From the jury: Overreach is a masterful analysis of the leading contemporary challenge in geopolitics by a long-time close observer of China. Shirk’s analysis of the vulnerability of the regime is provocative, plausible, and full of pragmatic potential for policymakers. She skillfully answers two critical questions for managing the “China problem”: how did we get…
From the Jury: “After two decades and four presidential administrations, America finally ended its war in Afghanistan. There is little doubt about the outcome: the United States spent twenty years pouring blood, sweat and treasure into a frustrating and complex war — one that it ultimately lost. In The American War in Afghanistan: A History,…
Trade disputes are usually understood as conflicts between countries with competing national interests, but as Matthew C. Klein and Michael Pettis show, they are often the unexpected result of domestic political choices to serve the interests of the rich at the expense of workers and ordinary retirees. Klein and Pettis trace the origins of today’s…
This book, full of sparkling insight and subtle analysis, explains why liberal democracy failed to become a universal ideology despite its victory over communism. The authors show how Western triumphalism of the 1990s failed to take into account the distinctive history and culture of states that were seeking to imitate and embed democracy. Although the…
The global financial crisis of 2007-2009 undermined global capitalism, exposed the failures of banks to manage their risks, almost broke the Eurozone and played a role in the Ukrainian conflict, Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. In a bold work of extraordinary range and ambition, Adam Tooze has written the standard work on the…
Anne Applebaum’s Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine is the gripping story of the famine the Soviet leadership induced in Ukraine. This beautifully written history speaks to one of the most important global issues. Famines, then and now, are never the result of natural causes only; they are also the result of deliberate choices that…
A Rage for Order tracks the tormented legacy of what was once called the Arab Spring. Combining dramatic storytelling with an original analysis of the Arab world today, Worth captures the psychic and actual civil wars raging throughout the Middle East and explains how the dream of an Arab renaissance gave way to a new…
Shane’s masterpiece is a rarity among foreign affairs books, flowing dramatically like a novel, carrying the academic weight of a thesis, and laying out enough policy dilemmas to fill a month of Sunday talk shows. The story of Anwar al-Awlaki is, in some ways, the story of Americans and Arabs in the age of terror, brought into sharp relief by the Obama administration and its unpredicted—and unpredictable—drone policy, which has redefined the meaning of war and reset its price.