Here are 100 books that Special Providence fans have personally recommended if you like
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Foreign policy has been my passion since I was a child. My father was a civil servant and growing up in India, I always wanted to follow in his footsteps but instead of working on domestic issues, I wanted to work on international affairs. History was another passion of mine and I wanted to combine the two of them in such a way that I studied the past in order to explain the present and help the future. This passion led me to enroll in a PhD program in the United States and then work at a think tank. I have written three books, two of which focus exclusively on foreign policy. I hope you enjoy reading the books I have listed and read my book.
This classic, from the 1980s, is a must-read for history buffs and those interested in international affairs. The author cites examples from ancient Greece to the 1970s, to demonstrate how empires and nations often make decisions that are detrimental to their long-term interests. I love this book for its writing style which is captivating, for the breath of its examples which range from ancient times to modern-day and for the recommendations this book gives not just for political leaders but those in business and other walks of life.
Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Barbara W. Tuchman, author of the World War I masterpiece The Guns of August, grapples with her boldest subject: the pervasive presence, through the ages, of failure, mismanagement, and delusion in government.
Drawing on a comprehensive array of examples, from Montezuma’s senseless surrender of his empire in 1520 to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, Barbara W. Tuchman defines folly as the pursuit by government of policies contrary to their own interests, despite the availability of feasible alternatives. In brilliant detail, Tuchman illuminates four decisive turning points in history that illustrate the very heights of folly: the Trojan…
Foreign policy has been my passion since I was a child. My father was a civil servant and growing up in India, I always wanted to follow in his footsteps but instead of working on domestic issues, I wanted to work on international affairs. History was another passion of mine and I wanted to combine the two of them in such a way that I studied the past in order to explain the present and help the future. This passion led me to enroll in a PhD program in the United States and then work at a think tank. I have written three books, two of which focus exclusively on foreign policy. I hope you enjoy reading the books I have listed and read my book.
The book takes the reader through seven decades of a tumultuous history of relations between the two countries. I love this book because it is an easy and fun read, the writing style is light, and there are lots of anecdotes. As a student of history and international relations, the book appealed to me at multiple levels. The book will appeal to practitioners, academics, and the average reader.
The relationship between America and Pakistan is based on mutual incomprehension and always has been. Pakistan,to American eyes,has gone from being a quirky irrelevance, to a stabilizing friend, to an essential military ally, to a seedbed of terror. America,to Pakistani eyes,has been a guarantee of security, a coldly distant scold, an enthusiastic military enabler, and is now a threat to national security and a source of humiliation.The countries are not merely at odds. Each believes it can play the other,with sometimes absurd, sometimes tragic, results. The conventional narrative about the war in Afghanistan, for instance, has revolved around the Soviet…
Foreign policy has been my passion since I was a child. My father was a civil servant and growing up in India, I always wanted to follow in his footsteps but instead of working on domestic issues, I wanted to work on international affairs. History was another passion of mine and I wanted to combine the two of them in such a way that I studied the past in order to explain the present and help the future. This passion led me to enroll in a PhD program in the United States and then work at a think tank. I have written three books, two of which focus exclusively on foreign policy. I hope you enjoy reading the books I have listed and read my book.
This is a book by a former top diplomat of India that lays out in a clear and concise fashion India’s priorities, its interests, and its concerns. Real life examples are cited to explain the choices India made, or didn’t make, and the reasons behind those decisions. As someone who is passionate about foreign policy, and who loves archival research, I loved reading a book written by a practitioner in which he tells you about the challenges they face and the real-life choices they have to make.
A look behind the scenes of some of India's most critical foreign policy decisions by the country's former foreign secretary and national security adviser.
Every country must make choices about foreign policy and national security. Sometimes those choices turn out to have been the correct ones, other times not. In this insider's account, Shivshankar Menon describes some of the most crucial decisions India has faced during his long career in government - and how key personalities often had to make choices based on incomplete information under the pressure of fast-moving events.
Menon either participated directly, or was associated with, all…
It didn’t begin with Donald Trump. When the Republican Party lost five straight presidential elections during the 1930s and 1940s, three things happened: (1) Republicans came to believe that presidential elections are rigged; (2) Conspiracy theories arose and were believed; and (3) The presidency was elevated to cult-like status.
Foreign policy has been my passion since I was a child. My father was a civil servant and growing up in India, I always wanted to follow in his footsteps but instead of working on domestic issues, I wanted to work on international affairs. History was another passion of mine and I wanted to combine the two of them in such a way that I studied the past in order to explain the present and help the future. This passion led me to enroll in a PhD program in the United States and then work at a think tank. I have written three books, two of which focus exclusively on foreign policy. I hope you enjoy reading the books I have listed and read my book.
This classic, written by the authors of the 11-volume The Story of Civilization, is a must-read for those who want to understand everything, from history to economics, from foreign policy to politics. I have read and re-read this book multiple times as it is my go-to book for when I rethink issues and problems. This short collection of essays offers simple yet critical lessons on geography, biology, economics, religion, and government all of which help explain the foreign policies of empires and states.
In this illuminating and thoughtful book, Will and Ariel Durant have succeeded in distilling for the reader the accumulated store of knowledge and experience from their five decades of work on the eleven monumental volumes of The Story of Civilization. The result is a survey of human history, full of dazzling insights into the nature of human experience, the evolution of civilization, and the culture of man. With the completion of their life's work, they look back and ask what history has to say about the nature, the conduct and the prospects of man, seeking in the great lives, the…
I became an anthropologist by accident. I never liked school, but I loved to travel, and I got a PhD so that I could rail against development and the perils of cross-cultural misunderstanding in print. Naively, I thought maybe someone would listen. Luckily for me, I discovered I also liked teaching. I first taught at UCLA and then at the Naval Postgraduate School, where I had mostly mid-career U.S. and international special operations officers in class. More serendipity: my two decades at the Naval Postgraduate School bracketed the Global War on Terror, which unfortunately proved to be a witch’s brew of cross-cultural misunderstanding.
Yes, this is the same Graham Hancock who now writes contrarian archeological tomes. I conducted some of my PhD fieldwork in the same area of Somalia that he visited as a reporter, and I was there not long after he was in the 1980s.
This was the first book I came across that explained why almost every development project I’d encountered when traveling around Africa seemed to be such a waste, or worse. Next to no one at the time was reporting on the corruption generated by ‘development’ or the extent to which aid was an industry. Hancock nailed it.
Each year some sixty billion dollars are spent on foreign aid throughout the world. Whether in donations to charities such as Save the Children, Oxfam, CARE, UNICEF, or the Red Cross, in the form of enormous loans from the World Bank, or as direct payments from one government to another, the money is earmarked for the needy, for relief in natural disasters—floods or famines, earthquakes, or droughts—and for assistance in the development of nations.
The magnitude of generosity from the world’s wealthy nations suggests the possibility of easing, if not eliminating, hunger, misery, and poverty; in truth, however, only a…
I became an anthropologist by accident. I never liked school, but I loved to travel, and I got a PhD so that I could rail against development and the perils of cross-cultural misunderstanding in print. Naively, I thought maybe someone would listen. Luckily for me, I discovered I also liked teaching. I first taught at UCLA and then at the Naval Postgraduate School, where I had mostly mid-career U.S. and international special operations officers in class. More serendipity: my two decades at the Naval Postgraduate School bracketed the Global War on Terror, which unfortunately proved to be a witch’s brew of cross-cultural misunderstanding.
This book describes two enduring American conceits so brilliantly that I assigned this book in classes whenever I could. The first conceit is ‘enabling ignorance.’ Could there be a more apt description for how we undermined our own efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq? I love this term. His second concept I love is solipsism.
Baritz uses this to refer to our misplaced notion that inside every non-Westerner is an American just waiting to be liberated by us. I remember a very reserved Pakistani Air Force officer who laughed uncontrollably in class as soon as I suggested that if only we unzipped him, his inner American would burst forth. His mirth perfectly underscored Baritz’s point.
In a probing look at the myths of American culture that led us into the Vietnam quagmire, Loren Baritz exposes our national illusions: the conviction of our moral supremacy, our assumption that Americans are more idealistic than other people, and our faith in a technology that supposedly makes us invincible. He also reveals how Vietnam changed American culture today, from the successes and failures of the Washington bureaucracy to the destruction of the traditional military code of honor.
Benghazi: A New History is a look back at the enigmatic 2012 attack on the US mission in Benghazi, Libya, its long-tail causes, and devastating (and largely unexamined) consequences for US domestic politics and foreign policy. It contains information not found elsewhere, and is backed up by 40 pages of…
I became an anthropologist by accident. I never liked school, but I loved to travel, and I got a PhD so that I could rail against development and the perils of cross-cultural misunderstanding in print. Naively, I thought maybe someone would listen. Luckily for me, I discovered I also liked teaching. I first taught at UCLA and then at the Naval Postgraduate School, where I had mostly mid-career U.S. and international special operations officers in class. More serendipity: my two decades at the Naval Postgraduate School bracketed the Global War on Terror, which unfortunately proved to be a witch’s brew of cross-cultural misunderstanding.
This book boasts the world’s greatest title. With just four words, McDougall’s title describes our trajectory as a country. We started as a beacon and example to others, only to (d)evolve into trying to get others to become more like us. In one sense, our impulse to convert others is laudable; it’s admirable that we want everyone to benefit from capitalism and democracy as much as we do.
But what happens when our values, beliefs, and practices don’t suit others? McDougall does an unparalleled job of revealing the costs to them and to us.
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Walter McDougall reinterprets the traditions that have shaped U.S. foreign policy from 1776 to the present in "an entertaining and iconoclastic fashion" (Philadelphia Inquirer).
In a concise analysis, McDougall divides American diplomatic history into two stages, which he calls "Old Testament" and "New Testament" phases.
The "Old Testament" phase, which ran from the Revolution to the 1890s, centered on protecting and perfecting America within. The "New Testament" phase, from the Spanish-American War to the present, is more interventionist, featuring competing ideals of containment, expansion, and meliorism. Within the "testament" phases, McDougall goes on to further categorize eight…
I became an anthropologist by accident. I never liked school, but I loved to travel, and I got a PhD so that I could rail against development and the perils of cross-cultural misunderstanding in print. Naively, I thought maybe someone would listen. Luckily for me, I discovered I also liked teaching. I first taught at UCLA and then at the Naval Postgraduate School, where I had mostly mid-career U.S. and international special operations officers in class. More serendipity: my two decades at the Naval Postgraduate School bracketed the Global War on Terror, which unfortunately proved to be a witch’s brew of cross-cultural misunderstanding.
This one sticks the most of all the books I’ve read on U.S./Afghan relations. Whenever I visited former students serving in Afghanistan, I used to joke that I was there to listen to them vent and vent they did. Even those who most wanted to do right by Afghans felt perpetually thwarted by their higher-ups.
One reason I couldn’t get enough of Partlow’s account is that no matter how frustrated American and Coalition servicemembers were, they had nothing on Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan’s leader. Senior leaders on our side routinely pressured Karzai, persistently trying to get him to do very un-Afghan things. Yet, as Partlow reveals, in large part thanks to Washington’s enabling ignorance, Karzai often resisted quite successfully.
The key to understanding the calamitous Afghan war is the complex, ultimately failed relationship between the powerful, duplicitous Karzai family and the United States, brilliantly portrayed here by the formerKabul bureau chief for The Washington Post.
The United States went to Afghanistan on a simple mission: avenge the September 11 attacks and drive the Taliban from power. This took less than two months. Over the course of the next decade, the ensuing fight for power and money—supplied to one of the poorest nations on earth, in ever-greater amounts—left the region even more dangerous than before the first troops arrived.
I started my career in Washington D.C., where my first job involved conducting strategy meetings with senior civilian and military policy officials regarding potential military conflicts around the world. At the time I was struck by the extent to which senior policymakers worried about whether they would be able to garner and sustain public support for U.S. overseas military operations. This concern often dominated our meetings. It ultimately set me on my course as a scholar, where much of my work has focused on trying to understand what average people think about the world, why they believe what they do, and whether and how their attitudes affect leaders’ decision-making in crisis situations.
The mass media arguably play a critical intervening role between public opinion and foreign policy. Yet I’ve found that it is muchharder to explain how the media, or public opinion, exert such influence than it is to determine what the public thinks or why. This book offers one of the most compelling explanations I’ve found for when and how the media can influence foreign policy, by serving as the intermediary between voters and their leaders. Importantly, Entman shows how media framing of events can influence public support for presidential foreign policy initiatives. It offers a comprehensive and persuasive delineation of the interplay between the media, the public, and political leaders, which I teach every year to my students.
To succeed in foreign policy, U.S. presidents have to sell their versions or framings of political events to the news media and to the public. But since the end of the Cold War, journalists have increasingly resisted presidential views, even offering their own spin on events. What, then, determines whether the media will accept or reject the White House perspective? And what consequences does this new media environment have for policymaking and public opinion?
To answer these questions, Robert M. Entman develops a powerful new model of how media framing works-a model that allows him to explain why the media…
I started my career in Washington D.C., where my first job involved conducting strategy meetings with senior civilian and military policy officials regarding potential military conflicts around the world. At the time I was struck by the extent to which senior policymakers worried about whether they would be able to garner and sustain public support for U.S. overseas military operations. This concern often dominated our meetings. It ultimately set me on my course as a scholar, where much of my work has focused on trying to understand what average people think about the world, why they believe what they do, and whether and how their attitudes affect leaders’ decision-making in crisis situations.
This is my go-to reference book about American public opinion on all things foreign policy. Holsti is one of the most important public opinion scholars of the 20th Century and arguably this is his most important book. I assign it in all of my undergraduate classes on the subject. He explains not only whatthe public believes about foreign policy—through case studies ranging from international trade to all major U.S. military conflicts in the post-World War II era—but also does a brilliant job of synthesizing decades of research on human information processing, learning, and ideological reasoning to explain in straightforward terms whypeople react to events the way they do. He also explains the (substantial) differences between the foreign policy views of elites and average citizens
One of the central issues in democratic theory is the proper role of public opinion in the conduct of international affairs. The capacity of the public to make informed judgments about these complex issues which are often far removed from their experience has been questioned. In addition, the impact of public opinion on foreign policy-making has been debated. In Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy Ole Holsti addresses these crucial issues using extensive data on public attitudes and preferences on international affairs. Holsti concludes that although the American public is not well informed about many aspects of foreign affairs, its…
