The bestselling writer of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mom, Yale Law School Teacher Amy Chua offers a bold new prescription for reversing our foreign policy failures and overcoming our destructive political tribalism in the home

Humans are tribal. We have to belong to groups. In many parts of the world, the group identities that matter most – the ones that people will kill and expire for – are cultural, spiritual, sectarian, or clan-based. But because America tends to see the about Politics Tribes: Group Instinct as well as the Fate of Nations globe with regards to nation-states engaged in great ideological battles – Capitalism vs. Communism, Democracy vs. Authoritarianism, the “Free World” vs. the “Axis of Evil” – we are often spectacularly blind to the power of tribal politics. Time and again this blindness offers undermined American foreign policy.

In the Vietnam Battle, viewing the discord through Cold War blinders, we under no circumstances saw that most of Vietnam’s “capitalists” were members from the hated Chinese language minority. Every pro-free-market move we made helped change the Vietnamese people against us. In Iraq, we had been stunningly dismissive of the hatred between that country’s Sunnis and Shias. If you want to get our foreign policy right – in order to not really be perpetually caught off guard and fighting unwinnable wars – the United States has to arrive to grips with political tribalism abroad.

Just like Washington’s foreign plan establishment continues to be blind to the energy of tribal politics beyond your country, so as well have American politics elites been oblivious to the group identities that matter most to normal Americans – and that are tearing the United States apart. As the stunning rise of Donald Trump laid bare, identity politics have seized both American still left and right within an especially harmful, racially inflected way. IN THE US today, every group seems threatened: whites and blacks, Latinos and Asians, men and women, liberals and conservatives, etc. There is a pervasive feeling of collective persecution and discrimination. In the left, this has given rise to progressively radical and exclusionary rhetoric of privilege and cultural appropriation. On the proper, they have fueled a troubling rise in xenophobia and white nationalism.

In characteristically persuasive design, Amy Chua argues that America must rediscover a nationwide identification that transcends our political tribes. Enough false slogans of unity, which are simply another form of divisiveness. It really is time for a more difficult unity that acknowledges the truth of group differences and battles the deep inequities that separate us.