100 books like The Stupidity of War

The best antidote to extremism, in my view, is to reject the old canard that humans are selfish and xenophobic by nature.

Bregman’s optimistic and affirming book dispels this myth with fascinating research and persuasive storytelling. Along the way, he examines deep questions like why we persist in believing the worst about ourselves and one another. Humans are wired for altruism and compassion and the more we understand that, the more difficult it is to persuade us to act against our most basic instincts.

Go to any park or public square in any city in the world and you are likely to see statues of people so venerated because they fought/died in some war. Why do we mythologize war, our species’ most destructive collective behavior?

In this 2002 book, written in the second years of the Global War on Terror, American journalist Chris Hedges gives a chilling explanation that, for me, dovetailed perfectly with my readings of Becker and TMT: “Most of us willingly accept war as long as we can fold it into a belief system that paints the ensuing suffering as necessary for a higher good, for human beings seek not only happiness but also meaning. And tragically war is sometimes the most powerful way in society to achieve meaning.”

This controversial book was a Rorschach Test for the security community.

Some read it as a critique of the United States; others saw it as a call for pacifism; others saw it as an attack on Franklin Roosevelt or Winston Churchill. In fact, it was none of those things and all of them. Baker is a novelist who purchased a newspaper archive from the 1930s and 1940s and simply reprinted some of the stories contained therein. He offers little additional comments or interpretation.

The book is an anecdote to the idea that the Second World War was somehow the “good war.”  Like all others, it was barbarism; unlike all others, it was barbarism on a scale never seen before or since. And like all wars, it was, at its root, the story of common people victimized by their governments.

The current war in Ukraine cannot be understood without reference to the rampant misunderstandings and misperceptions that animate both sides. 

This book is the bible of misperception, and for my money, the greatest book ever written about international politics. In it, Jervis explains how countries rarely understand one another; misperception is the rule in national security, not the exception. And those misperceptions all point in one direction: They make other actors appear more belligerent than they are.

Because of predictable psychological processes, we tend to think that they can’t be trusted....and as a result, cycles of hostility and misperception follow. And finally, war.

If I could get presidents to read one book of political science, this would be it.

Bob Woodward spares no president his unvarnished critique.

I found the most interesting part of the book not about Obama, per se, but the circumstances that led to Senator Hillary Clinton’s appointment as his Secretary of State, despite her known and strong disagreements with him on foreign policy.

In one part, Woodward relates a conversation between Clinton and a senior campaign advisor, in which she expresses deep concern that by accepting the position she might someday be caught between loyalty to the President and a hard place.

Fast forward to the 2012 Benghazi attack, which Republicans used to scuttle her 2016 Presidential bid, and in turn, allowed Donald Trump to dismantle much of Obama’s hoped-for legacy.

Although not technically about the Pearl Harbor attack, Those Angry Days is an excellent companion to understand the mood in America in those months before the attack.  While Grew was focused on avoiding an almost inevitable conflict between Japan and the United States, Olson shows that Americans in general and President Roosevelt in particular were far more focused on whether and how to engage in the ongoing conflict in Europe.

Known critically as the School of Dictators, Gill has written the first in-depth anthropological account of US military training for Latin American officers at the School of the Americas (now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) in Fort Benning, Georgia. She discusses the way that Latin American military officers sent to the school are attracted to the “American way of life,” how the courses enhance officers’ ability to exercise indiscriminate violence, their enduring ties to the global U.S. military mission, and downplay of human rights violations, which School officials attribute to “a few bad apples.” Carefully researched, thoughtfully structured, and exceptionally well-written, Gill shows that foreign training of Latin American military officers plays an important role in U.S. imperialism. 

I like this book because the author’s writing is cogent and clear. It has helped inform my own views about maritime strategy. More importantly, I admire the way the author blends military, economic, and technical insights in addressing the challenges America faces in the South China Sea.

The author, Droste Sadler, successfully tells me that the U.S. is most ill-prepared for the competition we are facing from China. He effectively sounds the alarm that we are at an inflection point, and we need to become more competitive now before it is too late.

Barry Posen is a civilian expert in U.S. defense issues at MIT. This book influenced lots of foreign policy experts who have come around to accept the argument of Restraint that the United States ought to radically reduce its military commitments abroad, notably in the Persian Gulf. The book is a key source for my own because Posen shows why the U.S. military presence there has no real effect on the security of oil supply, threats to which are routinely and wildly exaggerated. Posen believes, therefore, that something like “prestige” or acting like a superpower because it can, better explains that expansive and wasteful military posture. 

Mattern’s book is as much about Roman attitudes and mindset as it is about warfare. 

Even though planning and implementing “strategy” is sometimes seen as a modern thing, clearly the Romans had one, though, as Mattern phrases it, was more akin to our stereotypes of the mafia: Rome wanted respect more than anything, and went to great lengths to ensure it received it. The Romans and their empire had an incredibly long memory, and they didn’t forget slights.

When a people or country dissed the Romans in some way, Rome came after them, even if doing so took decades.