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I might not have initially realized how much I’d enjoy reading about a young-ish, unusually-kempt, brutal dictator with a weird hairdo. Jung Pak was the CIA’s top Kim Jong Un watcher for eight years, until we persuaded her to join us as a senior fellow in 2017, and she slaved over this book during her first 2+ years in the Foreign Policy program. It is one of the five best-written and most lively tomes I’ve ever enjoyed out of Brookings, in a quarter-century of working here and 35 years of reading the Institution’s work. This book, published in 2020, is awesome. Michael O’Hanlon recommends: Becoming Kim Jong Un: A former CIA officer’s insights into North Korea’s enigmatic young dictator Marshall’s book - simultaneously an atlas and analysis - provides a basis for a deeper understanding of global entanglements, why world leaders make the big decisions they do, and how a rapidly-changing physical planet will reshape the global geopolitical landscape as well. In the 2015 book “ Prisoners of Geography,” intrepid journalist Tim Marshall uses 10 up-to-date maps to examine the physical features of Russia, China, the United States, Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, Japan and Korea, and the Arctic to analyze the unique geopolitical challenges facing these countries and regions. Jesse Kornbluth recommends: Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need To Know About Global PoliticsĪll too often, natural geographical features are absent in geopolitical debates and analysis. O’Rourke is clear about the policy problem she articulates alternative hypotheses and she tests her theory using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods. The book is a model for students thinking about their own research projects. A critical insight from the book is that policymakers rarely got what they wanted through efforts at regime change, which had profoundly negative effects on the populations and their attitudes toward the United States. covert operations supported replacing an authoritarian regime with a democratic government. She discovered that there were 10 times as many covert efforts as overt action, and only one in eight U.S.
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O’Rourke conducted significant archival research and created an original dataset of U.S.-backed covert and overt regime change attempts during the Cold War. I highly recommend Lindsey O’Rourke’s “ Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War,” published by Cornell University Press in 2018.
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James Goldgeier recommends: Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War Each tried in every way they could to explain this to Trump, only to learn - over and over again - that he had rigid, non-mainstream views on trade and defense that smart practitioners were unable to budge. Each group accepted the basic parameters of post-World War II U.S.
#Intro to international relations books series#
Richard Bush recommends: Fear: Trump in the White Houseįor a riveting account of how foreign policy was really made in the Trump administration, I recommend Bob Woodward’s 2019 book “ Fear.” It describes a series of encounters that President Trump had with his economic advisers on the one hand, and his national security team on the other, through spring 2018. Recognizing that newer books and journal articles with fresh takes on the classic subjects don’t always make the syllabus, scholars and staff from Brookings Foreign Policy offer must-reads for students looking to supplement their coursework. But the more things change, the more they stay the same: Many will be assigned certain classics in their international relations, history, political science, and/or regional studies courses. Students across the United States are heading back to class - in utterly unconventional times, of course, with many attending virtually and under unusual schedules.