A Journey Through Putin’s Russia

In The White Man’s Burden, economist, NYU professor, and Brookings Institution senior fellow William Easterly argues that the global humanitarian aid system is fundamentally flawed. His main critique is that the international aid system prioritizes top-down, centralized, and tightly directed aid distribution—all controlled by people in rich countries (primarily the United States and those in Western Europe), far away from the developing world that they're meant to be serving. Because the aid community is so disconnected, it creates big plans and sweeping missions that are overly ambitious and completely unsuited for the reality on the ground, it overlooks local needs and concerns, and it rarely holds itself accountable for its failures.

In this guide, we’ve updated some of Easterly’s statistics, supplemented his ideas with more recent examples, and incorporated alternative and opposing viewpoints from leading experts in the fields of economics, political theory, and business.

According to Gen. H.R. McMaster, the United States views the world through a self-centered lens, assuming that its policy decisions are the main driving force behind global events. Because of this distorted perspective, the US has lost influence on the global stage at a time when authoritarian aggression is on the rise. In Battlegrounds, McMaster, who was US national security adviser in 2017-18, contends that American leaders must learn to see the world through the eyes of the US's adversaries in order to defend against foreign threats and compete in the modern global landscape.

In this guide, we’ll explore McMaster’s criticism of the assumptions driving US foreign policy, his assessment of the threats America faces, and the steps he believes the US must take. We’ll compare McMaster’s views with those of other experts on diplomacy, while placing his assessments in their larger context and updating some of his information based on events since the book’s publication.

In Blowout, journalist and MSNBC commentator Rachel Maddow aims to expose the corruption and exploitation underlying the oil and gas industry. Pointing the finger primarily at Russian politicians like Vladimir Putin and American energy magnates like former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, Maddow contends that over the past 40 years, the industry has wreaked havoc on the environment, developing economies in the third world, and international relations, especially in Eastern Europe. Ultimately, she argues that only full transparency and strict environmental regulation can protect the planet from devastating accidents and corporate greed.

In this guide, we’ll discuss her evidence for how a handful of companies and politicians have exploited oil and gas reserves worldwide, both for profit and to serve dangerous political ends. We’ll also elaborate on how oil and gas have damaged the environment (perhaps permanently), how American energy policy continued to evolve under the Trump and Biden presidencies, and how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 further destabilized the international energy market.