In a lucid and important book, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’ Trap? Graham Allison reaches back to Thucydides to tell the story of the conflict between rising powers and those that have already risen and asks if China and the United States are destined to fall into Thucydides’ Trap. Learning from…
DetailsLaura Secor takes us deep into an Iran that few of us know. With stunning revelations and evocative writing, her ambitious work, Children of Paradise: The Struggle for the Soul of Iran, portrays a post-revolutionary generation of reformers whose vision of a modern Islamic state continues to meet frustration. In the book Secor explores the…
DetailsThe fall of the Soviet Union took with it one of history’s greatest propaganda machines. Or so we thought. From the front lines of a nation’s political death and rebirth, Arkady Ostrovsky documents a relationship between Russian media and the Kremlin that helps explain the rise of Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin, and the oligarchs who…
DetailsIn Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam Is Reshaping the World, Shadi Hamid has dared to go where few scholars have ventured, as he courageously examines the political nature and history of Islam. The enduring conflicts of the Middle East, the social cleavages of the Persian Gulf, even the constrictive rule of Central Asia…
DetailsIn the afterglow of America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Rosa Brooks journeys to the heart of a post-9/11 military to discover a resilience that spells anything but retreat. In How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon, Brooks documents a Pentagon that now oversees the most pervasive military the…
DetailsSusan Pedersen transports us back in time, to an age when powers, old and new, thought they could hold the world together, even as they dismantled the vestiges of empire. The fallacy and hopes of a world caught between evil and innocence are captured in Pedersen’s portrait of the birth of internationalism. Her authoritative journey…
DetailsBarry Eichengreen provides an original look at the financial crisis and its origins, with desperately needed lessons about moving more quickly during such traumatic moments. Stimulus, coordinated monetary policy and banking regulation, as needed in 2009 as they were in 1929, and yet unappreciated to the degree they ultimately were needed. Beyond finance, Hall of…
DetailsThe years and months that carried Europe into the tragedies of 1914 and beyond do not wane in importance or impact as Dominic Lieven takes us into the lives that helped end the age of empire. And yet, as the book reveals in exquisite detail, so much was left unresolved. By telling the fall of…
DetailsJust the mention of his surname, or its initial, is enough to set off a raging debate. For no other figure has so divided the discussion of modern foreign affairs than Henry Kissinger. Peace-seeker, war-maker, celebrity diplomat, confidante to an epoch — Kissinger is all that and more in the first volume of Niall Ferguson’s…
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