Books for understanding 21st century geopolitics
History has never stopped happening
In the year of a US presidential election, with war raging in Europe and the Middle East, on the 75th anniversary of NATO, there's a lot to keep track of and a lot to learn.
Books written by leading scholars and journalists published in the last few years offer credible and accessible explanations for how we arrived at this geopolitical moment, as well as some ideas about where we might be headed. And there are some much older works whose insights speak more directly to our present moment than ever.
The World: A Brief Introduction
Author Richard Haass, president of the non-profit non-partisan Council on Foreign Relations, offers a general overview of relevant histories of different regions of the world with the aim of helping the reader become literate in the issues of the day. Read it all the way through, or skip to chapters on topics you want to understand immediately.
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Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate
The title of this book by post-Cold War historian M. E. Sarotte cites a promise—to bring NATO "not one inch" closer to Moscow—made to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev made by President George H. W. Bush's Secretary of State James Baker in the window of time between the fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Sarotte argues that by breaking that promise and bringing one former Eastern Bloc country after another into NATO over the past thirty years, America and its western allies precipitated a post-Cold War relationship no less bitter than the one it replaced.
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Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology
Semiconductors, an essential building block in the manufacture of microchips, are in many ways "the new oil." But as economic historian Chris Miller points out, a key difference is that countries can spend their way to abundance and sophistication in semiconductors—as the US has spent decades demonstrating. But China has been spending billions to advance its own microchip industry, and the American lead on Taiwan, South Korea, and even Europe is no longer as wide as it once was. This book explores the power struggle happening right now in this technology that's become globally ubiquitous.
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War: How Conflict Shaped Us
Historian Margaret MacMillan takes a thematic approach in this book, examining how western societies have responded to war. While it seems to us that every war is an anomalous diversion away from normalcy, MacMillan argues that civilizations are fueled in part by violent conflicts carried out at a large scale.
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The Shortest History of Israel and Palestine: From Zionism to Intifadas and the Struggle for Peace
There may be no more complex and hotly contested topic in geopolitics today than that of Israel and Palestine. In this book published in early 2023, Cambridge scholar Michael Scott-Baumann takes readers chapter-by-chapter through key moments in the region's history and includes testimony from Israelis and Palestinians about daily life under a state of conflict. He also covers the many attempts that have been made over the decades to broker peace—up to the Trump administration's 2020 "deal of the century"—and explains why each of these efforts failed.
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Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China
This award-winning book from 2014 outlines one of the key internal conflicts of contemporary China: the flourishing of individuals as the rate of poverty plummets vs. a heavy-handed Communist Party that is at once responsible for this broad improvement to peoples’ lives and yet uneasy with greater expectations of freedom. Journalist Evan Osnos doesn’t set out so resolve these tensions; rather, he explores them in the stories of normal people living as their forebears just a generation ago never imagined.
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How Civil Wars Start... and How to Stop Them
Political scientist Barbara F. Walter has specialized in the study of civil wars for almost 3 decades, so she’s well-positioned to speak on the conditions that precede them—as well as the actions that can be taken to ensure they never come to pass. When she looks out at the world now, she sees a number of scenarios where a civil war is, from her perspective, not as unlikely as we might like to think.
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The Age of the Strongman: How the Cult of the Leader Threatens Democracy Around the World
Gideon Rachman, the Orwell Prize-winning journalist who covers foreign affairs for the Financial Times, studies the growing power of political leaders known as "strongmen": nationalist candidates who campaign on simple (and implausible) solutions to populist grievances, obstruct democratic processes while dismantling institutions, normalizing violence as part of politics, and placing blame for every kind of problem on "enemies within" that include the media, critics and political opponents, and any minority group deemed weak enough not to fight back. Examples of strongmen abound from China, Brazil, Türkiye, and the US. Rachman outlines common themes across these disparate political and historical contexts that have led to this wave of like-minded and anti-democratic leaders winning control of governments through democratic means.
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On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
In this extremely slim volume historian Timothy Snyder lays out a series of lessons he believes we can learn from the twentieth century on how to protect democracy from collapse.
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Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism
Why does it seem democracy is under threat in so many different countries and in so many different ways—from occasionally violent protests against democratic institutions to outright war waged on democratic nation-states? Historian Anne Applebaum explains what’s so seductive about doing away with ballot boxes, checks and balances, and rule of law in general. And she illustrates how anti-democratic advocates act to change liberal democracies into authoritarian states.
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Putin's People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took On the West
If you’ve wondered why Russia has put so much effort into disinformation campaigns and interfering in western elections, and what Russian president Vladimir Putin stands to gain from it all, journalist Catherine Belton offers an explanation in this book. She traces the recent history of Russia along with the KGB career of Putin to show what motivates him now and how he won (and continues to hold) the support of the most powerful people in Russia.
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This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race
Through hundreds of interviews, New York Times reporter Nicole Perlroth assembles stories of cyberweapons employed to do everything from spying on personal devices to shutting down the Ukrainian power grid. She reveals a global arms race and a black market that threatens to wreak a kind of havoc we can barely imagine.
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China Unbound: A New World Disorder
In this 2021 book journalist Joanna Chiu gives readers background on the protests in Hong Kong, the persecution of religious and ethnic minorities in China, the astonishing growth of the Chinese government’s surveillance apparatus, and other issues playing out in China right now.
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The Origins Of Totalitarianism
This classic text has been relevant since it was first published in 1951. Hannah Arendt looks at Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, two governments that fit her definition of totalitarianism (despite their opposition in WWII), and explores the institutions and social mechanisms that created and supported them, including how they developed identities for different classes while perpetuating propaganda that explained away the world outside.
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