My top five international relations books for the next president

Books. Books books books books books!!!

Last week, in honor of Inauguration Day Minus One Year, the Council on Foreign Relations’ James Lindsay blogged the “Five Foreign Policy Books the Next President Should Read.”  That, in turn, led to this Carlos Lozada tweet:

When the Washington Post’s nonfiction book critic makes a request, the hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts is duty-bound to comply provided we think it’s an interesting request and we don’t want to write about the 2016 election again.

First off, go check out Lindsay’s five selections, as they are very, very good. Second, check out the books I recommended to aspiring politicians about five years ago: there’s even some overlap with Lindsay!!

Excluding the books on those lists, and thinking about the issues that the next president will need to cope with starting on Jan. 20, 2017, here are the top five texts that come to mind for someone taking office next year:

1)  “The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War.” Yes, it’s a classic, and yes, it’s cliched to bring it up, but it doesn’t matter. Simply put, it’s the ur-text of international relations. Dani Rodrik has argued recently that economics is all about producing an array of models and then figuring out which model applies which situation. One could argue that an awful lot of the models in international relations are contained in Thucydides’ history. There hasn’t been a time in the post-1945 era when something from it doesn’t seem relevant to American foreign policy. For 2017, I’d suggest that the incoming president to pay close attention to the erosion in Athenian democracy, and Greek civil society, over the course of the long war.

2)  E.H. Carr, “The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919-1939.” Also a classic, though often a misread one. Carr’s discussion of utopian and realist modes of thinking about the world are very useful in contemplating about how to navigate world politics — as well as parsing out presidential rhetoric. Too often, readers of Carr believe that he dismissed utopian thinking entirely, but it’s more that at the time Carr was writing, the world seemed to be suffering from to much utopianism and too little realism. Incoming presidents almost always are too utopian in their thinking, however, so this is a useful check against that bias.

3)  Scott Sagan, “The Limits of Safety.” The first two books on this list deal with great power politics; time to drill down a bit. Sagan took Charles Perrow’s theory of “normal accidents” and applied it to command and control of U.S. nuclear weapons.  Perrow’s book is a great read, but the results Sagan finds of near-nuclear accidents is frightening beyond words. This appears to be a moment when the public seems pretty damn fearful. The next president should read this to recognize the conditions under which additional security precautions can make America less safe.

4)  Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. There seems to be a lot of state failure going on around the world right now. Why is that? This book doesn’t have all the answers, but it has a very big part of the answer. There also are a lot of revanchist states that seem concern Americans. If Acemoglu and Robinson’s thesis is true, then the next president should be far more concerned about, say, a weak China rather than a strong one.

5) Peter Trubowitz, “Politics and Strategy:  Partisan Ambition and American Statecraft.” What latitude will the next president have to launch an ambitious grand strategy? Trubowitz’s book offers some evidence for the conditions under which a president can choose to invest resources into foreign policy and the conditions under which such a course of action will not be on the table. Based on current attitudes about defense spending, the next president will likely face fewer constraints on this front than Barack Obama.