Joshua Cooper Ramo is Managing Director of Kissinger Associates, which makes him a high priced consultant in the field of foreign relations. He's a Nixon to China kind of guy, speaking Mandarin and promoting the idea of talking to those funny furriners, even if they do eat strange food and speak in unintelligible gibberish. I'm sure he hangs out with Henry Kissinger. He has written two books about China and one about skydiving.

In this newest book Ramo discovers that the world doesn't always do what we expect and he proposes that we all get loose and flexible as the best way to deal with crisis. Ramo seems to think that this is something new. I tend to disagree with him. The problems du jour change but the surprises have kept on coming throughout history. Every time that our peerless leaders, whether they be Nixon or Napoleon, thought they had a handle on things, all hell has broken loose.


Ramo believes that the high degree of global interconnectedness we are experiencing today, in trade, communication and travel make the world more unstable instead of less. Viruses from afar can hitch rides on airplanes and travel thousands of miles in a few hours. Trouble in the U.S. mortgage markets cause a panic in Russia and China. A bunch of highly educated Saudi's, financed with millions in oil money, can wreak havoc in New York, London or Washington D.C. It would actually be more impressive if a gang of goatherds from the Afghan mountains could do that, but without the Saudis money that still isn't possible.

The pace of things has surely speeded up, but we haven't seen anything like the 1918 flu epidemic or the black death, for some time. (Knock on wood.) Genghis Khan made a pretty hash of things for the Chinese in his day and the South Sea Bubble is still the most egregious example of financial markets gone bad. Things have not really changed all that much.

I do rather like Ramo's proposed solutions. He has invented the term "deep security," which means paying attention to the basics, like ensuring meaningful work for people and giving them universal health care as a way of cushioning the effect of financial panics, employing diplomacy, to ensure that our enemies as well as our friends know what we (talking about the U.S. here) expect from them and what we are willing to do to get it. It may be a hard sell politically but I do think that aggressively fighting AIDS and engineering clean water supplies in sub Saharan Africa will, in the long run, lead to fewer wars, fewer pirates and fewer terrorists.

It took quite while, after chapters of scary scenarios, for Ramo to get to his point about "deep security," and even then, I found him a bit vague on details. Creating "deep security" is a lot of work. Even talking about it is. It's a lot easier to make up slogans like "bomb bomb Iran," which is why politicians do so much of that sort of thing.

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took a long time to make points. am not as knowledgeable as the other reviewer so can't comment on the history. i found interesting the idea that what will happen in the future is totally unpredictable, often seems sudden because we are not expecting it and that very ordinary people can find solutions and make change. ( )

Very Disappointing

I picked up this book after watching Joseph Cooper Ramo on Fareed Zakaria's GPS. He seemed very astute and a keen observer and commentator on current geopolitical events so I took a chance on his book thinking that it would be just as enlightening. I couldn't have been more wrong.

My first major criticism of the book is the reckless use and abuse of history for the purposes of furthering his unoriginal arguments. He completely misrepresents the historical causality of the events leading up to the collapse of the Soviet Union by claiming that Gorbachev was oblivious to the impending collapse and Ramo falsely claims that the CPSU establishement simply flipped sides -- if Ramo had bothered to spend 2 seconds to look up the failed putsch on wikipedia he would've seen how wrong he was. He fundamentally misreads the multiple wars between Israel and Lebanon and his hagiography of Hezbollah is almost criminal. I could go on, but I think you get the point.

My second major criticism is his dismissal of some of the major western philosophies without a whisper of any empirical or reasonable arguments. Instead, Ramo endorses eastern philosophy without so much as a single critical eye whatsoever.

Finally, his analysis and exploration of the "revolutionary" movements and the individuals who inspired them amounts to little more than sensationalist journalism. It is one thing to say that the world is complex, that we need new ways at looking at the world, thinking outside of the box, etc..., and quite another to explain how these exceptional ideas came about. In other words, don't tell us some fluff story about the guy who saved the Internet by geeking it up on a Saturday night with his LAN buddies, or a David and Goliath story of how Nintendo's Wii beat Sony. Tell us about what makes them special, is it biological, is it socio-economic, is it cultural?

I rarely give anything less than 3 stars and this may very well be one of the most disappointing books I have read in over 2 years. I had high expectations going in and have nothing but negative things to say about this book. Save yourself the two hours and skip "The Age of the Unthinkable." ( )