Political Tribes

Amy Chua, a Yale Law School professor and author of several books on global politics and ethnic conflict, argues that the United States has been "spectacularly blind" (1) to the power of tribal politics, both in its foreign policy and in its domestic affairs. Humans are inherently tribal, she contends: They crave group belonging, favor in-group members, penalize outsiders, and will sacrifice and even die for their groups. For at least half a century, American policymakers have viewed the world through ideological lenses such as Capitalism versus Communism, while ignoring more primal group identities rooted in ethnicity, religion, sect, and clan. This blindness has produced repeated foreign policy disasters and left American elites unable to understand the tribal forces now fracturing the nation.

Chua traces America's group blindness to two contradictory aspects of its history. On one hand, the country has a long record of racism that erased distinct ethnic identities, reducing enslaved Africans and immigrant communities to broad racial categories. On the other hand, America has been uniquely successful in assimilating diverse populations into a shared national identity. Chua introduces the concept of a "super-group": a nation whose membership is open to individuals of all backgrounds, allowing subgroup identities to flourish while binding members through a strong overarching collective identity. She argues that most countries fail to qualify and that America became a super-group only through a long struggle, from the Fourteenth Amendment's establishment of birthright citizenship to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which abolished discriminatory quotas and opened the country to immigrants from Latin America and Asia. Because this super-group status is so unusual, American policymakers have repeatedly assumed other multiethnic countries could manage diversity as the U.S. has, leading to catastrophe abroad.

Chua devotes successive chapters to Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq to demonstrate this pattern. In Vietnam, she argues, the core reason for America's defeat was its failure to see the ethnic dimension of Vietnamese nationalism. Vietnam's identity was forged in opposition to China, which had conquered and ruled the Viet people for a thousand years. Inside South Vietnam, a tiny ethnic Chinese minority called the Hoa controlled roughly 80 percent of the country's industry. Chua introduces the concept of "market-dominant minorities," ethnic minorities that disproportionately dominate a country's economy under market conditions, generating enormous popular resentment. American wartime spending enriched the already-resented Hoa, and the U.S.-backed regime effectively asked the South Vietnamese to fight and die to keep the Chinese rich. After the war, the Vietnamese government confiscated billions in Chinese assets and drove more than 250,000 ethnic Chinese out of the country.

In Afghanistan, the U.S. failed to understand that the Taliban is not only an Islamist movement but an ethnic one. The Pashtuns, Afghanistan's largest ethnic group, had ruled the country for over 200 years before losing power in the early 1990s when Tajik and Uzbek forces seized control. The Taliban, founded and led by Pashtuns, combined calls for purer Islam with appeals to Pashtun pride. After toppling the Taliban in 2001, the U.S. compounded its errors by allying with anti-Pashtun forces and installing a government dominated by Tajiks, alienating the Pashtun population and fueling the Taliban's resurgence.

In Iraq, Chua contends the U.S. chose the wrong historical models. Postwar Japan and Germany were ethnically homogeneous; a better comparison was 1990s Yugoslavia, where democratization produced ethnic warfare. Iraq's Sunni minority had dominated the country under Saddam Hussein while the Shia majority lived in poverty. The Coalition Provisional Authority disbanded the entire Iraqi army, producing hundreds of thousands of unemployed, armed Sunni men who joined insurgent groups. Chua identifies the 2007 surge as a rare example of tribally conscious policy: General David Petraeus adopted an approach pioneered by Colonel H. R. McMaster, building alliances with tribal leaders and mapping Baghdad by sectarian composition. Civilian deaths fell sharply. Yet these gains were sabotaged when the U.S. backed Nouri al-Maliki as prime minister without adequately considering his sectarian agenda. ISIS arose directly from the resulting Sunni disenfranchisement.

A chapter on terrorism argues that the phenomenon is best understood as a group dynamic rather than individual pathology. While poverty alone does not predict terrorism, Chua argues, every major terrorist movement arose in conditions of group inequality and group humiliation. ISIS offered disaffected young Muslims a tribe, status, and purpose, drawing recruits through gradual socialization and sophisticated social media campaigns that made belonging feel empowering.

Turning to Venezuela, Chua uses Hugo Chávez's rise to illustrate how democracy in conditions of extreme inequality and a market-dominant minority can produce populist, antiestablishment leaders. A small white elite dominated Venezuela's economy while the impoverished underclass, representing 80 percent of the population, consisted primarily of darker-skinned citizens. Chávez galvanized this majority by embracing his indigenous and African heritage. The U.S. misread the situation entirely, even hailing a 2002 coup against Chávez as "a victory for democracy" (128). Chávez cut poverty dramatically but also borrowed recklessly, and after his death in 2013, Venezuela descended into economic collapse under his successor Nicolás Maduro.

Chua draws parallels between Venezuela and the United States, arguing that inequality has driven a tribal chasm between America's haves and have-nots. She notes that movements like Occupy Wall Street attracted few members from the disadvantaged communities they claimed to represent, while America's lower classes belong to groups that elites often view with contempt, from the prosperity gospel to NASCAR to professional wrestling. White America is itself divided into two tribes, she argues, with so little interaction between rural, working-class whites and urban, coastal whites that the difference is practically ethnic. Coastal elites have become a kind of market-dominant minority from the heartland's perspective, producing the democratic backlash that helped elect Donald Trump.

In her final chapter, Chua contends that identity politics on both the left and the right are fracturing America's super-group identity. On the left, a shift from group-transcending civil rights rhetoric toward exclusionary identity politics has alienated potential allies. On the right, white identity politics ranges from overt white nationalism, supported by only 4 percent of Americans in a 2017 poll, to a more widespread nostalgia for a time when minorities were less numerous and less demanding. Every group in America now feels threatened, creating a vicious circle in which each side's grievances reinforce the other's.

In an epilogue, Chua identifies signs of Americans trying to bridge divides and cites research showing that meaningful face-to-face contact can dismantle prejudices. The book closes with a call for a national identity that transcends subgroups without denying past injustice, invoking Langston Hughes's 1935 poem "Let America Be America Again," which acknowledges the dream was never realized but affirms: "America will be!" (210).