Steve Walt, blogger
Little America: The War within the War for Afghanistan, by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, and The Crisis of Zionism, by Peter Beinart (2012)
Chandrasekaran's Little America is a mordant, moving, and ultimately depressing account of how the U.S. national security establishment failed the nation in the Afghan War. Impossible to read without becoming angry and depressed, but don't let that stop you.
Beinart's The Crisis of Zionism is a heartfelt cri de coeur from a liberal Zionist who fears for Israel's future and believes American Jewry must save Israel from itself. His account of Obama's humiliation at the hands of Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israel lobby is worth reading all by itself, but those chapters should not obscure his broader message.
James Traub, columnist
The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, by James Scott (2009)
For a class I am teaching on nation-building, I have just read this extraordinary work by James Scott, a political scientist at Yale. Scott argues that state formation inevitably breeds flight, and thus that frontier people, or tribals, are not "primitives" but rather conscientious objectors whose culture is formed around the idea of self-government. His chief example is the wonderfully named "Zomia," a vast region that stretches from southwestern China to the hill country of Burma, Laos, and Thailand. Scott reminds us that state formation often has more to do with brutal repression than with enlightened "modernization," and he honors both the dignity and the relevance of those who have lit out for the territory, and stayed there.
Aaron David Miller, columnist
The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien (1937)
A reread: J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit -- an indispensable and cautionary tale that should be required for all U.S. officials who doubt the power of small to best big and who themselves have big ideas about America saving the world. If only Bilbo Baggins could be secretary of state.
Mohamed El-Erian, columnist
Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2012)
In his latest book, Taleb again demonstrates his ability to think outside the box in a manner applicable to many aspects of our personal and professional lives -- and he does so in his typically lively and engaging fashion. In addition to shedding insights on error correction processes, the book advances our general understanding of how different systems operate, including why they differ in responding to unanticipated shocks. In the process, Taleb provides important insights into how to increase systemic resilience through a mix of adaptability and agility. I enjoyed reading this book; and I learned from it.
Ian Bremmer, blogger
Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2012)
I love when a book establishes a new framework or philosophical perspective that you can map across a wide variety of disciplines. Taleb's premise is that the opposite of fragility is not indestructibility -- resilience to shocks and turmoil is only half the battle. Rather, the inverse is the antifragile: those things that improve amid chaos, and even need disorder to evolve and flourish. Taleb establishes examples from diverse areas of life, spanning from biology (human bones strengthen when stressed) to business sectors (the death of a restaurant bolsters those that remain and can learn from the mistakes). Perhaps he sums up the spectrum best through nature. "Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes a fire," he writes. This concept is a compelling way of reimagining the tenets of "creative destruction" and Darwinian evolution -- and taking what has been widely applied in assessing markets and finding less intuitive applications.
I particularly identified with the implications in my own field, political science: The antifragile is as an intriguing blueprint for nations, institutions, and even individuals amid uncertainty and disorder. In a G-Zero world with a growing leadership vacuum and shocks -- political, economic, or environmental -- that will become more frequent (though no more predictable), those who can build up their antifragility are poised for success.
Michael Dobbs, blogger
Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman, by Robert K. Massie (2012)
The most topical book about foreign affairs that I read in 2012 was Robert K. Massie's biography of an 18th-century Russian empress, Catherine the Great. Follow Catherine's transformation from a product of the European Enlightenment to an all-powerful autocrat, and you have the perfect explanation for Russia's reversion to type after the promise and turmoil of the glasnost era. With his absorbing narrative, Massie describes how Catherine arrived in Russia with liberal ideas and became the friend and heroine of Enlightenment figures like Voltaire and Diderot. But the need to defend a vast territory from internal and external enemies caused the German-born princess to wage a Chechnya-like campaign against secessionist regions and turn into a Russian nationalist, drawing support from conservative institutions such as the Russian Orthodox Church. Analysts of the Putin era, take note.
Peter Feaver, blogger
Confront and Conceal: Obama's Secret Wars and Surprising Rise of American Power, by David Sanger (2012)
The book that had the biggest impact on my thinking this year was David Sanger's Confront and Conceal. As I wrote in an earlier blog post, Sanger adopts a very sympathetic tone, and clearly comes away with a favorable view of Obama's strategic approach. But he is an honest enough writer that he describes wart after wart and the cumulative effect is, in my opinion, quite damning. Heading in to 2013, virtually every one of the strategy lines Sanger reports on in the book is unraveling. It is not too much of a stretch to say that 2013 will be spent trying to forge new strategies for each of the security challenges Sanger identifies. Bottom line: If you want to understand why things look so bleak on the national security front, read this book.
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