World affairs primer, part I

I’m occasionally asked by intel- lectually curious students to provide a reading list on international politics. I tell them that the place to start is with important “big picture” works of theory and history that can serve as a foundation for reading on more specific topics. After a necessary grounding in the classics (Herodotus, Thucydides, etc.), works like these:

■ Kenneth Waltz’s A Theory of International Politics (1979). Everyone who studied world politics in graduate school in the 1980s had to read this because of its “neo-realist” insight that nation-states exist, and thus conduct their diplomacy, under what Waltz called “structural anarchy.”

Put differently, the anarchic nature of the international system makes the world a dangerous place where nations can survive only by paying constant attention to a calculus of power and interest.

I’ve also frequently used Waltz’s comprehensive analysis of the causes of war, Man, the State and War (1959) in my international conflict course. For Waltz, war ultimately occurs because states will (and should) fight rather than sacrifice vital interests and because there is no higher authority to stop them. ■ Henry Kissinger’s Diplomacy (1994) remains the most insightful treatment of 20th century world politics, with the introductory chapter on Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson an especially useful illumination of the “realist” and “idealist” approaches and how they have vied for influence over time in the American worldview.

In terms of practice as opposed to theory, Kissinger’s three-volume memoirs, White House Years (1979), Years of Upheaval (1982), and Years of Renewal (1999), provide not just a detailed look at the American role in crucial historical events (Vietnam, the opening to China, the Yom Kippur War, etc.) but also the best understanding of how a great power’s foreign policy is conducted, wherein the choices are usually not between good and bad, but bad and worse. ■ Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics

(1976) is another grad school staple, using theories drawn from cognitive psychology to explain how diplomats attempt to “learn” from history, even if often drawing the wrong lessons from it. Just as generals always seem to fight the last war, diplomats always seek to prevent it.

Think of the continuing impact of escalation (the Great War), Munich (World War II), and the quagmire metaphor (Vietnam) in our contemporary debates over foreign policy and you get the idea.

■ Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992) remains the most influential book on world politics in the post-Cold War era, with its intriguing argument that the triumph of liberal democracy represents the end point of human political evolution, but his two

more recent volumes, The Origins of Political Order (2012) and Political Order and Political Decay (2015) present an even fuller explication of his ideas, along with what might be the most comprehensive survey yet produced of the history of human governance.

Big picture indeed.

■ No graduate seminar on world politics would be complete without both Fukuyama and the response to him in Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilization and the Remaking of World Order (1996), which claimed that the post-Cold War world would feature not convergence around the liberal democratic ideal, as Fukuyama predicted, but divergence into clashing civilizations based on culture, ethnicity and religion. Lots of people who hadn’t read it the first time around did so after 9/11.

While making seminal contributions in a range of other fields— civil-military relations (The Soldier and the State, 1957), political development in the third world (Political Order in Changing Societies, 1968),

and immigration and national identity (Who Are We?, 2004)—Huntington also wrote perhaps the most indispensable book on the causes and nature of democratization as a

process, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (1991).

Anyone interested in the future of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Xi Jinping’s China or understanding why the “Arab Spring” failed should read closely and take copious notes.

■ Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500-2000 (1987) might have got the timing wrong (it was the USSR that collapsed shortly thereafter due to “imperial overstretch,” rather than America) but remains the best book I’ve read on how great powers decline.

Besides the cogent analysis of diplomatic rivalries in different eras, there is Kennedy’s key insight: that great power decline is invariably caused by fiscal insolvency. As our national debt now soars past our GDP, perhaps some folks in Washington should get around to reading it.

■ Steven Pinker presents a convincing brief for broad human progress in his recent Enlightenment Now (2018) but many of the key arguments therein were more fully conveyed in his previous work The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011), in which he draws from a range of fields, including psychology, biology, and anthropology, to trace how war, crime, and violence in general have declined remarkably over time, contrary to the impression generally given by alarmist media coverage. Perhaps most intriguing in his explanation for such progress is the concept of “feminization,” defined as the pacific effect of female entry into politics.

For Pinker, the march of “Civilization” matters, because the “noble savage” wasn’t noble, just a savage.