Recent Books238 insightful book, The Unraveling, chroni-
cling her service. In this new book, she
shifts from participant to spectator. The
results are disappointing. Starting in
2011 with the early Arab Spring, Sky
recounts her travels across several
regions, from Galicia in Spain to the
mountains o
Kyrgyzstan, often guided
by diplomats and other acquaintances
from her time in Iraq. Sky admits that
nding direction and purpose after she
left Iraq was not easy and says that her
excursions across the Middle East gave
her new shots o adrenaline. Yet what
the reader is meant to take away from
the stories remains a mystery.Asia and Pacic
Andrew J. Nathan
Super Continent: The Logic of Eurasian
Integration
BY KENT E. CALDER. Stanford
University Press, 2019, 344 pp.T
his book is the denitive
statement o Calder’s long-
standing thesis that technological
and economic changes are integrating
the Eurasian “super continent,” as
foreseen over a century ago by the
British strategist Halford Mackinder.
Beneath the churn o political events,
this integration is driven not only by the
familiar dynamics o globalization but
also by such less noted factors as the
growing e£ciency o transport logistics
and the digitization o customs proce-
dures. U.S. pressure on China and Russia
is pushing the two countries together,o¤er an attractive alternative government
and doubts that the current ¥-led
negotiations can bring a sustainable peace.After the Caliphate: The Islamic State and
the Future of the Terrorist Diaspora
BY COLIN P. CLARKE. Polity, 2019, 240 pp.In this book, Clarke aims to cover what
he calls “global jihadism,” although he
primarily focuses on al Qaeda and the
Islamic State (or ). His account
ends several months before lost the
last o its territory with the fall o
Baghouz, in Syria, in March o this
year, but Clarke’s main message is that
the jihadists will regroup in Iraq and
Syria and that al Qaeda and will
lead the way. What is more controversial,
he argues that the launching o a caliphate
by , in 2014, will in the end prove far
more signicant than its destruction. He
does not add much to the existing litera-
ture on jihadism, and although he o¤ers
some intriguing gures, he does not
explain them. There are some 230,000
jihadists worldwide, he says, but only
19,000 people on government terrorist
watch lists. I recruited around 43,000
ghters from 120 countries; between
6,000 and 11,000 o them may be left. In
all, Clarke estimates that some 70,000
jihadists have been killed in recent years.In a Time of Monsters: Travels Through a
Middle East in Revolt
BY EMMA SKY. Atlantic Books, 2019,
320 pp.Sky spent three years in Iraq as a
British civil servant seconded to senior
U.S. military gures, including Gener-
als David Petraeus and Raymond
Odierno. In 2015, she produced an24_Books_pp_Blues.indd 238 7/22/19 5:55 PM