"A must read for anyone who cares about our nation's security in these cyber-serious, hair-trigger times." – Susan EisenhowerEvery American president since the end of the Cold War has called for better relations with Russia. But each has seen relations get worse by the time he left office. Now the two countries are facing off in a virtual war being fought without clear goals or boundaries.Why? Many say it is because Washington has been slow to wake up to Russ...

Every American president since the end of the Cold War has called for better relations with Russia. But each has seen relations get worse by the time he left office. Now the two countries are facing off in a virtual war being fought without clear goals or boundaries.Why? Many say it is because Washington has been slow to wake up to Russian efforts to destroy democracy in America and the world.But a former head of Russia analysis at the CIA says that this misunderstands the ...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The fast-paced inside story of America’s plunge into a volatile rivalry with the other two great nuclear powers—Xi Jinping’s China and Vladimir Putin’s Russia—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and bestselling author of The Perfect Weapon“[A] cogent, revealing account of how a generation of American officials have grappled with dangerous developments in the post-Cold War era . . . vividly captures Washin...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER | From the diplomat Putin wants to interrogate—and has banned from Russia—comes a revelatory inside account of US-Russia relations across the three decades following the Cold War.In 2008, when Michael McFaul was asked to leave his perch at Stanford and join an unlikely presidential campaign, he had no idea that he would find himself at the beating heart of one of today's most contentious and consequential international relationshi...

An Instant New York Times BestsellerA chilling analysis of how Western indecision and apathy made possible the return of brutal Russian expansionism with catastrophic consequences – “A must-read for anyone who wants to understand what went wrong and how it can be fixed” (Serhii Plokhy, Harvard University)After the collapse of the Soviet Union, six US presidential administrations of both parties pursued policies for Russia, Ukraine,...

"A history, an analysis, and a set of prescriptions for the greatest geopolitical challenge of our time: the threat to the democratic world posed by China and Russia." —Anne Applebaum, author of Autocracy, Inc."A monumental account of contemporary geopolitics"—Francis Fukuyama, author of Liberalism and Its DiscontentsFrom New York Times bestselling author and former ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul come...

A provocative and urgent analysis of the U.S.–China rivalry.It has become conventional wisdom that America and China are running a “superpower marathon” that may last a century. Yet Hal Brands and Michael Beckley pose a counterintuitive question: What if the sharpest phase of that competition is more like a decade-long sprint?The Sino-American contest is driven by clashing geopolitical interests and a stark ideological dispute over whether authoritarianism ...

The United States is undergoing a profound and radical transformation, all features of which point to the fact of its departure at an accelerated rate from its largely self-proclaimed status as a global hegemon. The United States has lost ground in every single category that defines the power and status of a nation in relation to its rivals. This book delves into the reasons for a catastrophic decline of the American nation, addressing a range of factors from the economic (especially energ...

Since the start of the Trump era, the United States and the Western world has finally begun to wake up to the threat of online warfare and the attacks from Russia, who flood social media with disinformation, and circulate false and misleading information to fuel fake narratives and make the case for illegal warfare. The question no one seems to be able to answer is: what can the West do about it?Central and Eastern European states, including Ukraine and Poland, however, have been a...

REVIEWSI’m not sure if there’s been a better written book published yet this year than Ukraine: Zbig’s Grand Chessboard and How the West Was Checkmated, but I’m confident there’s not been a more important one. With some 17,000 nuclear bombs in the world, the United States and Russia have about 16,000 of them. The United States is aggressively flirting with World War III, the people of the United States have not the foggiest notion of how or why, and authors Nat...

According to the mainstream Western narrative, Vladimir Putin is an insatiable, Hitler-like expansionist who invaded Ukraine in an unprovoked land grab.That story is incorrect.In reality, the United States and NATO bear much of the responsibility for the Ukraine crisis. Through a series of misguided policies, Washington and its European allies placed Russia in an untenable situation for which war seemed, to Mr. Putin and his military staff, the only workable solution.

Ukraine is embroiled in a bloody civil war. Both sides stand accused of collaborating with fascists, of committing war crimes, of serving foreign interests. This proxy-war between Russia and the West was accompanied by a fierce information war. This book separates fact from fiction with extensive and reliable documentation. While remaining critical of Russia and the Donbass rebellion, De Ploeg demonstrates that many of the recent disasters can be traced to Ukrainian ultranationalists, pro-...