THE SHADOW WAR

The chief national security
correspondent for CNN, journalist Sciutto explores a variety of dangers to the
standing of the United States in the world order, with an emphasis on the
dastardly plans of Russia and China.

Sciutto (Against Us: The New Face of America’s
Enemies in the Muslim World, 2008) focuses on threats to the U.S.
military on the ground, in the air, and on the sea, and he also devotes
chapters to cyberattacks and industrial espionage targeting American
corporations. “This is a book about what happens when the enemies of the West
realize that while they are unlikely to win a shooting war, they have another
path to victory,” he writes. Throughout, the author’s tone is largely alarmist
in nature, as he explains why he believes naïve and/or incompetent U.S. policymakers
are ceding influence to the increasingly aggressive Chinese and Russians.
Sciutto views the nationalism around the globe as a deadly game of winners and
losers, with few shades of grey. He rarely portrays the U.S. government and military
as the perpetrators of unwelcome aggressions across national borders. Rather,
he suggests the U.S. is almost always the victim of an increasingly desperate
Russia and a surging China. Sciutto portrays each non-American nation as a monolith
lacking a substantial minority of dissenters. Some of the scenarios he examines
will not be familiar to a broad swath of Americans—e.g., Russian cyberwarfare
against its former state of Estonia. Many readers will be interested in
Sciutto’s account of Russian hacking during the 2016 presidential election. However,
while his review is useful, it contains no stunning revelations and is certain
to be out of date by the time the book publishes.

A hawkish book that will likely
please “America Firsters” and xenophobes but might seem unbalanced to those who
decry several centuries of U.S. aggression around the globe.