Get Smart: How to Cram for 2012

The foreign-policy books you should be reading to get ready for election season.

BY DANIEL W. DREZNER | JULY/AUGUST 2011

According to the New Yorker, Barack Obama boned up on international affairs to prepare for the presidency by reading Thomas Friedman. For foreign-policy cognoscenti, this is like reading John Grisham novels to study for the bar exam. With most of the Republican 2012 wannabes, like Obama, having spent their careers focused on domestic issues (or in the case of Donald Trump, the Miss USA pageant), it seemed only fair for FP to help these international relations neophytes. So we asked an array of seasoned foreign-policy professionals and general smart folks to provide reading suggestions for our aspiring leaders. The one obvious conclusion? All roads to understanding American foreign policy run through Joe Nye. 

Joseph S. Nye Jr.
Professor, Harvard Kennedy School

• Thinking in Time, Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May. Still the best primer on the uses and abuses of history in policy.

• Diplomacy, Henry Kissinger. Chapter 2 on the lasting and contrasting influences of Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt is alone worth the price of the book.

• The Future of Power, Joseph S. Nye Jr. At the risk of seeming immodest, I believe policymakers should understand the two great 21st-century power shifts -- the recovery of Asia and cyberpower -- described here.

Robert Gallucci
President, MacArthur Foundation; longtime U.S. diplomat

• The Future of Power, Joseph S. Nye Jr. A textured and subtle realist approach.

• Winner-Take-All Politics, Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson. A well-argued explanation of how democracy has produced the lopsided distribution of wealth that now characterizes America.

Liesl Schillinger
Book critic, New York Times

• Ali and Nino: A Love Story, Kurban Said. Beautifully contrasts Eastern and Western attitudes about progress and faith.

• The Desert and the Sown, Gertrude Bell. A remarkably enduring portrait of Middle Eastern character and pride.

• Hiroshima, John Hersey. Shocking eyewitness accounts that will help those who seek the executive office to consider the awful responsibility of the power they seek to wield.

Philip D. Zelikow
Former State Department counselor; professor, University of Virginia

• The Power of Place, Harm de Blij. Seeing the global and the local.

• The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective, edited by Niall Ferguson, et al. Interesting ruminations about how to comprehend today's crises.

• Thinking in Time, Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May. Lux aeterna.

 SUBJECTS:
 

Daniel W. Drezner, a professor of international politics at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, blogs at ForeignPolicy.com.

REDPOSSUM

11:26 AM ET

June 20, 2011

Inbred morons

The problem with the political class in Amerika, and indeed the whole Washington community, is that they have become horribly inbred. This shameless inbreeding has not only led to decadence and insanity, as with any inbred aristocracy, but also to raging provincialism. Joseph Nye suggesting his own book is the ultimate example of this arrogance and ignorance.

Of course I'm not referring to physical inbreeding, but rather to the copulation of too-closely-related concepts and points of view.

You want meaningful readings on economics? Try reading the regular columns by economist Samah El-Shahat.

You want real books on power, politics and the use of force?
Discourses On The First Ten Books of Titus Livius, by Niccolo Macchiavelli.

Black Edelweiss, by Johann Voss.

Le Rue Sans Joi / Street Without Joy, by Prof Bernard Fall, the 2nd edition being greatly preferable.

No Treason, by Lysander Spooner

The Great Betrayal, by Hon. Ian D. Smith