Stayed up all night reading this compelling account of a great national tragedy, and learned not to assume that the people in charge knew what they were doing. David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest. Reading Scott’s work (to include his Weapons of the Weak and Domination and the Arts of Resistance) provided the intellectual launching pad for my book Taming American Power).ĥ). And it’s a book that aspiring “nation-builders” and liberal interventionists should read as an antidote to their own ambitions. Scott pins the blame for these grotesque man-made disasters on centralized political authority (i.e., the absence of dissent) and “totalistic” ideologies that sought to impose uniformity and order in the name of some dubious pseudo-scientific blueprint. This isn’t really a book about international relations, but it’s a fascinating exploration of the origins of great human follies (like Prussian “scientific forestry” or Stalinist collectivized agriculture). James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. And if only more scholars wrote as well.Ĥ). (The essays found in Schelling’s Strategy of Conflict are more technical but equally insightful).
Robert Pape’s Bombing to Win and Wallace Thies’s When Governments Collide) but more than anyone else, Schelling taught us all to think about military affairs in a genuinely strategic fashion. Some of Schelling’s ideas do not seem to have worked well in practice (cf. He’s a Nobel Prize winner now, so one expects a lot of smart ideas. The Best International Relations Schools in the World: U.S.Top 10 International Relations Books By Women: a reading list.Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel.Ĭombines biology and macro-history in a compelling fashion, explaining why small differences in climate, population, agronomy, and the like turned out to have far-reaching effects on the evolution of human societies and the long-term balance of power. Not only did M, S & W provide an enduring typology of different theories of war (i.e., locating them either in the nature of man, the characteristics of states, or the anarchic international system), but Waltz offers incisive critiques of these three “images” (aka “levels of analysis.”) Finding out that this book began life as Waltz’s doctoral dissertation was a humbling moment in my own graduate career.Ģ). Kenneth Waltz, Man, the State, and War.Īn all-time classic, which I first read as a college sophomore. But I’ve just scratched the surface here, so I invite readers to contribute their own suggestions.ġ). What follows aren’t necessarily the books I’d put on a graduate syllabus instead, here are ten books that either had a big influence on my thinking, were a pleasure to read, or are of enduring value for someone trying to make sense of contemporary world politics. The FP staff asked me to follow suit with some of my favorites from the world of international politics and foreign policy. Last week Tom Ricks offered us his “Top Ten list” of books any student of military history should read.
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