The reader response to my IR 101 contest was truly overwhelming.  The variety and intensity of the responses is quite impressive, and merits a blog popst on its own. 

To recall the assignment:

[I]f a newly-minted U.S. Senator did want to seriously bone up on foreign affairs, what books should he or she read?....

[I]f you're educating a politician from scratch, you need something relatively pithy, accessible, relevant to current events, and America-centric....

I therefore call upon the readers of this blog to proffer up their suggestions -- if you had to pick three books for an ambitious U.S. politician to read in order to bone up on foreign affairs, what would they be? 

Before I get to the reader suggestions, I heartily encourage the rich variety of responses in the foreign policy blogosphere:  see Stephanie Carvin, Brian Rathbun, Andrew Exum, Rob Farley, Justin Logan, Will Winecoff, Phil Arena, and Steve Saideman, for starters.   

A few of them challenge some of the underlying premises of my question.  Arena asks, in essence, "does it really matter?"  If IR scholars believe that structural, impersonal factors are what guide American foreign policy, then a reading list won't make a difference.  Rathbun implicitly endorses this point in observing that us IR folk basically write books saying that the first image of leadership doesn't matter all that much. 

There is an theoretical and empirical response to this.  The theoretical response is that even the most ardent structuralist would acknowledge that there is a stochastic element to any political model -- indeed, in most tests, random chance explains more than the non-random model.  What books leaders read falls into the stochastic category (we never know ex ante), so any attempt to influence on that factor is not trivial.

The empirical is that we have at least anecdotal evidence that books occasionally do affect the thinking of American foreign policy decisionmakers.  Bill Clinton was famously reluctant to intervene in Bosnia after reading Robert Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts.  I'd argue that Kenneth Pollack's  The Threatening Storm was the most important book-length contribution to the 2003 debate about going to war in Iraq -- because it provided intellectual cover for Democrats supporting the Bush administration.  Bush himself touted Natan Sharansky's The Case for Democracy as a book that influenced his thinking on the Middle East. 

Exum also asks a fair quesion -- why books? 

A lot of the reading material I digest comes from blogs as well as newspaper and magazine articles. A lot of it comes from scholarly and policy journals as well.... I generally find articles in International Security, Survival, Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy, though, to be both accessible and thought-provoking. And asking a senator to read a few articles in Foreign Affairs each month en route back to his or her constituency actually sounds like a reasonable request. So I am not sure I would actually recommend a junior senator read a book so much as I would ask him or her to read a few carefully selected articles or scan through ForeignPolicy.com every other day.

This is a fair point -- if we could get our junior Senator/aspiring presidential candidate to read up on foreign affairs every day.  I'm pessimistic about that happening, however, for the reasons I gave in the prevous post. 

Also, here's the thing -- oddly enough, politicians want to tell everyone how many Very Important Books they read.  Consider Condoleezza Rice's New York Times Magazine interview, in which she stresses that, "[George W. Bush] read five books for every one I read. He read something like 12 biographies of Lincoln in office."  Bush is not someone who seemed worried that he wasn't egghead-y enough, and yet even he and his acolytes feel compelled to point out what's on his bookshelf.  We might living in a Twitter age, but books still possess some totemic value of intellectual gravitas. 

Picayune disagreements aside, I do encourage readers to click through each of the above links to see their book recommendations. 

Below, however, is the aggregate list produced by my readers.  At least three different commenters recommended or endorsed all thrirteen books below.  [And what do you think of the list?--ed.  I'm a big fan of many of these books, I confess I haven't read several of them, and there are a few that I think are mind-boggingly stupid.  I suspect that would be the same response of any other IR scholar to the list below -- though which ones are "mid-boggingly stupid" would be a furious subject for debate.] 

In alphabetical order:

 THE TOP THIRTEEN FOREIGN AFFAIRS BOOKS EVERY ASPIRING POLITICIAN SHOULD READ

(As selected by readers of Foreign Policy)

Andrew Bacevich, Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War

Steve Coll, Ghost Wars   

Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

Robert D. Kaplan, Monsoon  

Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers

Parag Khanna, How to Run the World

Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy

Walter Russell Mead, Special Providence

John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics

Joseph Nye, The Future of Power

Ahmed Rashid, Descent Into Chaos

Stephen Walt, Taming American Power

Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World

Your humble blogger will be posting his book selections on Monday. 

Let the fight/snark in the comment thread.... begin!!

Now is the winter of your humble blogger's discontent, only to be made glorious once writing letters of recommendation/grading papers has ceased.  After that, I'm looking forward to reading or re-reading the following six books and articles: 

1)  Charles Kupchan, How Enemies Become Friends.  A lot of international relations theory starts off with the basic question of "what causes war?"  Kupchan flips this question on its head, asking how enduring rivals decide not go to to war.

2)  Ben Wildavsky, The Great Brain Race.  The first discussion I've seen of how universities are competing in an era of globalization for the deepest pockets best minds to educate.  Plus, I was a big fan of this series as a kid.

3)  McKinsey Global Institute, Farewell to Cheap Capital?.  Think of it as a sequel to the global savings glut hypothesis. 

4)  Tyler Cowen, "The Inequality that Matters," The American Interest, January/February 2011.  I think Cowen is overemphasizing the role of finance in explaining rising inequality in the United States (my hunch is that the economics of superstars plays a big role as well), but he raises a very interesting question about whether the financial sector is the Achilles' heel of free-market democracies. 

5)  The Economist's year-end issue.  This is always a treat -- a double issue filled with articles about the interesting and the arcane.  This essay on the inefficiency of getting a Ph.D. ("America produced more than 100,000 doctoral degrees between 2005 and 2009. In the same period there were just 16,000 new professorships.") is a must-read for anyone contemplating getting a doctorate. 

6)  Linda Schlossberg, Life in Miniature.  All non-fiction and no fiction makes Dan a dull boy.  This delicate first novel, a child's narrative of her mother's descent into paranoia, will be of interest for those policy wonks currently working on the war on drugs:  it's a theme that runs through the book.  Full disclosure: Linda is a friend and gives a great reading. 

[What about John Mearsheimer's latest in The National Interest?--ed.  Already read it, and I'll have more to say about in a bit.] 

So I see the blog meme of the month is Tyler Cowen's "the top 10 books which have influenced your view of the world."  All the old cool bloggers are doing it. 

The hard-working staff here at the blog likes to keep up with all the latest internet traditions.  Having read and watched High Fidelity, I'm keenly aware of all the ways I'd be tempted to go all obscure-y in my references.  So, here are my "gut response" books, in roughly the chronological order I encountered them: 

1)  Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition.  My 11th grade U.S. history teacher assigned this book in addition to the standard textbook.  It certainly provided a more nuanced view of certain historical figures than you got in the textbook.  More importantly, Hofstadter knew how to write well.  This was the first book I ever read where it occurred to me that nonfiction could be as interesting to read as fiction. 

2)  Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation.  I didn't know anything about game theory before reading this book for a summer school course.  After reading this book I was fascinated by it. 

3)  Douglas Adams, The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy.  A sense of whimsy, of intellectual play, is a necessary condition for staying sane in the universe.  Douglas Adams is Whimsy 101 through Advanced Theory of Whimsy.  Plus, when I grow up I want to be Oolon Colluphid.   

4) Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. A lot of people have put Genealogy of Morals on their lists because Nietzsche was the first person they read who pointed out that morals might have an instrumental and particularistic motivation.  I'm not sure Kuhn is completely correct in his vivisection of how science works, but it was only after reading this book that I began to recognize the instrumental, cognitive, and sociological dimensions of scientists.   

5)  P.J. O'Rourke, Holidays in Hell.  Click here to see why O'Rourke's first collection of essays was partly responsible for my decision to get a Ph.D. 

6)  Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.  Everyone focuses on the end of this book, with the exaggerated statements about U.S. "imperial overstretch."  What hooked me was the first 95% of the book, in which Kennedy went through 500 years of history to demonstrate the essential link between economic power and military power, and the ways in which hegemonic actors ineluctably overreach and overextend themselves.  The first chapter, which discusses why Europe and not China rose to global dominance from 1500 on, was what turned me onto economic history.  From here I went to David Landes' The Unbound Prometheus, Rosenberg & Birdzell's How the West Grew Rich, Joelk Mokyr's Lever of Riches, etc...

7)  Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker.  Lewis has expressed befuddlement that people still wanted to go into finance after reading his book -- which makes me wonder if he read what he wrote.  True, Liar's Poker is not exactly a paean to finance, but the book does capture the raw energy that comes with the good and the bad of financial innovation.  For my own intellectual development, the book was also surprisingly useful:  I'll now always be able to say that I got an A+ from Joe Stiglitz  for a game-theoretic explanation of some of the phenomena Lewis talked about in the book.  The lesson I drew from that; inspiration can come from even the most popular of books. 

8)  Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations.  This was Olson's sequel to The Logic of Collective Action, and basically argued that over time, political stability breeds interest group capture, which breeds economic sclerosis.  I don't quite buy the argument in the same way that I did when I first read it.  What was appealing about the book, however, was the elegance of the argument and evidence.  It's just a great, simple argument

9) Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War.  In the early nineties I spent a year in eastern Ukraine, where sources of entertainment that did not involve vodka were extremely scarce .  So I brought two books that I knew I had to read at some point but had yet to finish:  the Old Testament and Thucydides.  The first one had a great beginning, but I confess that I got bogged down in Leviticus.  The second book has held my attention ever since.  It's analytical history rather than political science, but the entire tapestry of human behavior is on display in that book.  Far, far too many people who consider themselves experts in international relations have read nothing from Thucydides except the Melian Dialogue -- and they are poorer for it. 

10)  Albert Hirschman, Exit, Voice and Loyalty.   I've mined Hirschman throughout my own professional career, and I could have put at least four of his books on this list.  This one makes the list for three reasons.  First, it's Hirschman's most wide-ranging in terms of its applicability -- it can apply to any organization at any level of society.  Second, I relied on it heavily when developing the domestic politics portion of All Politics Is Global.  Third, it's a great example of an idea that was simultaneously original but, once you thought about it, became completely intuitive. 

Looking at the list, I notice three trends:  1)  a lot more nonfiction than fiction; 2)  all of these books have clear prose styles -- they are accessible to both scholars and non-scholars; and 3) the books that captured my attention were interesting for their intellectual style as much as their content. 

I reviewed Gregg Easterbrook's Sonic Boom: Globalization at Mach Speed today in the New York Times.  The opening paragraph:

America could use a truly Whiggish book right about now. More than a year into the Great Recession, it has become much harder to believe in the idea of inexorable progress. The moment is ripe for a counterintuitive, optimistic perspective that shows, despite appearances to the contrary, that the world is getting better and better every day, in every way. Gregg Easterbrook  tries hard to satiate our inner optimist with “Sonic Boom.”

You'll have to read the rest of the review to gauge how well Easterbrook did at this task.  Here's a small hint, however -- I'd really like to read a persuasive book that advances this argument, because I think it can be done. 

When someone publishes an op-ed, longer essay, or book, they have to write a tagline.  It's usually two sentences describing their title and affiliation, and whatever big projects are associated with them. 

After watching the preview for The Invention of Lying, however, I began to wonder what these tag lines would look like if they were brutally honest.  With a nod to Megan Mcardle's "Full Disclosure" post from a few years ago, here's fifteen examples I came up with: 

• Jack Silver is a fellow at the Institute for Strategic Studies.  He has been Henry Kissinger's bitch for something like three decades, so when Henry passed on writing something for us, he was the next logical choice.     

 

• Suzie Wong has never been to the country about which she is writing.  What's in this op-ed is culled from a quick perusal of the Economist and a few phone calls.     

 

• Cass Bunstein is a law professor.  He dashed off this essay in his head while commuting to work this morning, wrote it in under thirty minutes, and it's still smarter than anything, my dear reader, that will ever pop into your brain. 

 

• Augustine Cornington has been teaching at an obscure state school for two decades, lying in the tall grass, waiting for her archnemesis to make a mistake in print.  This book review is her chance to completely eviscerate him. 

 

• Joe Schlub Jr. is a law professor.  This essay is a badly mangled version of an interesting idea he heard Cass Bunstein riff on at a cocktail party last week. 

 

• Andrew McClutchen is a former governor.  He hopes that this op-ed is the first step in getting beyond that horrible sex scandal from a few years ago. 

 

• Madeleine McFadden is a former cabinet secretary, and did not write a single word of this policy essay.  It is possible she read the first few paragraphs of it, but that's being really optimistic.

 

• Jane Babbington has no extraordinary policy expertise.  She does have an awesome book jacket photo, however, and will have better hair and skin than you do until the day she dies.  

 

• Lou Marston is a very smart professor at Princeton University.  This op-ed is woefully underplaced because he took his own sweet time writing it, and this issue is from last week's news cycle.  

 

• Robert Knaus lost the capacity to write long-form essays years ago - what you just read is what an intern scraped together from one year's worth of Twitter tweets. 

 

• Ann Stoneham is the foremost expert on this topic, and cannot write her way out of a paper bag.  Her uber-competent editor busted her ass for the last 48 hours to try and convert this essay into semi-readable prose

 

• Gwen Pollard is an area expert at a prominent DC think tank.  She fervently hopes that everyone has forgotten how completely wrong she was about this topic just five short years ago.

 

• C. Thomas Pope is a professor at the University of Chicago, and his worldview hardened into an inpenetrable black mass the day he turned twenty-four.  As no amount of contradictory evidence will cause him to change his mind, he is perfectly willing to make absurd, idiotic statements without worrying that he is wrong. 

 

• Richard Jensen is a professor at Harvard University.  He has the Mother of All Balloon Payments due on his mortgage next year, so any extra income helps. 

And, of course.....

• Daniel Drezner is a professor at Tufts University, and is publishing the fifth version of exact same idea with this essay.  Seriously, the man would be nothing without the cut and paste function.

Readers are warmly welcomed to come up with their own brutally honest tag lines in the comments. 

OK, so by my calculations, your humble blogger has heard from at least .001% of the Icelandic population in response to my latest book review.  By an eerie -- and not conspiratorial!! -- coincidence -- they have been unable to post responses using FP's f***ed-up somewhat dysfunctional comment software.  Sooo... as a special courtesy to Icelandic Friends of Drezner's Blog (IFDB), here are the responses: 

1) From Petur Henry Peterson: 

You seem, rather naively, to think that this book was written by the Nation of Iceland. You would be better to "follow the money" and realize that its author is one of the people hired and payed handsomely,  for what at the best, appears to be to deceive and manipulate Icelanders about the real state of their banking system. Is he going to identify himself and his friends as the culprits, I dont think so. Strangely, the people who were the best and the brightest, now claim to have been totally clueless
(well some of them were and still are ;).

Most Icelanders realize all too well the cause of the meltdown in lax regulations and cronyisms between right wing politicians (and their supporters, the farmers party) and the financial sector, plus a dash or two of nepotism, stupidity, greed, lack of active democracy and a national minority complex.

I think that's supposed to be "inferiority complex" rather than "minority complex," but you get the idea. 

2)  This one comes from Audur Ingolfsdottir:

I have not read the book myself, and thus have no comments on your analysis on the book itself. However, I must agree with your own second thoughts, on if the last part of the review is perhaps a bit harsh. Not so much because I think Icelanders should not look within to find explanations for the crash last October, but rather you assumption, after having read a book by a single individual, that his analysis are reflective of the "country´s mindset".

The Icelandic public went out to streets, outraged, pounding their pots and pans, which resulted in the government resigning and early elections were called. The director of the financial serveillance authority resigned after huge public pressure. The central bank managers were forced to leave theirs seats, also after great pressure by the public. Hardly any of the people that were in power during and before the collapse are still holding their positions.

Currently the government is going through the very painful process of cutting down costs in the public sector. At the same time, considerable amount of money is being spent in order to investigate the banks, and what went wrong.

So I would say that although there were of course some strong international forces influencing the chain of events, most Icelanders are acutely aware of that a number of things went wrong in our own country, and a lot of work is aheaad to clean up the mess. 

These are fair comments, and it would certainly be unfair to say that Jonsson's worldview represents all Icelanders.

That said, I'm not the only one who's picked up on this meme.  Both Michael Lewis and Ian Parker sussed out the same vibe when they visited Reykjavik -- and it comes out a little bit in the newest Icelandic PM's recent public statements.  Furthermore, the Financial Times recently noted that, "Iceland has a tendency to imagine a British or Dutch conspiracy behind any bad news." 

The problem with this kind of label is that it's hard to shake, so maybe this is dogpiling on a small country.  I'll merely point out, with respect, that this statement in my book review was not based only on Jonsson's book -- rather, it is emblematic of everything I have read to date about Iceland. 

Back in the spring, I hinted that I would be willing to produce a top ten list of must-read books on the international political economy/global political economy (IPE or GPE for those in  the know), provided there was sufficient demand. 

Judging by the e-mail response, the demand is robust and quite persistent.  So I've decided... to postpone that list for another month or two.

Because you're not ready yet. 

Let's face it, if you have read this far in the post, it means you're either: 

• A curious professor ready to minimize this page if anyone walks in;
• A grad student seeking the keys to success in the profession;
• An intense undergraduate student who really wants to study IPE. 

This is great.  The thing is, most graduate programs in political economy don't give you that much historical background before throwing the cutting-edge theory and methodology at you.  This year I was lunching with some Ph.D. students at one of the top IPE schools in the country, and the students (and some of the professors) made it pretty clear that they didn't know all that much about the topic beyond the tricks of the trade - formal modeling, econometric techniques, etc. 

If you're expecting me to go off on a rant here about the uselessness of these tools, well, you're going to be sadly disappointed.  There are some pretty good reasons to learn these techniques - among other things, they'll help you to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to what blogs, pundits and public intellectuals are saying about the global economy. 

That said, the opportunity cost can be significant - a failure to learn anything about global economic history beyond the stylized facts contained in the most-cited articles.  This would be a weird collection of scattered knowledge, ranging from the 1860 Cobden-Chevalier Treaty to the 1934 Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act to the birth of the Washington Consensus. 

Soooo..... before you are ready to ready the ten books in IPE that you have to read, you should first read these ten books on global economic history.  I'm leaving a lot out here (North and Thomas' The Rise of the Western World; Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation; anything and everything by William McNeill, Joel Mokyr, David Landes, Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., Joseph Needham; some things by Niall Ferguson, etc.).  That's partly because I've slanted this list towards more recent scholarship, and partly because while these books are excellent economic histories, they don't focus as much on the international dimension. 

[There are some other newly-released books, such as Liaquat Ahamed's Lords of Finance or Justin Fox's The Myth of the Rational Market, that might very well belong on this list.  I'm still in the middle of reading them, however, so the jury is still out.]

Once you imbibe the (sometimes contradictory) information contained in these books, you can look at what the stylized facts contained in IPE books with a much more astringent perspective.  It's not a coincidence that the foundational IPE texts are by the twentieth century's greatest economic historians - Eli Heckscher, Albert Hirschman, Charles Kindleberger, and Jacob Viner.  Trust me - you will feel much the wiser for it. 

The following would be my preferred order of how to read them, but it's hardly the only way to do it: 

1.  Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms:  A Brief Economic History of the World (2007). I've already tagged this book as an interesting read.  If nothing else, the first chapter of this book - "The Sixteen-Page Economic History of the World"  - actually matches the audacity of the title.  As I said, I don't completely buy Clark's explanation of Malthus + genetics = Industrial Revolution in Great Britain.  His attempt to explain away the irrelevance of institutions doesn't hold up to scrutiny.  Still, I will say I better appreciated the heyday of mercantilism after reading Clark. 

2.  Nathan Rosenberg and L.E. Birdzell, Jr., How the West Grew Rich (1986).  Perfect when paired with Clark, because Rosenberg and Birdzell present the classical argument for why Western Europe was the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution. 

3.  Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997).  The third leg in the triad of "why did Europe dominate the globe?" explanations.  If Clark focuses on genetics/culture, and Rosenberg and Birdzell focus on institutions, Diamond proffers a geographical determinism.  Simply put, he thinks the temperate climate of Eurasia was bound to produce the most sophisticated societies with the most advanced animals, germs, and technologies.  Diamond's argument complements rather substitutes for the institutions and culture arguments.  If nothing else, it is impossible to read this book and ever buy the ending to War of the Worlds.

4.  John Nye, War, Wine and Taxes (2007).  David Ricardo's classic example of comparative advantage was English wool for Portuguese wine.  Nye explodes the "natural" aspect of this trade, demonstrating how high tariffs against French wine proved a boon to both the Portuguese and English beer distillers.  Nye stretches his argument too far at times, but the interrelationship between war, protectionism, and statebuilding is pretty damn fascinating. 

5.  Douglas Irwin, Against the Tide:  An Intellectual History of Free Trade (1996).  Irwin's book is more a history of economic thought than economic history, but nevertheless tells a remarkable story:  how did the idea of free trade knock off mercantilism, protectionism, strategic trade theory, and other doctrines?  

6.  Kevin O'Rourke and Jeffrey Williamson, Globalization and History (1999).  A lucid, detailed and fascinating study of how the nineteenth century of globalization went down.  When anyone argues that the current (fast fading?) era of globalization is historically unique, take the hardcover version of this book and whack them on the head with it.  Special bonus book:  people who liked this should go on to read Power and Plenty by Kevin O'Rourke and Ron Findlay). 

7.  Jeffry Frieden, Global Capitalism:  Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century (2006).  This book is to the twentieth centiury as Williamson and O'Rourke's book is to the nineteenth - except it's written for a wider audience, so it's a more accessible read.  Accessible doesn't mean simple, however - this book is chock full of interesting arguments, cases, and counterarguments.  

8.  Barry Eichengreen, Globalizing Capital:  A History of the International Monetary System, second edition (2008).  A more narrow work than Frieden's, Eichengreen's book is the starting point for understanding the classical gold standard, the Bretton Woods regime, and whatever the hell system we have now the Bretton Woods II regime. 

9.  Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, The Commanding Heights (1997).  Yergin and Stanislaw tell a cheerleader's tale of how the Washington Consensus displaced the old quasi-Keynesian, quasi-socialist economic order that had its apogee and downfall in the 1970s.  What's particularly interesting is their argument that what mattered was the content and spread of the ideas themselves, and not some coercive power, that led to the re-embrace of markets.  

10. Paul Blustein, The Chastening (2001).  Blustein, a reporter for the Washington Post, tells the you-are-there version of the Asian financial crisis and the reaction from the U.S. Treasury Department.  If you want to know why Pacific Rim economies started hoarding foreign exchange reserves beginning in 1999, read this book. 

OK, readers, which books would you recommend? 

Free books are both a major perk and a major inequity of being a senior professor.  Academic publishers send loads of free books to me and my senior colleagues in the hopes that we assign them in class, mention them on the blog, etc.  This is a tragic inequality of the academic system, since as a full professor I should, in theory, be able to buy these books Meanwhile, debt-ridden graduate students have to pay for these things. 

Yesterday, however, was a real treat, because I got several books in the mail that were written by my friends (at least that's what my Facebook page tells me):

1. Daniel Nexon's The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe:  Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change.  A book about the ways in which transnational religious movements threatened the old political order of continental Europe.  Gee, it's too bad this kind of discussion doesn't resonate in today's world politics. 
2. Sadanand Dhume, My Friend the Fanatic:  Travels with a Radical Islamist.  Why is radical Islam such a growth industry in Indonesia?  Dhume travels across that country with an Islamist who worships Osama bin Laden to examine its appeal. 
3. Joshua Gans, Parentonomics:  An Economist Dad Looks at Parenting.  Josh and I started in grad school at the same time, so I'm already freaked out by the concept that he's a parent.  That he's written a Steve Leavitt-inspired book on the topic is even freakier.  Of course, I have no choice but to read it. 
4. Daniel W. Drezner, ed., Avoiding Trivia:  The Role of Strategic Planning in American Foreign Policy.  Sure, you might call this shameless self-promotion, but guess what?  I can honestly say that I'm the least important person involved in this book.  The other contributors -- including Richard Haass, David Gordon, Jeff Legro, Bruce Jentleson, Stephen D. Krasner, Amy Zegart, and FP's own Peter Feaver and Will Inboden -- are the ones who provide the real meat of the book.  I just set the table and poured the wine on this project. 

Enjoy!

Please do check out Foreign Policy's Book Club discussion of Tom Ricks' The Gamble, his excellent and contrarian follow-up to Fiasco.  Here's a link to Marc Lynch's take, and that is followed by Christian Brose.

My take just went up.  The point I want to stress: 

[T]he ways in which the architects of the surge got their way seems like an exact replay of how the architects of the invasion and initial occupation got their way -- operating through bureaucratic backchannels and endruns, ideologically simpatico think tanks, and -- of course -- Dick Cheney's office. For those of us who want the policymaking process to work, this looks like another fiasco. Petraeus's decision to co-opt the Sunni insurgents, for example, was made without consulting the president. Doesn't that echo J. Paul Bremer's disastrous decision to disband the Iraqi military without consultation? Petraeus, Odierno, and Jack Keane might have been right on the merits, but to get their way they bypassed the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CENTCOM commander, the State Department, and the NSC interagency process. The Gamble argues that these actors were impediments to the right strategy. All well and good, but what is to stop another cluster of bureaucratic "insurgents" from bypassing the chain of command and telling political leaders what they want to hear on, say, Afghanistan, North Korea or Iran? Is there a need for another, more ambitious version of Goldwater-Nichols?

Go check it out -- and Ricks will respond to all of these comments at the end of the week. 

Are you confused about the cause and effects of the current global financial crisis?  Here are some useful reads for you:

1. John Cassidy, "Anatomy of a Meltdown," The New Yorker.  Cassidy tries to explain Bernanke's decision-making process over the past eighteen months.  If nothing else, this story contains the only amusing anecdote about Dick Cheney that I have read in the past five years. 
2. Niall Ferguson, "What 'Chimerica' Hath Wrought," The American Interest.  Ferguson hits the key notes, which is how the crisis affects the strange interdependence that China and the United States and the future distribution of power.  This essay nicely sums up the state of play -- the numbers suggest a hegemonic power transition between the U.S. and China happening sooner rather than later, but since the U.S. has historically coped with these inds of crises better than other states, you never know.
3. James Pethokoukis, "5 Reasons Why the Economy Might Recover Faster Than You Think in 2009," Capitol Commerce.  Pethokoukis offers the best-case scenario for why this will be a short sharp recession.  I remain unconvinced, especially by the benefits of cheap energy (rising energy prices failed to drag down the economy at all until they skyrocketed earlier this year, and unless oil falls to below $10 a barrel I see no reason why the reverse effect should take place either).  Still, I hope he's right.
4. Drake Bennett, "Depression 2009: What would it look like?" Boston Globe.  Bennett's essay is the flip side of Pethokoukis -- what happens if this really is the Great Depression II?  Bennett explains how the piublic manifestations of this depession would be markedly different from the thirties.  Among the cheery notes -- fewer hungry people. 
5. Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker.  I read this over the weekend and it's astonishing to see how well it holds up twenty years later.  Indeed, in many ways this book provides a better guide to the origins of the current crisis -- the securitization of mortgages, the explosion of shaky debt -- than anything written this year, with the possible exception of... Michael Lewis. 

Readers are strongly encouraged to suggest additional and alternative readings. 

Your humble blogger is going on a family vacation where Internet oppotunities are limited and opportunities to play Whiffle ball with my son are plentiful.  In other words, all y'all shouldn't be expecting a lot of new posts.  However, this being a vacation, I'll be bringing some light and not-so-light reading material.  1)  David Rothkopf, Superclass.  As someone who flits on the margins of Davos, Aspen,  and other tony addresses, Rothkopf is well-placed to write a book about the rich and the powerful.  Part of the fun is seeing how Rothkopf walks the line between tweaking this uber-elite without alienating them. 2)  Benjamin J. Cohen, International Political Economy: An Intellectual History.  Cohen provides the first history of the IPE field, and marries this intellectual history to biographies of the seven "intellectual entrepreneurs" in the US and UK who have made the field what it is today.  3)  David Singh Grewal, Network Power: The Social Dynamics of Globalization.  Grewal thinks he's cracked the code for how to use network dynamics to explain the myriad social reactions to globalizaion.  I think he's using the term "standard" a bit too freely, and the punk grad student fails to cite my work should have dipped into the existing literature a bit more.  That said, I suspect he's onto something.  4)  Elizabeth Bumiller, Condoleezza Rice, and Marcus Mabry, Twice As Good.  For reasons that will become clearer in a few months, I'm on a Condi reading jag.  5)  Orson Scott Card, Pastwatch and Jhumpa Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth.  I'm on vacation, dammit -- I get to read fiction!!!

Robert Farley reads Strobe Talbott's The Great Experiment so you don't have to:

To sum up, if you have trouble sleeping but can't get another prescription, check out The Great Experiment. If not, avoid it like the plague.

For this holiday month, why limit the recommendations to just two books? Here are the selections I'm eager to read over the holiday season: Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium, by Ronald Findlay and Kevin H. O'Rourke. It's been a very good year for reading economic history -- John Nye's War, Wine, and Taxes, Gregory Clark's A Farewell To Alms -- and this is the last course. Eight years ago, O'Rourke co-authored the very interesting Globalization and History about the 19th century Atlantic economy -- and this is an even grander discussion. Growing Apart?: America and Europe in the 21st Century, edited by Jeffrey Kopstein and Sven Steinmo. It contains several insightful essays examining the frayed state of transatlantic relations -- particularly Steven Pfaff's comparison of the market for religion in the U.S. and Europe. Full disclosure: I make a contribution as well. The Confidante: Condoleezza Rice and the Creation of the Bush Legacy, by Washington Post diplomatic correspondent Glenn Kessler. The book is essentially a tick-tock of Rice's various diplomatic forays as Secretary of State, in which she tries and not quite succeeds in digging herself out of the hole created during her time as National Security Advisor. The details are priceless and disturbing. My favorite is State Department counselor Philip Zelikow requesting a sidearm during a trip to Baghdad. The scariest is the notion that Rice failed to comprehend the "responsible stakeholder" language that Bob Zoellick crafted as a way to move the Sino-American relationship forward. I've argued elsewhere that this was a pretty deft formulation, but Rice apparently just though it was "odd." For more on The Confidante, check out my bloggingheads with Kessler on the fancy new Bloggingheads website.. Supercapitalism, by Robert Reich. I've noticed an interesting trend with Reich's books -- I find myself agreeing more with the arguments in each passing book more and more. I'm not saying I agree with everything the man says, but Reich has traveled a long way since his industrial policy days with Ira Magaziner. International Institutions and National Policies, by Xinyuan Dai. Why do weak international governmental organizations -- like, say, the Helsinki Accords -- occasionally have powerful effects on nation-states? Dai argues that even weak organizations can empower and mobilize NGOs and domestic actors to act as monitors and enforcers. This argument differs somewhat from my own work -- which means it needs to be read. Speaking of my own work....

I'm juuuust a wee bit late on this month's book club selections. So, to be quick about it: The international relations book is Michael Tomz's Reputation and International Cooperation: Sovereign Debt across Three Centuries. In recent years, some of the most interesting work in international relations theory has been about the significance of reputation effects in world politics. Tomz argues for a dynamic theory of reputation, in which actors can update their beliefs over time about whether governments will honor their commitments. He marshalls considerable empirical evidence to make this case by looking at the behavior of sovereign borrowers and lenders over the past few centuries. Tomz's book, combined with the recent efforts of Daryl Press and Anne Sartori, have created a fruitful area of research in international relations. Go check it out. The general interest book is Cass Sunstein's Republic.com 2.0. This is one of those arguments -- the Internet will foster cyberbalkanization -- that I pooh-poohed when the original book came out. That said, trends in the blogosphere suggest that his argument has held up better than I would have predicted a few years ago. Naturally, by waiting until very late in the month to make this book recommendation, Sunstein has gone and published yet another book. So I promise to be more punctual next month.