World affairs primer, part two

Last week’s column recommended some works of theory and history as a foundation for further reading on international politics. On that further reading list could be the following:

• Barbara Tuchman’s “The Guns of August” (1962) is still the classic account of the start of the Great War, which started so much of the calamitous 20th century, while Paul Fussell’s “The Great War and Modern Memory” (1975) remains the best study of its cultural and psychological consequences. I remember devouring it in just a couple sittings for a

20th-century history course.

• Useful one-volume overviews of World War II (or the Second

World War, as they call it across the pond) are Gerhard Weinberg’s

“A World at Arms” (1994) and Richard Overy’s “Why the Allies Won”

(1997).

A more thorough, “participant observer” account can be found in the six volumes of “The Second

World War,” by some fellow named Churchill.

• The emergence of “totalitarian” regimes explains a great deal of the horrors of the past century, hence any reading list should include the key theoretical works on the subject, especially Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism” (1951), and Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski’s “Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy” (1956), as well as “dystopian” fiction like Arthur Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon” and George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” and “1984.”

An especially useful overview tracing the development of the concept is Abbott Gleason’s “Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War”

(1995).

• On the Cold War itself, what many consider World War III, it is helpful to go back to George Kennan’s 1947 Foreign Affairs article “The Source of Soviet Conduct,” which first articulated the policy of “containment” for the general public. John Lewis Gaddis consequently provides the best overview of the implementation of containment in “Strategies of Containment” (1982), as well as a superb biography “George F. Kennan: An American Life” (2011).

The most authoritative account of the policy debates at the highest levels of the American government in the early Cold War remains Dean Acheson’s “Present at the Creation” (1969).

• The central dynamic of the Cold War was, of course, the nuclear arms race, and to get a sense of how such weapons were incorporated into diplomacy in the guise of “strategic studies,” consult Henry Kissinger’s “Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy” (1957) and Herman Kahn’s “On Thermonuclear War” (1960), along with Thomas Schelling’s “The Strategy of Conflict” (1960), which introduced game theory to the study of “coercive diplomacy” and has been a staple of graduate school courses ever since.

A broader overview of the literature can be found in Lawrence Freedman’s “The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy” (1981).

• The greatest American defeat during the Cold War, Vietnam, inevitably produced a voluminous literature, most of which embraced the anti-war viewpoint of the “New Left.” For the sake of balance, it might therefore be useful to consult some of the less polemical, “revisionist” studies on that conflict, including Phillip Davidson’s “Vietnam at War”

(1988), Lewis Sorley’s “A Better War” (1999), and Mark Moyar’s “Triumph Forsaken” (2006), each of which built upon Guenter Lewy’s pathbreaking “America in Vietnam” (1978).

• On the topic of arms control, there is Patrick Glynn’s exquisitely contemptuous “Closing Pandora’s Box” (1992).

As Glynn notes, despite an almost perfect record of failure, from the Washington and London naval agreements of the interwar years up through the nuclear arms treaties (SALT I and II) with the Soviet Union, a gospel-like belief in arms control continues to hold in certain quarters; indeed, almost every item in his indictment, including the naiveté and wishful thinking and granting of needless concessions out of a self-imposed position of weakness would be amply displayed in the diplomacy that led to the Obama administration nuclear agreement with Iran.

As so often, when you are desperate for an agreement for the sake of agreement, you get taken to the cleaners.

• On the broader pitfalls of negotiating with “rogue” regimes, there is Michael Rubin’s “Dancing with the Devil” (2015), particularly its section dealing with America’s feckless appeasement of North Korea.

In Rubin’s prophetic words, “Pyongyang’s playbook never changed: First they provoke, then they consent to accept an agreement in exchange for concessions, and finally they violate that agreement, starting the cycle again.”

It is said that Donald Trump doesn’t read, but maybe just this once his handlers could prevail upon him to peruse Rubin before he meets with the round-mound rocket man of Pyongyang.

• Finally, out of respect for their recent passing, the classic works of Richard Pipes and Bernard Lewis, including the former’s “A Concise History of the Russian Revolution” (1996), which nicely distills his broader three-volume study and its provocative thesis that “Red October” wasn’t really a revolution at all but a midnight coup d’état by a tiny band of ruthless ideologues that thereafter imposed themselves for 74 years upon the Russian people.

And for what is peculiarly called “the Islamic world,” just about any of the books of Lewis, but especially “What Went Wrong” (2002), and “The Crisis of Islam” (2004), which persuasively argue that the source of “Muslim rage” (and thus terrorism) is neither Western imperialism nor the existence of the “Zionist entity” but the self-inflicted decay of Islam as a civilization.