According to Ian Bremmer, the author of the new book “Every Nation for Itself,” the rise of the “G-Zero” means the world has entered a transformative new phase — which will be more chaotic, uncooperative and dangerous. In his book, he charts how America assumed the burden of global leadership in the wake of World War II, and how institutions like the United Nations, NATO, the G-7 and the IMF helped it dictate the international agenda for much of the past century. He also explains how the breakdown of those (often problematic) institutions is now hurting our ability to marshal global leaders to deal with some of the greatest threats facing our planet. Bremmer, the head of a global political risk research firm who has written for the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek and Foreign Affairs, believes that this new dynamic could lead us to a new, more egalitarian world — or to a new Cold War.

Salon spoke to Bremmer over the phone about America’s new isolationism, the cyber-attack threat and why China will never replace the USA.

You start off the book by talking about the Copenhagen climate summit. What does the outcome of that conference tell us about the changing dynamics in the world?

Frankly, the only success that was had at that summit was that Queen Margaret of Denmark managed to avoid sitting next to Mugabe from Zimbabwe. There had been so much buildup to this summit, that the climate is incredibly important and we’ve all finally gotten to the point where we agree that something needs to be done. It seemed like the classic area that you could get some form of global agreement on. Of course we came away with absolutely nothing.

Following the Copenhagen summit we haven’t pushed harder to get stuff done, we’ve actually just moderated our expectations. Every country is prioritizing its own very strong agenda and there’s an absence of acceptance of what the global road map should look like, what the global architecture should look like. This dynamic is increasingly true in so many aspects of the world, whether we talk about the election of a new president of the World Bank, or on how you fund the IMF (and what you do with the money once it’s there), global trade initiatives, security issues in places like Syria, sanctions on Iran, bailing out the Europeans.  I mean, really the principal dynamic in the world today is the fact that there just isn’t anyone driving the bus.  We don’t have a G-20. We have a G-Zero.

Why is the G-7 an anachronism?

The G-7 is an anachronism in the same way that the United Nations Security Council is an anachronism, in the same way that the old structure of the IMF and the World Bank is an anachronism. All of that stuff basically came out of World War II, when the United States was the dominant power in the world, and it created a world order using its own capital, using its allies, building up its allies, prioritizing its values and its interests. And that world order functioned very well for us for decades but of course over the last 30 years, the underlying balance of power shifted away from this G-1 environment toward China. It hasn’t shifted to China — it’s not as if China is now the new superpower — but toward China, and away from the developed world toward the developing world, and away from debtor states toward creditor states.  When the underlying balance of power no longer in any way reflects the global architecture that you have, then at some point, clearly, a shock will come along that will be big enough to crash that system.

The end of the Soviet Union was not big enough to make that happen, and 9/11 was not big enough to make that happen, but the 2008 financial crisis was big enough. And that effectively made the G-7 an anachronism. And it did so in part, of course, because it showed some of the vulnerabilities of the U.S.-led free market system; it certainly made it harder for the Americans to rally the emerging markets behind their values and preferences. But more important, the Europeans have been almost completely absent from the global stage over the past four years, and frankly so have the Japanese, with their 17 prime ministers in 22 years. And by the way, I strongly feel this is not a book about U.S. decline. I actually don’t believe the U.S. is in decline. It’s much more a book about the fact that the United States is not going to do this stuff anymore and its allies certainly are not coming along, but nobody else is either.

What happened after World War II to propel America to this position?

Well, it wasn’t just that they helped win the war, it was that the economies and infrastructures of the other countries — both victors and vanquished – were utterly destroyed, and the United States rebuilt them. Of course, that was the Marshall Plan. And that also was MacArthur in Japan. So the U.S. basically built up both its allies as well as the vanquished Japanese who surrendered, to create folks that would support a U.S.-led global system. And that worked very effectively indeed.

In polls, more and more Americans want a kind of inward focus and less involvement in the world stage — an issue that’s also played itself out in the Republican primary. Why do you think that is? 

The reason why I make the point that this book is not about whether or not the U.S. is in decline is because it’s very clear that America is the world’s largest economy, and more important, even if it weren’t, even when China becomes the largest, richest economy, China will still be a poor country. If the Americans wanted to remove Assad from power in Syria they surely could. If America wanted to bail the Europeans out they surely could; we have the money. It’s also true that if we wanted to balance our budget, we could, but we don’t. The political will doesn’t exist for that. And so much of that has to do with the political system, and it has to do also with the inward-lookingness of the U.S.

I happen to think that there has been this significant “coming apart” within the United States of the top 10 percent and the bottom 90 percent economically. But that coming apart within the U.S. is also being mirrored by a coming apart globally. And that there aren’t many Americans that are prepared to support the U.S. as the world’s policeman anymore. There aren’t many Americans that are prepared to say they benefit from U.S.-led globalization. With the levels of unemployment that exist in the U.S., with manufacturing jobs that have gone away and aren’t coming back, with Katrina and New Orleans not getting rebuilt, large numbers of Americans are saying, “We do not see the benefit from all of what the U.S. has been doing internationally.” And that will make it politically inconceivable for the U.S. to do the kind of things that it did when it was putting together the old world order. I mean, Geithner can get on a plane and go to Europe and give as much advice as he wants to. But there’s nowhere near the level of political support in the United States for the Americans to pull off another Marshall Plan in Europe, or anything remotely close to that.

And even in the case of Libya, which of course is the big intervention that happened after the 2008 financial crisis, look at what actually happened. The U.S. did not want to do it. Everyone hated Gadhafi — U.S. enemies, U.S. allies. The Brits and the French said, You’ve gotta remove this guy. And only then did the U.S. say they would, and still the U.S. did not have troops on the ground. In some ways, Libya is the exception that proves the rule, that whether we’re talking about trade or climate or security or the European crisis, all of these are issues where we’re just not going to see the kind of leadership anywhere that we have historically.

I think many people would see this as a positive decline in so-called American imperialism.

Well, first of all there’s no question that American intervention on the military side has been seen as problematic. But for every country that sees it as problematic, others have seen it as something essential. You can talk about Marshall Plan, the role that the U.S. has played in the World Bank and the IMF, the importance of the Peace Corps and all of this sort of stuff – these have been organizations that generally have been very welcomed in terms of the benefit for the common good.

A few years ago, I remember reading endless magazine articles about how China was going to become the new superpower, and we’ll all be learning Mandarin in grade school. You don’t think that’s going to be the case. 

I put that into strong question and there are a number of reasons for it. The first is that for the Chinese to continue to succeed they need to fundamentally restructure both their economy and their political system. They’re aware of this. It’s an enormous challenge, it’s never been attempted with a country remotely the size of China, and they’ll need to do it relatively quickly.  First of all, there are no guarantees that they will succeed and, even assuming that they succeed, or they even succeed sufficiently to stave off various crises, when China becomes the world’s largest economy, it will still be a poor country. And I don’t think we sufficiently appreciate how different that will be. They will be focused much more on ensuring that they can provide the minimum form of employment and growth and commodity inputs for their own people. The United States is a rich country. The U.S. can easily afford to spend a lot of time helping to provide public goods, acting as a global policeman across the world, and it’s done that for over a century, again for good and for bad. The Chinese will not be prepared to play that role.

Look at what China’s doing in the Middle East: They are interested in defending very narrow interests – economic and security interests. It’s easy for the United States to say, we want to do more on the global environment, because the average American is paying attention.  The average Chinese person has a very different view of the global environment. They want a car. They want their kids to be able to have an apartment. They want a proper education. Hundreds of millions of them want to get out of absolute poverty.

The last few decades have been sort of notable, because there’s been relatively little death and conflict around the globe, compared to other periods of time in global history — a point made by the recent book, “The War on War.” What do you think the G-Zero environment means for the security of the world?

Clearly we’re going to see much more conflict in this environment. And the question is what kind of conflict it will be. I tend to not see this as a world where we’re going to have military and the sort of conventional warfare between major powers. Compared to the pre-WWII environment, there’s so much more interlinkage between the economies of countries. But having said that, we’re definitely seeing a fragmentation of the world order, compared to a globalization and statelessness that had been driven by the United States at the order of the global markets over the past decade. What does that mean? Well, first of all it means we’ll see much more cyber-conflict. Much more industrial espionage. Much more direct and overt conflict between states and corporations. More protectionism.  More industrial policy. Those sorts of things, I think we will see more conflict overall. I think that can spill over into military conflict regionally that won’t necessarily involve the United States.

In a G-Zero environment the Middle East is much more problematic. Because absent strong US, European, Japanese, Chinese or Russian intervention, what you end up having is the Saudis, the Iranians, and the Turks playing much greater roles in terms of diplomacy and political influence, economic influence, military influence.  Those countries support completely different outcomes. Clearly that means more sectarian conflict.  We’re not going to see more integration in the Middle East, we’re going to see more disintegration, more fragmentation, more confrontation.

In the book you also suggest that we’ll be see the rise of privatized warfare, using contractors like the company formerly known as Blackwater. I find that a worrisome prediction.

You know, absent U.S. intervention, you are likely to see many more local arms races, like India vs. China, for example. But you’ll also see the privatization of warfare, where countries with cash will be buying mercenaries that are well-trained, whatever they can afford, and they’ll be doing the fighting for them. And that will also be true in terms of folks that can engage in cyber-warfare and folks that can protect you from cyber-warfare. In a G-Zero environment, fighting of all sorts gets fragmented.

How does this affect our ability to deal with global warming?

Well, this is one of the problems I have today with the political debate. You’ve got so many people out there who are saying, “Global warming is horrible and we have to do something.” But it’s fairly obvious that we’re not going to. And again, it’s not as if the world has never been capable of dealing with climate problems.  You remember, we had a hole in the ozone, and I believe it was in 1976 that there was this Montreal protocol that was going to stop putting the CFCs in the atmosphere.  And it was effective.

It’s very clear that this climate issue, as you mentioned, is a much, much bigger order of baggage. It’s going to cause a lot of death, a lot of displacement. There will be winners as well. There will be folks who are successful economically out of climate change, but overall, it’s a negative for the world economy, and it is inconceivable in a G-Zero environment that you’re going to move efficiently even toward the beginning of a global solution, and so what will happen is you will have local solutions.  Local solutions will not be coordinated, they will be less efficient, and they will focus on those issues that are most important to individual governments directly. In the case of the Maldives, they’ll buy land and they’ll move. In the case of China, they’ll focus on issues that are impacting their domestic population, without worrying about what they’re doing to the global public commons in terms of emitting pollutants into the air. As they need to industrialize but they’ll focus much more on water, for example, because they desperately need that water for themselves.

And the U.S. and others will start focusing on geo-engineering — looking at what can be done to potentially artificially lower temperatures and create cloud cover and, you know, all of these sort of things which 10 years ago were fanciful but now increasingly people are starting to look into seriously.  But the issue is that those solutions will not be taken globally.  And what will be seen as a solution by one country or a set of like-minded countries might actually be seen as very strongly against the interest of other countries and other actors.

What countries do you think are going to be helped by this new G-Zero arrangement?

There are a group of countries that I think will do particularly well in this environment and I call them pivot states. The reason I focus on these pivot states is in a G-Zero environment you need to not just focus on growth — because there’s so much more volatility in the world, you need to focus on growth and resilience together. It’s countries that are able to hedge and adapt between different models of growth and integration, that don’t get captured by any individual large country [that will thrive] and certain countries are particularly good at doing that.

Canada’s really good at doing that. If Obama doesn’t want to do the Keystone pipeline, there are a lot of Chinese that want to have access to Canadian energy. As climate change occurs, the Canadians will have this northern shipping route, which will help them to have access to folks all over the world and will help them have access to Arctic resources. They sell more timber in British Columbia to China now than they do the United States, and that’s very interesting. Singapore pivots very well. Kazakhstan increasingly pivots well where Mongolia, nearby, actually doesn’t because they’re much more in the pocket of the Chinese. I would argue that Indonesia pivots relatively well, Turkey pivots quite well. Mexico doesn’t. Ukraine doesn’t.

You claim there are a few possible outcome scenarios from the G-Zero world. What are they? 

The G-Zero is not the next world order. It is a global power vacuum that is not sustainable. Something will fill it, because crises will continue to grow and not be resolved and so that very process will lead to something new.  And the question is what that something new is. And I think to understand what’s coming next there are two questions you need to answer. The first is, what will be the relationship of the United States and China toward each other: Will they be relatively cooperative or relatively competitive? And the second is how much do other countries matter; do they matter a little or a lot? If you can answer those two questions you have a really good sense of where the world is going.

The only one of my scenarios that gets you to a G-20 that actually works is one where the U.S. and China have relatively harmonious relations and other countries matter a lot. So far we are not moving in that direction. So far we’ve been moving into an environment where the U.S. and China have more confrontational relations and we’re moving toward an environment where other countries are indeed likely to play a fairly significant role. So you’ll end up with a world of regions.  That’s a much more inefficient environment and it’s one where pivoting is absolutely critical.

The other two possibilities are one where the U.S. and China have good relations and other countries don’t matter: That’s the G-2 path. That’s an environment where pivoting doesn’t matter so much but where nothing gets resolved unless it happens to be a priority on the agendas of both the United States and China.  The U.S. does relatively well in that environment, actually, and so does the dollar. The other environment is the one where no one can pivot and that’s if the U.S. and China have bad relations and other countries don’t matter very much, and that is really a bipolar cold war. It’s by far the worst of all outcomes, though it’s not actually the one I expect.

But this is very much in process. Countries are in play right now, geopolitics are in play. We are in a process of creative destruction, globally, that hasn’t occurred since after WWII.

Over the phone, curator Catherine Futter explained the show’s inspiration, lengthy gestation and throwback structure. Click through the following slide show for a glimpse of the treasures on display.

How did this exhibition come about? How long have you been working on it?

Well, I went to two world’s fairs: I went to the 1964 New York World’s Fair, and then I went to Expo ’67. So my love of world’s fairs started when I was very young. And then when I was in graduate school, I wrote a paper about the architecture of the 1867 fair, because it was the first time that there were national pavilions … Then I worked at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in the ’90s, and we started collecting decorative arts that had been shown at world’s fairs, and realized that they were sort of the epitome of design, of technological innovation. That got the idea bubbling forward, and then about four years ago, we partnered with the Carnegie Museum of Art [in Pittsburgh], and that really got the exhibition going. That’s the timeline.

Before [the first world's fair in 1851], you had to go to different places [to see products from different countries]. If you wanted to go to trade fairs, they were national, as opposed to being about international competition and international mass communication, and dissemination of style, taste, education and, of course, manufacturing.

Why did you choose 1939 as the end date for the show?

First of all, [because it marked the beginning of] the Second World War. Second, all of the fairs really shift after that point. They become much more about ideas, and less about the products that were presented. So that seemed like a good closing point.

Can you describe how the exhibition is presented? You’re featuring works from all over the world inside the museum — but you’ve also built a real pavilion outside, right?

Exactly. The exhibition at least begins by re-creating the atmosphere of the world’s fairs. It’s still very object-driven; I shouldn’t let you think that it’s a playground or anything like that. But as you walk in, there’s a five-minute loop of vintage footage from world’s fairs from 1900 to 1939, [which shows that] these were incredibly popular, well-attended and very diverse kinds of events … The palette of the galleries changes from dark tones to tertiary tones to very bold colors — basically, white with bold accents of dark blue and orange, which were the colors of the New York 1939 fair … The whole way that the exhibition is laid out is echoing what was going on in the fairs.

We have three areas of music — not opera, not really high-style music, but things that were popular in the period. We also have some activities for our visitors; the first one involves 3-D technology in the time period of 1851-1939, because stereoscopes were introduced around 1851, and there were a lot of views of world’s fairs: the architecture, the people, buildings, the fans. People will have vintage stereo-viewers or stereo-cards to look at. And also, View-Master was introduced in 1938-39; one of the very first series was views of the New York World’s Fair of 1939 …

And finally, there’s the pavilion, which [looks at the theme of "What is innovation today?"].

The world’s fairs frequently presented new technology, but also celebrated the best of the past. How does that contrast play out in terms of the items on display here?

One of my theories is that if an object is very innovative in its style, then it tends to use very traditional materials or technologies — and if it’s very innovative in its technologies, then it tends to be more traditional in its style. Salviati glass stands, for example, [represent] the revival of 16th and 17th century Venetian glass techniques, but their scale and even some of their forms are more innovative. With the innovative techniques — like a papier mâché piano, for instance — [sometimes you see] a  more traditional form made of innovative materials. One of the things that I really like about our layout is the fact that [your encounters with the material might be sort of surprising]. A work may seem traditional to you — maybe it looks like hand-painting on a vase — but then it turns out it’s chromolithography on ceramics. Or acid etching on glass, even. It makes you think about how things were made.

I know that you gathered these objects from many different countries. Do you think it will be clear to people what they communicated about their countries of origin at the particular time that they were made?

I think one of the things that people will learn from the exhibition is that a lot of the countries — especially Japan, but even the European countries and American countries — were, by absorbing the other cultures, making them their own. So when the Japanese are catering to the Western market, their work might look Japanese to us, but to the Japanese it looks more Western. There’s a Japanese vase that is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and it was purchased from the 1876 centennial. The form is Japanese; the decoration in terms of subject matter is Japanese, because it’s samurai fighting among the cherry blossoms; yet it is the Japanese doing Japanese art as seen through Western eyes, or European eyes … It would never have looked Japanese to a Japanese person. The whole palette has got purples and pinks and yellows that just weren’t even in the palette of the Japanese ceramic artists until the 1860s and ’70s, when a German chemist went to Japan, bringing German chemical glaze technology. That, to me, is the quintessential object of the exhibition — because it telegraphs to people that it’s different and new, but it’s got all kinds of other layers in it.

How did you choose which individual works to include?

There were probably tens of thousands of things we saw. Just in Nuremberg, in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, there were 1,750 objects that were purchased from the 1873 Vienna exhibition. Obviously, not all of them have made it to today, but many of them have. The exhibition’s co-curator, Jason Bush, and I went on five trips of varying length all over Europe, plus additional trips that we made independently — and then we went through collections in this country as well. We also wrote to Australia and other places further afield, but shipping costs made those objects price-prohibitive. We really let the objects drive what we were going to do. We knew that “innovation” was our key word, and through that we let what we saw out there tell us what the other themes were going to be.

There’s another important part of this, which is that these objects that we saw had already been chosen by directors and curators of museums. So they already had a process of selection. And then we, as curators in the 21st century, made that second choice. You could do a whole, completely different exhibition on gold prize winners at the fairs. Most of the juries who gave out the prizes were composed of the people who exhibited — so that would give you a very inside-manufacturing point of view. There’s nothing wrong with it, it’s just a completely different exhibition.

One of the reasons we brought the exhibition up to 1939 is that some of the objects in the exhibition are still in production today. These object still are relevant to the way we live.

“Inventing the Modern World: Decorative Arts at the World’s Fairs, 1851-1939″ is on display at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, in Kansas City, Mo., through Aug. 19, 2012.

View the slide show

Martin has always maintained that he’s been influenced at least as much by history and historical fiction as by the traditional epic fantasy of writers like J.R.R. Tolkien. Aficionados know that his novels (collectively called “A Song of Ice and Fire”) are loosely based on the Wars of the Roses, a vicious series of battles of succession that took place in 15th-century England. Martin has also listed Maurice Druon and Thomas B. Costain as models, two mid-20th-century historical novelists who wrote about medieval France, and you can see echoes of that material in his fictional universe, as well.

It would probably surprise several generations of British schoolchildren to learn that the dynastic politics of the late 1400s could be transformed into anything coherent, let alone entertaining. (“It’s worse than the Wars of the Roses!” Lucy Pevensie cries in dismay when someone tries to explain a particularly complicated bit of Narnian history in “Prince Caspian.” She speaks for many.) This, however, hasn’t kept many novelists and historians from trying.

It’s not that there aren’t fabulous characters and nefarious doings in the Wars of the Roses — Secret marriages! Mad monarchs! Vanishing princes! This is a story that concludes with one of the players being drowned in a barrel of wine, after all. But keeping the Wars’ family trees, convoluted legalistic arguments and perpetually shifting allegiances straight is enough to give anyone a headache. It certainly doesn’t help that all the male principles seem to have the same three names (Henry, Richard or Edward) or that they are forever gaining or losing and then gaining again the titles that serve to distinguish them from one another.

For fans who wish to investigate further into the real-life inspirations for Martin’s characters, one of the most lucid popular histories of the conflict is Alison Weir’s “The Wars of the Roses” (originally published as “Lancaster and York”). Some of Martin’s references to the Wars are easy to pick up. For example, the two dueling clans in “Game of Thrones,” the Lannisters and the Starks, have names that resemble those of the two sides in the Wars of the Roses. Like the Yorks, the Starks are northerners, while the Lannisters, like the Lancasters, are famously rich.

Both English families were branches of the House of Plantagenet who vied for the throne after the deposition of the last Plantagenet king, Richard II, in 1399 and before the establishment of the Tudor dynasty in 1485. There’s no one-to-one correspondence between the characters in “Game of Thrones” and actual historical figures, but Martin was clearly inspired by Edward IV in creating, say, Robert Baratheon, the great, strapping warrior who became a stout, ailing king. There’s a dash of Edward, too, in Rob Stark, a brilliant commander who makes an impetuous, disadvantageous marriage.

Cersei Lannister, Robert’s ambitious, conniving widow, is thought by many to have been inspired by the hot-headed Margaret of Anjou, wife of Henry VI, the king Edward IV helped depose. Henry’s bouts of insanity left him frequently unable to rule, and Margaret, a leading Lancastrian, fought ferociously against those she saw as threatening her family’s hold on the crown. Historians view her as a prime driver in the Wars of the Roses, just as Cersei is substantively responsible for the War of the Five Kings in “A Clash of Kings.” Cersei also resembles Isabella of France, an earlier medieval English queen, who conspired with her adulterous lover to dethrone, and possibly to murder, her (bisexual) husband, Edward II, in the 1300s.

Cersei is a crude, incompetent politician, however, which cannot be said of Isabella. Although unpopular in England, where she was nicknamed “the She-wolf of France,” Isabella has acquired some sympathizers over the years, including the indefatigable Alison Weir, who wrote a contrarian biography of her in 2006, “Queen Isabella: Treachery, Adultery, and Murder in Medieval England.” Weir has also written novels about various women in the Tudor era, no doubt aspiring to the success of Philippa Gregory, whose romantic historical novels routinely land on the New York Times Bestseller List.

For her own part, Gregory has already published three books in a series set during the Wars of the Roses, “The Cousins’ War” (an apt title, given the intricate blood relationships among the many combatants). The most recent of these, “The Lady of the Rivers,” may even be infused with enough magical elements to appeal to some “Game of Thrones” readers: In it, the character of Jacquetta, Duchess of Bedford, possesses psychic abilities (the real duchess was tried for witchcraft by her political enemies) and is initiated into the mysteries of alchemy by her first husband. For those who prefer a more grounded view, Gregory collaborated with two historians, David Baldwin and Michael Jones, on a nonfiction book, “The Women of the Cousins’ War: The Duchess, the Queen, and the King’s Mother,” published last year.

You may have noticed that most of these books are about women, despite the fact that, with very few exceptions, the women of the Middle Ages had little power. Much of today’s popular historical fiction about the rulers of the Middle Ages is read by women who are primarily interested in the lives and problems of women. Since the historical record contains next to no information on this topic, fiction has stepped in to fill the breach.

Another, more manly, popular contemporary historical novelist, Bernard Cornwell, has set a series of novels, “The Grail Quest,” during a slightly earlier period. His hero, an archer named Thomas of Hookton who gets caught up in the Hundred Years’ War, is an entirely fictional commoner in search of that fabled relic. What Cornwell’s novels lack in historically based, Machiavellian aristocrats they make up for in action-packed, blood-soaked battle scenes.

For the ultimate in medieval scuttlebutt, however, you can’t do better than Barbara Tuchman’s prizewinning 1978 history, “A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century.” This account of the Hundred Years’ War centers around the life of a French nobleman who married an Englishwoman, but it’s more expansive than any novel, taking in such fascinating details as the bizarre fashion for long-toed shoes in court (so long, they had to be tied up with strings and were inveighed against by puritanical clergymen) to the legendarily brutal rampages of British mercenary John Hawkwood through Italy. If you really want to know how the peasants fared while their rulers skirmished, the peculiar challenges of sewage-management in a stone castle, what the real agenda was behind the Crusades, or just how dastardly the highborn and royal can behave when it suits them, then look no further.

“The Maid and the Queen” describes two ways exceptional women found to exercise power in the Middle Ages. Yolande — who ran Aragon while her husband (and, later, her son) pursued a fairly hopeless claim to the throne of Sicily — raised money, sponsored advisors, negotiated strategic marriages and otherwise worked, often indirectly, to further the interests of her six children. She backed the Armagnac side in the protracted French civil wars that weakened the country to the point that Henry V and Henry VI of England found it ripe for the picking. The other side, the eel-like Burgundians, formed on-again, off-again alliances with the limey invaders.

Charles, who became dauphin (heir to the French throne) only after his four elder brothers died, had gone to live with Yolande in her castle at Angers at age 11, when he was betrothed to her daughter, Marie. His father was intermittently mad (a situation that led to much of the chaos in France) and his own mother was so self-serving that eventually she repudiated him as the illegitimate product of an adulterous affair in order to appease a more useful ally. (Goldstone finds persuasive proof of his legitimacy.) Charles called Yolande his “Bonne Mère” (good mother) and, as Goldstone writes, “became very attached to her, relying on her judgment and reflexively turning to her in moments of distress. No one had more influence with Charles than Yolande.”

Nevertheless, after Charles’ father died, Yolande’s sway was eclipsed by that of avaricious Georges de la Trémoille, grand chamberlain, whose interest lay in, as Goldstone puts it, “undermining the king’s confidence as a means of controlling him and enriching himself as much as possible.” A major military defeat against Henry V spooked Charles, and he became obsessed with his disputed legitimacy and the possibility that God had thwarted him because he was not, in fact, the rightful king. As he tarried, the English solidified their base in northern France. Yolande raised and funded a substantial army, but she still couldn’t get her lily-livered, self-doubting son-in-law to fight.

Goldstone believed that Yolande’s extensive network of spies and contacts — particularly her youngest son, Renè, who was in line to become the Duke of Lorraine — notified her when a teenage peasant girl from the northern village of Domrèmy (on the border between Lorraine and Champagne) developed a following. In a touch right out of a J.J. Abrams series, there was a well-known prophecy, first circulated by a Provencal seeress, that “France will be lost by a woman [Charles' profligate and unpopular mother] and shall thereafter be restored by a virgin.” No one believed in Charles more than the charismatic and manifestly pious Joan, who treated his coronation and rule as sacramental.

Like medieval churchwomen with more conventional careers, Joan wielded an authority rooted in both her chastity and her claim to a hot line to heaven — in Joan’s case, the voices of the saints who directed her actions and promised success to Charles. (When she was finally captured by French allies of the English and subjected to a kangaroo trial for heresy, the question of whether, by wearing men’s clothes, she had behaved “immodestly” was given great weight.) At her famous meeting with the dauphin in 1429, Joan was said to have delivered an unspecified “sign” to Charles, confirming her holy status. Goldstone believes that she simply addressed his most corrosive, secret anxiety by immediately assuring him that she had been sent by God to verify his legitimacy and help him retake his kingdom.

Historians differ on how much military authority Joan exercised over the next year and how effective that authority was. But there is no doubt that her symbolic power was immense; she transformed a grinding dynastic squabble into a holy war in the eyes of French commoners, who had previously had little reason to side with any of the aristocratic combatants. Her valor in the heat of battle rallied flagging French troops again and again, above all in the raising of the siege of Orleans, a huge morale booster for Charles loyalists. The retrial that overturned her conviction for heresy 25 years after her execution became “a collective catharsis staged at the national level, in which not only Joan but the entire French population achieved redemption,” Goldstone writes.

Because so much of this material is familiar, delivery becomes a crucial factor in any popular history of these events. Goldstone’s is vigorous, witty and no-nonsense in the tradition of the late, great popular historian Barbara Tuchman. She registers moral disgust at the Burgundian lackeys who tormented and killed Joan of Arc, as well as pragmatic admiration for the campaign-trail chops of Yolande and her mother-in-law, Marie of Blois, who knew that the best way to consolidate support in your son’s or husband’s duchy was to travel from one provincial town to another, patiently listening to the local burghers’ gripes and then handing out plenty of cash. And she’s very funny when exploring the roots of the campaign to rehabilitate Joan’s reputation in a theological conflict within the University of Paris: “So much of life is fleeting, ephemeral: Seasons change, civilizations rise and fall; people are born, they live a little, they die. But faculty disagreements endure.”

“The Maid and the Queen” does suffer a bit from the fact that the figure Goldstone presents as driving events, Yolande, is almost never at the scene when the action occurs. Her influence must be inferred by the presence or behavior of men who were allied to her in one way or another. Of course, this is the only way Yolande could have operated, but it makes Goldstone’s central argument difficult to substantiate. “There is no more effective camouflage in history than to have been born a woman,” she writes. Not all of that camouflage can be conclusively cleared away, but thanks to this book, a bit more of this remarkable life has been coaxed out into the open.

When the Jewish community of Alexandria collapsed, everyone in the family except Isaac went south, to a corner of the Belgian Congo where Jews from Rhodes were congregating. A few years later, the Jews who still remained in Rhodes found themselves under Nazi rule. The Nazis rounded them up, stole their possessions, extracted their gold teeth, stripped them naked to search for hidden jewelry, starved them, and put them in cargo ships and sealed cars for the two-week trip to Auschwitz. Virtually the entire community — which dated from the second century B.C.E. — was murdered. Now there were no more Jews there either.

When the war ended, my grandmother moved again, this time to South Africa, where she met my grandfather. Fifteen years later, the Congo erupted in civil war, and the Jews there fled. Now, in her old age, racial violence was bloodying South Africa, too, and all around her, Jews were again packing their things. Only later did I realize: My grandmother had spent her life burying Jewish communities. So had her parents. She suspected I would do the same.

Yet she was at peace, because of Israel. She never joined Isaac, who ran a store in Haifa. But Israel’s existence calmed her, comforted her, rooted her. It made her feel that Jewish history was more than an endless cycle of estrangement and dislocation; it actually led somewhere. It made her feel that not all Jewish homes need be temporary, that all the running had not been in vain.

My life has been very different from my grandmother’s. But I have seen enough to understand how she feels. When I was thirteen, I watched footage of thousands of emaciated Ethiopian Jews, isolated from the rest of their people since the days when the First Temple stood, trekking through the Sahara to reach the planes that the Jewish state had sent to take them home. When I was fourteen, I saw a squat, bald Russian named Anatoly Sharansky — fresh from eight years in a Soviet jail — raise his hands in triumph as he descended the steps at Ben-Gurion Airport. In those soul-stirring scenes, I saw my grandmother’s Zionism — the Zionism of refuge — play out before my eyes. It became my Zionism, too. Like her, I sleep better knowing that the world contains a Jewish state.

But not any Jewish state. Roughly eighteen months ago, an Israeli friend sent me a video. It was of a Palestinian man named Fadel Jaber, who was being arrested for stealing water. His family had repeatedly asked Israeli authorities for access to the pipes that service a nearby Jewish settlement. But the Jabers have little influence over the Israeli authorities: like all Palestinians in the West Bank, they are subjects, not citizens. Partly as a result, West Bank Palestinians use roughly one-fifth as much water per person as do Jewish settlers, which means that while settlements often boast swimming pools and intensive irrigation systems, Palestinians fall far below the World Health Organization’s recommended daily water consumption rate. In the video, Israeli police drag Fadel toward some kind of paddy wagon. And then the camera pans down, to a five-year-old boy with a striped shirt and short brown hair, Khaled, who is frantically trying to navigate the thicket of adults in order to reach his father. As his father is pulled away, he keeps screaming, “Baba, Baba.”

As soon as I began watching the video, I wished I had never turned it on. For most of my life, my reaction to accounts of Palestinian suffering has been rationalization, a search for reasons why the accounts are exaggerated or the suffering self-inflicted. In that respect, I suspect, I’m like many American Jews. But in recent years, for reasons I can’t fully explain, I had been lowering my defenses, and Khaled’s cries left me staring in mute horror at my computer screen.

Perhaps it is because my son is Khaled’s age. He attends a Jewish school, has an Israeli flag on his wall, and can recount Bible stories testifying to our ancient ties to the land. When he was younger, we thought he would call me Abba, the Hebrew word for father. But he couldn’t say Abba, so he calls me Baba, the same name Khaled calls his father.

One day, when they’re old enough to understand, I’ll tell his sister and him how my grandmother made me a Zionist. And one day, if they see a video like this, I’ll tell them that unless American Jews help end the occupation that desecrates Israel’s founding ideals, this is what Zionism will become, a movement that fails the test of Jewish power.

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The shift from Jewish powerlessness to Jewish power has been so profound, and in historical terms so rapid, that it has outpaced the way many Jews think about themselves. One hundred years ago, Jews in Palestine lived at the mercy of their Ottoman overlords; Jews in Europe endured crushing, often state-sponsored, anti-Semitism; Jews in the Muslim world were frequently consigned to second-class status; and Jews in the United States lived at the margins of American life. Even fifty years ago, none of Israel’s Arab neighbors recognized its right to exist, and some of those neighbors seemed to enjoy military parity with, if not superiority over, the Jewish state. Most of the Jews still in Europe lived under a tyrannical, anti-Semitic Soviet regime, and even in the United States, some Ivy League universities still limited the number of Jewish students who could attend.

Today, we inhabit a different world. Israel has made peace with two of its Arab neighbors, and all the Arab countries have offered to make peace if Israel ends its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, returns to the lines that prevailed before the 1967 Six-Day War, and reaches a “just” and “agreed upon” solution to the Palestinian refugee issue. Israel’s defense budget easily exceeds those of its four immediate neighbors combined; it is the world’s fifth-largest exporter of arms, and it is the only country in the Middle East with nuclear weapons.

In Europe, although anti-Semitism persists, the transformation of Jewish fortunes has been equally dramatic. Most Jews have left the former Soviet Union, and the vast majority of European Jews now live in democracies that ensure religious liberty. In Britain in recent years, Jews have run Oxford and Cambridge universities, the Conservative Party, the Labor Party, and The Times of London. In France, the president proudly proclaims his Jewish ancestry, as did his first foreign minister. The foreign minister of Poland — Poland! — has a Jewish wife.

But even that pales in comparison to the United States, where in the last two decades Jews have served as secretary of state, secretary of the treasury, national security adviser, House majority leader, and White House chief of staff, and have held the presidencies of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Of the last six editors of The New York Times, four have been Jews. On the Supreme Court, Jews currently outnumber Protestants three to zero. A Jew recently married the daughter of a former president while wearing a tallis. According to polling by the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, Jews are now the most esteemed religious group in the United States.

Privately, American Jews revel in Jewish power. But publicly, we often avoid discussing it for fear of feeding anti-Semitic myths. The instinct is understandable but the consequences are grave. Because we don’t talk much about Jewish power, we rarely grapple with the potential for its abuse. Instead, we tell ourselves that we are still history’s victims, whose primary responsibility is merely to survive. Consider the language of prominent Jewish leaders. In 2009, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, Abraham Foxman, declared that “global anti-Semitism [is] … reaching a peak this year that we haven’t seen since the tragic days of World War II.” In 2010, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor devoted his entire speech at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) policy conference to an extended analogy with the Nazi era. That December, Malcolm Hoenlein, the powerful executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, gave a speech entitled “Is It 1939?” (In a 2007 speech subtitled “Is It 1938 Again?” Hoenlein claimed, “There are no analogies that are perfect but there are similarities.”)

But the rhetoric of American Jewish leaders hints at a deeper problem. Consider the way American Jews discuss our holidays. We tell the story of Chanukah as the story of the Jewish return to sovereignty. The Syrian Greeks tried to outlaw Judaism; the Maccabees rose in rebellion; they liberated and rededicated the Temple; God made the menorah’s oil last for eight days. Then we eat our latkes. But what did Jews do after we gained power? What happened after we survived? The historical record tells us much about the Hasmonean dynasty — the last experiment in Jewish sovereignty before our time — much of it chilling. Yet we don’t talk about that.

It’s the same with Purim. Ask most American Jews how the Purim story ends and they will tell you that Haman tried to kill the Jews, but Esther and her uncle Mordechai foiled his wicked plan. But that isn’t how the Purim story ends. It ends with the king giving Persia’s Jews license to do to Haman’s people what Haman wanted to do with them — and the Jews slaughtering seventy-five thousand souls. We don’t talk about that either, because we begin our stories with victimhood and end them with survival. We talk about what the Egyptians did to us when we were slaves, but we rarely talk about what Joseph did to the Egyptians when Pharaoh put him in charge of the nation’s grain. We discuss the Exodus, but we rarely discuss what happened afterward, when the Jews struggled to rule themselves in the desert. Again and again, we silence our tradition just when it becomes most relevant to our age. And so, as the joke goes, many American Jews think the lesson of Jewish history is “They tried to kill us; we survived; let’s eat.”

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Given the fragility of Jewish life in the twentieth century, it is not surprising that American Jews — especially older ones — emphasize stories of persecution. But perpetual victimhood is not a narrative that can answer the two great Jewish challenges of our age: how to sustain Judaism in America, a country that makes it easy for Jews to stop being Jews, and how to sustain democracy in Israel, a country that for two-thirds of its existence has held the West Bank, a territory where its democratic ideals do not apply. Today, we are failing both challenges.

In city after city, American Jews have built Holocaust memorials. The Jewish schools in those cities are often decrepit, mediocre, and unaffordable, but there is no shortage of places to learn how Jews died. When a community builds better memorials than schools — when it raises children more familiar with Auschwitz than with Simchat Torah — the lesson of those memorials cannot be: Honor the dead by leading informed, committed Jewish lives. Nor is the lesson: Honor the dead by acting justly toward those non-Jews who live under Jewish rule, since mainstream Jewish organizations rarely grapple with the injustice inherent in occupying land in which Jews enjoy citizenship and non-Jews do not. Instead, the implicit lesson is: Honor the dead by preventing another Holocaust, this time in Israel. That lesson is reinforced by the vast sums that American Jewish groups spend on “Israel advocacy,” on teaching young American Jews to defend the Jewish state against the viciously anti-Semitic climate that supposedly pervades their college campuses and the world.

But the Israel advocacy generally fails. For one thing, it is difficult to teach Jewish students to defend the Jewish state when they have not been taught to care much about Judaism itself. Second, it is intellectually insulting to tell young Jews who have been raised to think for themselves that they should start with the assumption that Israeli policy is justified, and then work backward to figure out why. Third, since young American Jews—more than their elders—take Jewish power for granted, the victimhood narrative simply doesn’t conform to what they see in their own lives or in the Middle East.

For the most part, young American Jews don’t experience their campuses as hostile or anti-Semitic. In 2008, when researchers at Brandeis asked students at eight universities whether it was easy to be Jewish on campus, 84 percent said yes and only 7 percent said no. To the contrary, Jewish students frequently befriend Muslims, Arabs, or Palestinians—communities that were far less present on campus in their parents’ day—and thus develop an empathy that their elders often lack. They also realize that as a mostly white, native-born, upper-middle-class population, they occupy a position of privilege.

When they look at the Middle East, they see Israel as powerful, too. American Jewish leaders often call Israel a democracy threatened with destruction by its neighbors, and that story line feels authentic to many older Jews who remember an Israel that did not hold the West Bank and Gaza, and faced Arab armies that seemed to enjoy military parity with the Jewish state. But younger American Jews have never known Israel as a full democracy. For forty-four years, twice a college student’s life span, they have seen Israel control territory in which millions of Palestinians lack citizenship. And since the 1980s, they have seen Israel fight wars not against Arab armies but against terrorists nestled amid a stateless and thus largely defenseless Palestinian population. Thus, they are more conscious than their parents of the degree to which Israeli behavior violates democratic ideals, and less willing to grant Israel an exemption because it stands on the brink of destruction. The more the American Jewish establishment forces today’s realities onto the procrustean bed of 1939 or 1967, the more young liberal-minded American Jews turn away.

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We need a new American Jewish story, built around this basic truth: We are not history’s permanent victims. In a dizzying shift of fortune, many of our greatest challenges today stem not from weakness but from power. If non-Orthodox American Jewish life withers in the coming generations, it will be less because gentiles persecute Jews than because they marry them. And if Israel ceases being a democratic Jewish state, it is less likely to be because Arab armies invade the West Bank than because Israel permanently occupies it.

The fact that Israel wields power does not mean it faces no external threats. But it does mean that Israel plays a larger role in shaping those threats than American Jewish leaders generally admit. Yes, the Islamist groups Hamas and Hezbollah traffic in anti-Semitism and murder Jews, but they gain strength when Israel—by subsidizing West Bank settlement and meeting nonviolent protesters with tear gas, rubber bullets, and military courts—discredits those Palestinians willing to live in peace. Yes, the populism sweeping the Middle East has unleashed frightening hostility against the Jewish state. But this hostility feeds off Israeli policy. As recently as 2005, the same government that rules Turkey today was signing military deals with Israel. In 2008, it tried to broker an Israeli-Syrian peace. Turkey only began shunning the Jewish state after Israel’s 2009 war in Gaza, and after Israeli troops killed eight Turkish militants who tried to break Israel’s blockade of the strip in 2010.

Similarly, the Egyptian leaders who have emerged in Hosni Mubarak’s wake are not generally calling for Israel’s destruction, let alone promising to take up arms in that cause. But they are exploiting widespread anger that more than thirty years after the Camp David Accords, which called for Israel to grant Palestinians full autonomy in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Israel still directly controls most of the West Bank and has subsidized hundreds of thousands of its people to move there. There is, of course, real anti-Semitism in today’s Middle East. But by too often ascribing criticism of Israel to a primordial hatred of Jews, American Jewish leaders fail to grapple with Israel’s own role in its mounting isolation. And by ignoring the fact that Jews today enjoy far more power to define their relationships with their neighbors than did Jews in the past, they imply that the Jewish condition has not fundamentally changed.

Accepting that the Jewish condition has fundamentally changed requires looking to our tradition for guidance about how Jews should treat the people we rule, not just how we should endure treatment from the people who rule us. That guidance will not always be comfortable: Jewish tradition offers no simple lessons for how to wield power, and the lessons it does teach can sometimes be hard for modern liberals to stomach. But it is striking that when describing the previous two times that Jewish sovereignty failed — the Kingdom of Judah’s destruction by the Babylonian empire around 586 B.C.E. and the Hasmonean dynasty’s destruction by the Romans more than five hundred years later — our tradition insists that physical collapse was preceded by ethical collapse. Again and again, Jewish texts connect the Jewish right to sovereignty in the land of Israel to Jewish behavior in the land of Israel. In the words of Jeremiah, “If ye oppress not the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow, and shed not innocent blood in this place, neither walk after other gods to your hurt: Then will I cause you to dwell in this place, in the land that I gave to your fathers, for ever and ever.”

Today, too, Israel’s physical survival is bound up with its ethical survival. Whether or not Israel’s nuclear weapons and antimissile shields can protect it from Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas, they will be of no use on the day that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians march, nonviolently, to demand the very “equality of social and political rights” that Israel promises in its declaration of independence. And if American Jewish leaders continue to defend the Israeli government at the expense of Israeli democracy, they may find their own children and grandchildren cheering those protesters on.

I will try to give my son and daughter a sense of the immensity of what they have been given, of the agony that prior generations endured so that Jews could have a state. And I will tell them that their duty is to help ensure that this time, Jewish sovereignty does not fail. I will tell them, if they see that video of Khaled Jaber calling for his father, that I learned of his story because brave young Israelis chronicled it, Israelis who believe in the promise of Israel’s independence declaration, which envisions a nation that pursues “freedom, justice, and peace as envisaged by the Hebrew Prophets.” I will tell them that that pledge, made when the stench of Jewish death still hung over Europe, and amid a war for Israel’s very existence, is their patrimony. If Israel betrays that promise, it will be a stain upon their lives. I will tell them about their great-grandmother, who spent her life fleeing sinking ships. And tell them that today Israel—democratic Israel—is the ship that must not sink. The birthright they must not squander. The dream that must not die.

Excerpted from “The Crisis of Zionism” by Peter Beinart, published by Times Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. Copyright © 2012 by Peter Beinart. All rights reserved.