempting to
rehabilitate as well as incarcerate.
Tepperman also reports on Rwanda, which has rebounded from a genocide and civil war that killed or displaced more
than 40 percent of the population, obliterated the civil service, and left the country with a per capita yearly income of
just $217. President Paul Kagame went about rebuilding the country and attempting reconciliation by stripping all
mention of Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa ethnic groups from official texts. He introduced a transitional justice system based on
a precolonial model that used elected local tribunals to combine confession, reconciliation, and punishment in dealing
with the perpetrators of mass violence. The system heard nearly two million cases before it was dismantled in 2012.
Thanks to peace, stability, and economic reform, per capita income in the country has tripled over a decade, and child
mortality has fallen by more than two­thirds­­a world record pace. Ninety­three percent of Rwandans report that they
are confident about the direction of the country, according to Gallup. While far from a heaven on earth, the country is
no longer a problem from hell, and those in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Syria, or Afghanistan would surely be
delighted if you suggested that similar progress could be theirs over the next decade.
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The Fix discusses other economic successes. Botswana has seen the fastest growth rate in the world over the thirty­five
years of its independence, never suffering hyperinflation, recession, or famine, by successfully harnessing its immense
diamond resource to the cause of development under effective democratic rule. South Korea has seen almost as rapid
growth. Tepperman argues that this is thanks in part to leaders who have successfully implemented an industrialization
strategy followed by reforms that have allowed efficiency and competition to drive creative destruction. And in 2012,
Mexico undertook a rapid and far­reaching set of reforms under a bipartisan coalition that an expert quoted by
Tepperman suggests was 'the most ambitious process of economic reform seen in any country since the fall of the
Berlin Wall."
To add to the list of problems that may appear insoluble but aren't, The Fix includes chapters on Singapore's successful
anticorruption efforts, the American shale revolution, which extracted previously inaccessible fossil fuels, and New
York's anti­terror policing, which may have helped keep the city safe after 9/11.
For all that these are cases of success, Tepperman is usually straightforward about the limitations of the stories he
highlights. In the case of Rwanda, Kagame's leadership is the subject of considerable debate, for example, and the
transitional justice system is burdened with significant concerns over due process and plentiful examples of misuse of
power to settle personal scores.
Nonetheless, The Fix is often a little too certain about what has worked. Was it the FBI, New York's Finest, or
something else entirely that should take the credit for the lack of a mass terror event in New York City since 2001, for
example? And vital elements sometimes vary: The Fix suggests that high government salaries were an important part of
the anti­corruption fight in Singapore, but that keeping government salaries low was an important part of avoiding
wasteful spending in Botswana.
Tepperman does worry about this latter problem­­what social scientists would term "external validity." For example, he
notes that Canada's positive policies and attitude toward immigration are based in part on long­standing fears that the
country was underpopulated and on the fact that undocumented immigration has rarely been a significant problem
there. Many other countries don't share those features. And if there is a lesson from Rwanda, it is that "local problems
require local answers," he writes. For all of that, some of the solutions are generalizable; the model used by Bolsa
Familia, for example, has been used in many other countries to similar effect.
Tepperman's preferred generalizable lessons of success regard leadership­specifically, the central role of Brazil's Lula,
Botswana's Seretse Khama, and Singapore's Lee. A final chapter suggests that the most important leadership
components are pragmatism, not letting a good crisis go to waste, acting magnanimously from strength, and so on.
Tepperman suggests that the reason many global leaders have not been able to achieve the success of the book's case
studies is that the leaders in question "haven't yet found the wisdom and intestinal fortitude to do what's necessary."
Leadership vision and drive have an important role in tackling The Fix's terrible ten. Changing the immigration system
in the United States to be more generous would have a huge payoff, because immigrants add immense value to the
economy (they do not, contrary to current right­wing conventional wisdom, steal jobs or raise crime rates). But rather
than lead the fight on reform, we get "Trump and his quasi­fascist race­baiting" and European leaders who, instead of
fighting bigotry, pander to it.
Nonetheless, the evidence suggests that if leadership is vital to progress, it must be far more common than The Fix
implies. Bolsa Familia, for instance, is not a unique example of a large­scale conditional cash transfer program, nor
even the first. Mexico's Progresa program, later rebranded Oportunidades, began in 1997. Like Bolsa Familia, it
provided cash to poor families on the condition that they send their kids to school and keep their shots up to date, and it
has reduced poverty and improved health and learning. Today there are conditional cash transfers running in countries
from Bangladesh to Jamaica and Indonesia and beyond. The growth of such programs may help to explain why average
inequality in countries of the developing world has been fairly flat since 2000, and Brazil is not the only country in
which it has rapidly declined. Mali and Peru both saw almost as fast reductions in inequality alongside more robust
growth than Brazil managed­­suggesting that they did even better at raising the incomes of their poorest citizens.
To the extent that political regimes are primarily (excessively) judged on their ability to produce jobs through economic
growth and low inflation, it has been a fantastic fifteen years around much of the world. The average inflation
worldwide during the first ten years of the new millennium was less than 8 percent, compared to 66 percent in the
previous decade. Economic growth has been so widespread that the number of low­income countries (those with an
annual GDP per capita of less than $1,005) fell from sixty­three to thirty­five between 2000 and 2010.
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It isn't just income and inequality: while Rwanda is indeed a world leader in reducing child mortality, five highmortality
countries managed to reduce child deaths by three­quarters over the past couple of decades, and the world as a
whole has more than halved the rate of mortality since 1990. For all of the horrors of Syria, the world is getting less
violent. Terrorism remains a tragic but extremely rare phenomenon outside of Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, and Syria,
and, even including those countries, global terror deaths are still far below annual automobile traffic deaths in the U.S.
alone. In the United States, terror deaths run far behind those from fatal lawnmower accidents and deaths caused by
falling out of bed. Meanwhile, there isn't much evidence that global migration flows are higher or lower than in the
recent past, for all of the toxic rhetoric around the subject in the West. And even in the United States, that rhetoric
spews from an aging, declining minority: in recent polls, 59 percent suggested that immigrants strengthen the country
through hard work and their talents, and only 33 percent describe them as a burden through taking jobs, housing, and
health care. In 1994, opinions were worse: 63 percent said immigrants were a burden, and 31 percent said they
strengthened the country.
Even better, some of the "terrible ten" problems highlighted by The Fix may not even be problems at all. It isn't really
clear that there's such a thing as a middle­income trap; there's no evidence that countries "bunch" below a particular
GDP per capita because it takes some fundamental and transformative institutional change to leap over it. In addition,
countries with more natural resources tend to be richer than countries without resources. And the looming problem with
energy isn't so much that regulations are keeping shale oil in the ground in many countries, it is that if we extract and
burn all we can we'll fry the planet.
Tepperman's case studies, alongside evidence of widespread global progress, suggest that the idea that significant
development challenges can only be overcome with a rare miracle of leadership under unique circumstances is wrong;
success is not as hard as that. Some combination of the comparative ease of replicating good ideas, a reasonable global
stock of competent leadership, and multiple paths to progress means that improvement has been ubiquitous rather than
elusive worldwide over the past ten years. Tepperman does a wonderful job of illustrating that government leaders can
achieve great things if they put their minds to it. Widespread global progress suggests that many do­­and we should
expect nothing less.
Charles Kenny is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development and author of Getting Better: Why Global
Development Is Succeeding and The Upside of Down: Why the Rise of the Rest Is Great for the West.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Kenny, Charles. "Seven habits of successful nations: some unlikely places around the world are tackling some of the
world's toughest challenges and winning." Washington Monthly, Nov.­Dec. 2016, p. 45+. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA470867518&it=r&asid=88d9df193fa21ea0ece976979ab9704e.
Accessed 5 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A470867518
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Quoted in Sidelights:

individual pieces are
riveting and well told
well­written and surprisingly accessible

Tepperman, Jonathan. The Fix: How Nations
Survive and Thrive in a World in Decline
Rachel Bridgewater
Library Journal.
141.14 (Sept. 1, 2016): p126.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Tepperman, Jonathan. The Fix: How Nations Survive and Thrive in a World in Decline. Tim Duggan: Crown. Sept.
2016. 320p. notes. bibliog. index. ISBN 9781101902981. $28; ebk. ISBN 9781101902998. POL SCI
Tepperman (managing editor, Foreign Affairs) doesn't deny that things in the world are bad. In fact, the introduction to
his engrossing book outlines ten areas­­from inequality to energy to Islamic extremism­­that are seemingly intractable
problems. After this bleak setup, Tepperman shares ten case studies of leaders who have taken on major issues and
succeeded in effecting positive change. For example, he describes Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's Bolsa Familia program in
Brazil, which gave cash directly to the poor and brought millions of citizens into the middle class. Others come from
Indonesia, Singapore, Botswana, the United States, South Korea, and Mexico, demonstrating that these optimistic
accounts are not restricted to one part of the world nor to a particular form of government. While the individual pieces
are riveting and well told, Tepperman is after more than simply highlighting "good news" among the bad. He concludes
by elucidating what is common across these situations and what leaders­­of nations or any other kind of organization­­
might learn through the crisis. VERDICT This well­written and surprisingly accessible volume will attract general
readers interested in current affairs and political science as well as academic audiences at all levels. [See Prepub Alert,
3/28/16.]­­Rachel Bridgewater, Portland Community Coll. Lib., OR
Bridgewater, Rachel
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Bridgewater, Rachel. "Tepperman, Jonathan. The Fix: How Nations Survive and Thrive in a World in Decline." Library
Journal, 1 Sept. 2016, p. 126. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA462044955&it=r&asid=c5a6cffb29413e5415be2484d5814806.
Accessed 5 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A462044955
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Quoted in Sidelights: noble, even
if many readers will disagree with the solutions he puts forward.

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The Fix: How Nations Survive and Thrive in a
World in Decline
Publishers Weekly.
263.25 (June 20, 2016): p146.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Fix: How Nations Survive and Thrive in a World in Decline
Jonathan Tepperman. Crown/Duggan, $28 (320p) ISBN 978­1­101­90298­1
Tepperman, managing editor of Foreign Affairs, examines global problem solving in this survey of how 10 countries
and their respective leaders addressed concerns such as Islamic fundamentalism, inequality, and political corruption.
His survey is global, providing an in­depth look at such controversial figures as Paul Kagame of Rwanda, Harry Lee of
Singapore, and Enrique Pena Nieto of Mexico. He tells the story of how Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in Canada
devised an immigration policy that "abandoned ethnicity" in favor of "educational, professional, and technical
qualifications." He explains how Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's welfare program "Bolsa Familia"
(Family Grant) curbed inequality by providing cash assistance to its recipients. In the United States, he looks at how the
fracking industry was developed under President Gerald Ford's leadership, and how former New York City Mayor
Michael Bloomberg tackled post­9/11 security issues. He concludes that the world's leaders will only solve the biggest
problems by putting party alliances and ideology aside. The book is an enjoyable read, even for those less informed
about foreign policy. Tepperman's attempt to provide solutions rather than mere analysis of the problems is noble, even
if many readers will disagree with the solutions he puts forward. (Sept.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"The Fix: How Nations Survive and Thrive in a World in Decline." Publishers Weekly, 20 June 2016, p. 146. General
OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA456344773&it=r&asid=3cb72818054a940bd429f3e9d9940d93.
Accessed 5 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A456344773

Quoted in Sidelights:
Tepperman's optimism isn't starry-eyed, and the hope he proffers is as grounded as he can make it in concrete examples of strategies that seem to work.

a great many of the ills he cites have been caused by the same political power structures he hopes can be taught to fix them. Let's all hope they're listening to this book.

'The Fix' seeks out strategies to solve the vexing problems facing nations
Steve Donoghue
The Christian Science Monitor. (Sept. 22, 2016): Arts and Entertainment:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 The Christian Science Publishing Society
http://www.csmonitor.com/About/The-Monitor-difference
Listen
Full Text:
Byline: Steve Donoghue

The latest fragile cease-fire agreement in war-torn Syria had scarcely been implemented before a US air strike mistook Syrian forces for ISIS forces and opened fire, killing dozens of people. A terrorist explosion in New York's Chelsea neighborhood injured 29 people. A knife-wielding Islamic fundamentalist injured nine people in a Minnesota mall before being shot to death. Pakistan-backed Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorists killed 17 soldiers and injured many others in an attack on an Indian army base in Kashmir. These things all happened on the same day.

Consistent polling shows that the current Republican and Democratic nominees for President of the United States are the least-popular and least-trusted candidates ever to run for that office. The eastern lowland gorilla is now on the "critically endangered" list and will likely be extinct in the wild by the end of the decade. The polar ice caps have shrunk to their smallest dimensions in millennia, and 2016 is shaping up to be the hottest year the planet has experienced since record-keeping began, breaking the previous record which was held by 2015. One out of every five children in the United States lives in near-hopeless poverty, and one-half of all the wealth in the world is owned by 80 individuals.

All these things and many, many more crowd around the perimeters of The Fix: How Nations Survive and Thrive in a World in Decline, the new book by Foreign Affairs managing editor Jonathan Tepperman, in which he admits immediately the obstacles to writing what he refers to as "a good news book." In many ways, 2016 seems like the worst year in recent memory in which to publish a book made out of optimism.

Fortunately, Tepperman's optimism isn't starry-eyed, and the hope he proffers is as grounded as he can make it in concrete examples of strategies that seem to work.

He focuses on a small handful of the large-scale problems afflicting the world - Islamic terrorism; corrupt political systems; unstable, panic-driven declines in financial markets; the decay of societal institutions; widening income inequality; and a few others - and travels widely to talk to the people who are devising new and innovative strategies to hold chaos at bay and sometimes even improve things. "Why is it," he wonders, "that in this time of turmoil ... a few countries are nonetheless flourishing?"

He looks at Mexico's fight against governmental gridlock and cites President Pena Nieto's employment of oversight committees for legislative reform. He studies the decades of work done by Singapore's first prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, to curb his country's rampant graft and corruption on all levels. He describes the success Indonesia has had in combating and in some cases subverting Islamic extremism inside its borders.

Throughout his book, these and other scenarios are held up as examples of the ways strong, enlightened government and passionate, involved people can tackle some of the worst problems in the world today and find solutions that actually work. "The fixes are out there; now our leaders must act on them," he writes. "Either that or the doomsayers will win the day, and things really will keep getting worse and worse."

It's an encouraging message, and "The Fix" is an ultimately inspiring performance, but it's also a problematic one. Tepperman has a weakness not only for TED talk-style empty catch-phrases like "The Power of Promiscuous Thinking" or "Embrace Extremity," or "Govern with Guardrails," but also for the facile data-manipulation that makes such catch-phrases deeply suspect.

President Pena Nieto, for instance, empaneled those reform committees in part with the aim of having them absolve him and his wife of suspected ethics violations. Indonesia's successes against radical Islam take on more complicated, less helpful overtones when Tepperman points out that Indonesia has always been "overwhelmingly Muslim," and thereby neatly avoids the anti-Christian motivation of so much Islamic terrorism. And Prime Minister Lee's measures against governmental corruption were so effective mainly because Lee gave himself dictatorial powers. (Tepperman calls this reliance on repression "unpleasant to contemplate").

Tepperman's chapter in praise of fracking is nothing short of bewildering, considering the vast, catastrophic environmental damage that always follows in fracking's wake. "Peak oil," he writes, "has become a distant, slightly embarrassing memory" - words the next generation will likely read with a good deal of understandable bitterness.

"The Fix" focuses mainly on top-down government-imposed solutions to the problems Tepperman identifies; in the world of this book, power is almost always the key to progress. And maybe this is simple realism, but it tends to remove the potential for restorative action from the hands of the very people most immediately afflicted by the bad news Tepperman describes. Leaders can make that bad news better, or they can make it worse - Tepperman is striving for better, because the alternatives have never been starker.

But a great many of the ills he cites have been caused by the same political power structures he hopes can be taught to fix them. Let's all hope they're listening to this book.

Kenny, Charles. "Seven habits of successful nations: some unlikely places around the world are tackling some of the world's toughest challenges and winning." Washington Monthly, Nov.­Dec. 2016, p. 45+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA470867518&it=r. Accessed 5 Mar. 2017. Bridgewater, Rachel. "Tepperman, Jonathan. The Fix: How Nations Survive and Thrive in a World in Decline." Library Journal, 1 Sept. 2016, p. 126. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA462044955&it=r. Accessed 5 Mar. 2017. "The Fix: How Nations Survive and Thrive in a World in Decline." Publishers Weekly, 20 June 2016, p. 146. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA456344773&it=r. Accessed 5 Mar. 2017. Donoghue, Steve. "'The Fix' seeks out strategies to solve the vexing problems facing nations." Christian Science Monitor, 22 Sept. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA464329473&it=r. Accessed 5 Mar. 2017.

• Kirkus
  https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/jonathan-tepperman/the-fix-nations/
  Word count: 463

  Quoted in Sidelights:
  a stirring account of the achievements of risk-taking political leaders.
  all rendered at length in polished prose
  An important and unusually engrossing book that merits wide attention.
  THE FIX
  How Nations Survive and Thrive in a World in Decline
  by Jonathan Tepperman
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  KIRKUS REVIEW

  Foreign Affairs managing editor Tepperman (co-editor: Iran and the Bomb: Solving the Persian Puzzle, 2012, etc.) offers a stirring account of the achievements of risk-taking political leaders.

  Based on more than 100 interviews and the author’s deep understanding of international affairs, this welcome book makes “a data-driven case for optimism at a moment of gathering darkness” by exploring how leaders in nations from Brazil and Canada to South Korea and Indonesia have successfully tackled major world problems, including inequality, immigration, corruption, civil war, Islamic extremism, and others. What’s remarkable is Tepperman’s ability to identify and tell the complex stories of places where realistic, pragmatic, and determined leadership at the top has triumphed over staggering challenges. In Rwanda, where 1 million people died in civil warfare between the Hutu majority and the Tutsi minority, President Paul Kagame used local community tribunals to foster reconciliation based on compromise. In Mexico, President Enrique Peña Nieto convinced three warring political parties to overcome their differences and govern again. In Singapore, former Prime Minister Harry Lee created good-governance initiatives to battle serious corruption, including a tool kit to detect wrongdoing. Perhaps most fascinating is the market-friendly cash-transfer program begun under former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil, which brought some 40 million people into the middle class between 2003 and 2011. Least expected among “nations” overcoming political gridlock is New York City, where Mayor Michael Bloomberg circumvented post–9/11 federal inertia and built a formidable intelligence and counterterrorism apparatus. In each instance, writes the author, government leaders ranging from repressive rulers to liberal democrats embraced crisis as an opportunity for action. Aiming for less than perfection, they expected to make mistakes, gave no faction everything it wanted, and succeeded. While recognizing the unique aspects of each nation’s experience, Tepperman finds lessons that can serve as templates elsewhere. Many readers will be astonished to realize that these success stories—all rendered at length in polished prose—have been lurking amid excessive doom-and-gloom headlines.

  An important and unusually engrossing book that merits wide attention.

  Pub Date: Sept. 20th, 2016
  ISBN: 978-1-101-90298-1
  Page count: 320pp
  Publisher: Tim Duggan Books/Crown
  Review Posted Online: June 21st, 2016
  Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1st, 2016

• Foreign Affairs
  https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsule-review/2016-08-15/fix-how-nations-survive-and-thrive-world-decline
  Word count: 249

  wonderfully engaging
  The pragmatic reform tradition that the book illuminates is apparently still alive.
  The Fix: How Nations Survive and Thrive in a World in Decline
  by Jonathan Tepperman
  Reviewed by G. John Ikenberry

  In This Review
  It is easy to look at the world today and see nothing but a spiral of disorder, dysfunction, and decline. In this wonderfully engaging book, Tepperman—the managing editor of this magazine—tours the world looking for political success stories that cut against this gloomy outlook. The book identifies ten common but particularly difficult problems, including inequality, immigration, civil war, corruption, and political gridlock, and argues that they are “fixable” when leaders act boldly. For each problem, Tepperman finds a free-thinking and experimental leader (or leaders) who defied the odds and achieved success. In the early years of this century, for example, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil developed a ground-breaking poverty-fighting program, Bolsa Família, that gave small monthly grants to mothers to feed and educate their families. And for the past two decades, the democratic leaders of post-Suharto Indonesia have steered their country toward a moderate form of politics that has undercut Islamist radicalism. From his fascinating travelogue, Tepperman offers lessons for a world in trouble: leaders need to think outside the box, embrace the possibilities that crises present, and respect systems of checks and balances. The pragmatic reform tradition that the book illuminates is apparently still alive.

• New York Times
  https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/02/books/review/jonathan-tepperman-the-fix.html?_r=0
  Word count: 1645

  Quoted in Sidelights:
  grand ideological debates ... seem too broad, tired and pointless,
  Jonathan Tepperman’s smart and agile answer to this “gathering darkness,” as he calls it, is to take a giant step back from the larger, paralyzed debate. practical, microcosmic solutions to big problems in sometimes surprising ­places from Brazil to Botswana to New York City.
  addresses but doesn’t fully answer: whether many of these programs are readily transferable to other places, or are unique to the political culture whence they sprang.
  an indispensable handbook
  Here Are 10 Practical Solutions to the World’s Big Problems
  By MICHAEL HIRSH SEPT. 29, 2016

  THE FIX
  How Nations Survive and Thrive in a World in Decline
  By Jonathan Tepperman
  307 pp. Tim Duggan Books. $28.

  The timing of this book could not be better. Big Think has run into a ditch. No one appears to agree on fundamental ideas about governing anymore, and we’re not even sure what we’re arguing about. The grand ideological debates of the 20th and early 21st centuries — capitalism versus socialism, democracy versus authoritarianism — today seem too broad, tired and pointless, and little has come along to replace them. Globalization, the economic paradigm of our era, has become an epithet in the mouths of insurgent politicians exploiting middle-class discontent on both right and left (that would be you, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders). The people in power on both sides of the aisle and the Atlantic, the so-called establishment, still seem surprised by the magnitude of the backlash — by Trump, by Sanders, by Brexit, by the deepening anger — and confused about how to respond. And with no one pointing a way through the paralysis, either in Washington or Western capitals like Brussels, democracy itself has seemed to curdle, especially with the Arab Spring degenerating into something close to civilizational collapse.

  We are in other words utterly adrift, ideologically speaking. It’s hardly a surprise the vacuum of ideas is being filled, in the political arena, by atavistic impulses like nationalism, racism and xenophobia.

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  SEE SAMPLE PRIVACY POLICY
  Jonathan Tepperman’s smart and agile answer to this “gathering darkness,” as he calls it, is to take a giant step back from the larger, paralyzed debate. In “The Fix: How Nations Survive and Thrive in a World in Decline,” Tepperman sets aside Big Think to serve up a smorgasbord of small think: practical, microcosmic solutions to big problems in sometimes surprising ­places from Brazil to Botswana to New York City. Tepperman, the managing editor of Foreign Affairs, offers what he calls “a ­data-driven case for optimism” at a time when “most of us have glumly concluded that our governments are broken and our domestic and international problems are insurmountable.” He divides his “good news book” into chapters on what he describes as “the Terrible Ten” problems: inequality, immigration, Islamic extremism, civil war, corruption, the “resource curse,” energy, the “middle-­income trap” (the difficulty countries have in making the leap from developmental success to wealthy-nation status) and two kinds of political gridlock: what’s not working worldwide, and American-style. Then he travels to 10 places around the world to highlight successful local or national solutions to these problems.

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  Almost to a tale, they are stories of gutsy political pragmatism in the midst of crisis, often involving battlefield conversions by unusually adaptable and able leaders unfettered by “ideological handcuffs.” In Brazil, the business community and economists were initially horrified when Lula da Silva, a rough-hewn labor leader who had experienced extreme poverty as a child, was elected president. But the ­“rabble-rouser metamorphosed into the Great Conciliator,” Tepperman writes, and to address Brazil’s terrible income inequality Lula launched Bolsa Família, an innovative and relatively inexpensive cash-transfer program that didn’t just give people handouts but required “counterpart responsibilities,” including government demands to use some of the money to send one’s kids to school and ensure they are immunized and get regular checkups (along with their mothers). Lula ended up winning over even conservatives in his country and dramatically reducing poverty, leading the former World Bank expert Nancy Birdsall to conclude that Bolsa Família is “as close as you can come to a magic bullet in development.” More than 60 countries sent experts to Brazil to study the program, and then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg based his Opportunity NYC program on Lula’s idea.

  Tepperman devotes a separate chapter to Bloomberg’s own innovative approach to breaking through Washington gridlock to secure his prime-target city in the face of terrorist threats. Elected two months after 9/11, Bloomberg had cause to despair over Washington’s ineptitude in counter­terrorism. His response was to “work around the federal government and do something no modern American city had ever attempted: try to defend itself, by itself,” Tepperman writes. Bloomberg reappointed a no-nonsense career N.Y.P.D. officer, Ray Kelly, as police commissioner, and Kelly rose to the challenge, becoming the city’s “secretary of defense, head of the C.I.A. and . . . chief architect all rolled into one,” in the words of the New York University urban studies professor Mitchell Moss. Kelly in turn hired David Cohen, a C.I.A. veteran who created a raft of new response teams and used his knowledge of Washington’s byzantine ways to force the feds into sharing intelligence. Ignoring the Justice Department’s qualms, Kelly sent officers to 11 foreign cities to foster cop-to-cop cooperation, and deployed 100 more to “muscle their way” onto the ­federal Joint Terrorism Task Force to demand full access to F.B.I. files.

  Under Bloomberg’s brash leadership, this all happened with admirable swiftness and efficiency: By 2002 the Police Department had 60 fluent Arabic speakers on staff, almost double the number the F.B.I. could claim three years later, Tepperman writes. And by the time Bloomberg left office in 2013, the F.B.I., C.I.A., Secret Service and Defense Intelligence Agency had all asked New York for advice.

  Tepperman finds successful leadership stories in some unlikely places. Among them is Mexico, which despite its reputation north of the border (especially this election season) for runaway corruption and drug violence has begun to recover under President Enrique Peña Nieto, who impressively exploited the despair of Mexico’s political elites to forge unprecedented cooperation. In just the first 18 months after his July 2012 election, Peña Nieto “managed to bust open Mexico’s smothering monopolies and antiquated energy sector, restructure the country’s education system and modernize its tax and banking laws,” Tepperman writes (though he may have lost some of that political capital after his widely criticized August meeting with Donald Trump). Across the world in Bot­swana, the “cleaner than a hound’s tooth” Seretse Khama lifted his country beyond its dependence on the “resource curse” of diamonds, building what was considered, for a time, one of the best-governed countries in the developing world — a system so structured against corruption that it is, for now, resisting the alleged abuses of his far less capable son, Ian Khama.

  Though the book is not long, Tepperman goes into impressive detail in each case study and delivers his assessments in clear, pared-down prose, careful to describe most of his success stories as experiments that could still fail. “The Fix” is no clip job either: Tepperman spent considerable time flying around the globe for his own research, including interviews with Lula, Rwanda’s Paul Kagame, Indonesia’s Joko Widodo and other leaders.

  Perhaps the biggest question about Tepperman’s thesis is one he addresses but doesn’t fully answer: whether many of these programs are readily transferable to other places, or are unique to the political culture whence they sprang. In the end, for example, Bloomberg’s version of Bolsa Família failed to gain traction in New York, and there are indications it may work better in rural than in urban areas. And it’s somewhat easier to embrace large-scale immigration if you’re Canada (another case study Tepperman looks at), and you enjoy the world’s ­second-largest state by landmass (after Russia) with something like one-tenth the population of the United States. Perhaps what scholars call the “Canadian exception” — its avoidance of anti-immigrant ­backlashes — has as much to do with these peculiar conditions as anything its leaders have done. Tepperman’s answer to the ­energy/climate problem is also not terribly persuasive: He cites the shale revolution as a rare American success story (these days anyway), but that seems more an example of geological luck and greed than inspired leadership. Tepperman may also be too sanguine about some of his political heroes: Brazil’s Lula is under investigation for graft, and his handpicked successor has just been impeached.

  But to answer these larger questions adequately, perhaps what we need most is a renewal of Big Think — a deeper reconsideration of the outdated ideologies of our day. In the meantime, Tepperman has produced an indispensable handbook on ways to work around the problem.

  Michael Hirsh is the national editor of Politico Magazine and the author of “Capital Offense: How Washington’s Wise Men Turned ­America’s Future Over to Wall Street.”

  A version of this review appears in print on October 2, 2016, on Page BR23 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Here’s the Good News. Today's Paper|Subscribe

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