Both Sides, Now

There’s an alarming rise in political tribalism in the US yet failure to recognise the same trend elsewhere has led to catastrophes on the international stage, says writer Amy Chua.

- Joanne Black

Does Amy Chua find consolation in thinking that, in American foreign policy, things can only get better? Chua, who achieved world fame with her 2011 book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, and was once named by Time magazine as among the 100 most-influential people in the world, is one of the most-talked-about writers in the disunited states of America.

Speaking from her home in New Haven, Connecticut, where her day job is as a professor at Yale Law School, she reels off the list of countries that have been sites of US debacles abroad: Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Venezuela. It’s a grim roll call, but maybe, from such abject lows, there is nowhere to go but up.

Maybe, but maybe not. Talking to the Listener just after US President Donald Trump announced that his country was pulling out of the deal that tried to delay, and perhaps prevent, Iran developing nuclear weapons, Chua offers no comment. It is too new and she likes to do thorough research before offering an opinion. However, she says, the debate over the Iran deal throws up an example of a subject on which she is only too happy to talk: tribalism.

It’s the subject of her fifth book, Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations, which was published in February and has been widely discussed, reviewed and excerpted around the world.

Tribalism, she says, is now so pronounced in the US that, no matter what someone says, their opponents will argue the opposite of a position that, just a few years ago, they would have supported.

“There’s no nuance any more,” Chua says. “It’s almost like we’re hunkered down in our [respective] sides. Whatever Trump says about North Korea, we’re against it because he’s not on our side. Or if he says something about China, we’re against that.