Humanity’s future will include struggles over the extent of such a global convergence of living standards. What chance that all nations will agree that humanity’s future must include reduction in First World privilege? I understand Diamond to be saying that if such self-denial is not on our agenda, then we in the First World have not yet understood the crisis at which humanity has arrived. His final chapter speculates about how nations and supra-national bodies could blend military might and political skill to effect the convergence in living standards that sustainable global development requires.

Observing human history as a ‘natural experiment’ affords Diamond the opportunity to develop a model of crisis resolution, using himself and seven nations as cases. He begins with an account of his own crisis of self-confidence in his early twenties (from which he seems to have recovered). From that case he develops a model of crisis resolution. A crisis that does not destroy a person or nation will have the following sequence of elements: acknowledgment that one (the nation) is in crisis; accepting responsibility to do something about it; clear delineation of the problem; getting material and emotional support from others (persons/nations); using models of others’ coping; ego strength (national identity); honest self-appraisal; experience of dealing with previous crises; patience; flexibility; core values; and freedom from constraints (personal/geopolitical). He then devotes a chapter each to mostly twentieth-century critical moments in Finland, Japan, Chile, Indonesia, Germany, Australia, and the United States. In these chapters (with the exception of the one on Chile), he tends to attribute states of mind to nations as a whole.

In Diamond’s view, Australia’s ‘crisis’ has been our recognition – since Japan’s seizure of Singapore in 1942 – of the fact that developing and securing the continent requires that we to cease be Australian Britons and become a plural nation, in ethnicity and religion, and that we cease to rely on Britain for security and prosperity. Diamond admires our ‘honest self-appraisal’ in a crisis that has been ‘so slow that many Australians wouldn’t even consider there to have been a crisis at all’.

Other cases are more dramatic. He admires Finland’s shrewd and geopolitically realistic negotiation of its proximity to the Soviet Union (now Russia), singling out for praise the pragmatic leadership of Juho Kusti Paasikivi (1946–56) and Urho Kekkonen (1956–81). He gives Japan high marks for the Meiji restoration (1868) and its immediate aftermath, but he worries that Japan nowadays is not reappraising the ‘core value’ that blocks immigration (so its population will continue to age and to diminish), that it is still treating natural resources (mostly imported) as if they were inexhaustible, and that it angers neighbours by refusing to revise the story that Japan was a victim of World War II.

Mass killings and torture are not how crises should be managed. Diamond’s cases of failure in national crisis resolution are Indonesia and Chile. Indonesia’s crisis was that by 1965, under Sukarno, it could no longer defer choosing between communist and capitalist models of national development and diplomatic alignment. The crisis was resolved not by compromise or further legerdemain but by the murder of an estimated half a million communists. Chilean élites also dealt violently with a crisis provoked by Salvador Allende’s ‘foolish’ and ‘unrealistic’ socialist program in 1973. According to Diamond, the reach and sadism of the Chilean right’s retribution dismayed the US government; he quotes Henry Kissinger using the word ‘unpleasantly’. While Diamond distances himself from the socialist and communist projects of the 1960s and 1970s, he is astonished by the ferocity of anti-left politics and saddened that resilience, in Indonesia and Chile, includes the narrative that the left/pest was the source of the crisis and that its extermination was a necessary resolution.

Among the heroes of Upheaval is Willy Brandt (West Germany’s Chancellor from 1969 to 1974). Germany experienced rolling crises: demolished and defeated in 1945, then divided during the Cold War (1961), and then split along generational lines as those born after 1945 came of age (1968). Brandt’s and successors’ reunification diplomacy was rooted, in part, in Germans’ unflinching account of their Third Reich.

Because Diamond is capable of thinking globally, he can persuasively depict humanity as a whole as a subject of history that – like persons and nations – may or may not be able to deal with its current crisis. Having argued that ‘global development’ must be revised to mean convergence in living standards, under resource constraints, Diamond can be understood as saying that the key to dealing with humanity’s ecological crisis will come down to the First World’s preparedness to review its sense of material entitlement. The United States, as the most significant nation in the First World and as a self-appointed global hegemon, will largely determine the First World’s ability to rethink its part in any realistic modification of ‘global development’. However, Diamond devotes only scattered sentences to US hegemony. He treats the United States as just another nation to be compared (his seventh case), without noting that it is also the world’s most important contributor to our collective capacity to alter humanity’s disastrous trajectory.

Diamond lists the elements of the current crisis in the United States: ‘political polarization, low voter turnout, obstacles to voter registration, inequality, limited socio-economic mobility and decreasing government investment in public goods’. Widespread denial and apathy, Diamond argues, suggest that the United States will not deal productively with this crisis.

The global impact of such a flawed hegemon is dire. What Upheaval does not make explicit is that this lapse in American self-awareness may amount to a strategy – the strategy that the First World needs if it is to ignore the ecological imperative of global convergence. The First World’s self-protective bunker may be Trump’s next (and tallest) Tower.