The most recommended international relations books

Ivan Maisky served as the Soviet Union’s ambassador in London from 1932 to 1943. In his extensive diaries, he chronicled his frequent interactions with Churchill and other British officials. He predicted that 1941 would be “the decisive year of the war,” which proved accurate. But, like his boss Joseph Stalin, he refused to believe at first that Hitler would turn against the Soviet Union, with whom Germany had signed a non-aggression pact. His diary shows how quickly the Kremlin acted as if it had always opposed Hitler’s plans—and made increasingly strident demands for Western aid. The makings of the future Cold War are already evident in this account.

The fairest way to begin to explore the conspiracy McCarthy and his backers feared is to hear it from the Cassandra himself. Joe lays out his case in this thin volume.

In The Peacemaker, William Inboden draws on declassified materials, interviews with high-level government officials, and on Reagan’s personal diary to write the most thorough, fair, and scrupulously researched account of Reagan’s foreign policy and the successful end of the Cold War.

And he does this with such aplomb that his history reads like a novel. I worked in the US government in the 1980s and thought I knew Reagan’s foreign policy well, but I discovered much that was new and couldn’t put the book down.

Like Sebag Montefiore and Mawdsley, Raack was the first diplomatic historian to re-evaluate Stalin’s foreign policy in light of documents which became available after the collapse of the USSR in 1991. He exploded numerous myths about the supposed Soviet interest in “collective security” in the 1930s, showing that this was mere projection on the part of French and British and Czechoslovak statesmen who saw what they wanted to see in Stalin’s foreign policy, which was just as territorially “revisionist” as that of Italy, Germany, and Japan, just as expansionist – but better camouflaged.

Mr. Galeotti makes Russia’s ever-changing military status read like a spy novel. You might think information about drones, tanks, aircraft, and MANPADS is boring. I beg to differ.

Starting with the disarray caused by the breakup of the Soviet Union, Mr. Galeotti tells us who changed things, who failed to, and why. He matches the retooling of the Russian military to war lessons learned in Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea, and Syria.

Mr. Galeotti has intimate knowledge of history, personal connections with individuals in the Russian military, and a brilliant way of putting it all together. He asked a Russian soldier his opinion of a photograph of Putin, who never served in the military, sitting at the controls of a fighter aircraft. The soldier said it was like being married to a virgin; the concept was good, but the experience wasn’t there.

This book is amazing.

When I started to read the news as a kid, I understood right away that oil prices were important. Constant war in the Middle East was somehow linked to the gas my mom used to fill up her minivan. It wasn’t until I read this book in college that I truly knew why energy dominates politics.

Mitchell points out that with the rise of coal mining came the rise of democracy because workers suddenly had the power to shut down the entire national economy by striking at only a few mines. They demanded rights and fair treatment. The transition to oil changed everything because it was easy to transport and difficult for workers to shut down. Mitchell shows that oil isn’t just about convenience. It’s about power. 

Rosenberg, whose knowledge of Israeli and U.S. politics provides a great background for his writing, has produced several series, all of which are excellent. But if you’re new to this author, I recommend reading this book first. His political thrillers are spellbinding, especially since Rosenberg foretold the 9/11 disaster and the killing of Saddam Hussein in his novels. In The Last Jihad, Saddam is hell-bent on attacking the West. On the eve of a treaty signing that may ensure peace for Israel and Palestine, the Israelis discover an Iraqi Scud missile armed with a nuclear warhead. It’s clear that Hussein is planning an attack on major U.S. cities and Tel Aviv, and Israel issues an ultimatum to the USA—take Saddam out or we’ll do it instead. This book is a fascinating tale about events that are as real and as possible as today’s newscasts. 

This book is another example of the way that shifting our gaze to empires instead of states provides a radically different perspective. 

In this book Jason Sharman takes on the Military Revolution Thesis, an approach to state formation in Europe which hives it off from its deeply imperial context and argues that the modern state is the product of a series of ‘rational’ decisions made through war. 

Instead, what Sharman shows is that war making in Early modern Europe was just as external as it was internal and that Europeans had to contend with powers to their east and south that were far more powerful militarily and economically. 

The disciplines of political science and international relations tend to treat the formation of the modern state system as if the rest of the world was incidental, irrelevant, or non-existent. 

This is another entry in a new genre of historical writing that… show more.

A retired career army officer and professor of history who now heads the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, Andrew Bacevich has been writing devastatingly for two decades about the country’s growing military presence in the Middle East since the late 1970s and the waging of its “forever wars” there. America’s War is his magnum opus, a book that lays bare the costs of the military’s mistaken strategic thinking for the United States and for the region.

Waring, a former MP for New Zealand, wrote what I consider the foundational book in feminist political economy. Removing the scales from our eyes in this book, she questions how it is that when an oil tanker spills, that event adds to the GDP of a nation, but when a woman gives birth to a baby, that event adds nothing to the GDP. She was the first to note that the “production boundary” stipulated by the male-created GDP indicator completely invisibilizes—even erases—the enormous contribution of women, simply because it is unpaid and performed for members of the same household. Waring then goes further and asks how this gendered approach to understanding economic success actually destroys our goal of sustainable, functional societies.