Foreign Policy and International Hot Topics Recommended readings in conjunction with the 2018 Great Decisions Free Community Discussion Series on U.S. Foreign Policy.
Adult Non-Fiction Title
Author
Call Number
The End of American World Order
Acharya, Amitav
327.73 ACH
The age of Western hegemony is over. Whether or not America itself is declining, the post-war liberal world order underpinned by U.S. military, economic and ideological primacy and supported by global institutions serving its power and purpose, is coming to an end. But what will take its place? In this timely and provocative book, Acharya offers an incisive answer to this fundamental question. While the U.S. will remain a major force in world affairs, he argues that it has lost the ability to shape world order after its own interests and image. As a result, the U.S. will be one of a number of anchors shaping a new world order. Don’t Wait for the Next War: A Strategy for Clark, Wesley 355.033573 CLA American Growth and Global Leadership Can America have a real national strategy and move forward together without the focus of war? In the twentieth century, America came together to become the "Arsenal of Democracy," and emerged from World War II as the greatest power in the world. We shaped a global civilization in our own values, first with international institutions and our allies, then triumphing over our long-term adversary, the Soviet Union to emerge as the world's lone superpower. But in losing our adversary, America's leadership has founded. We have not replaced our post-World War II strategic vision with something appropriate for a postwar role. Terrorism, cybersecurity, financial system vulnerabilities, the rise of China, and accelerating climate change constitute a new class of national security challenges-and meeting these will require America to revisit hallowed mythologies and concert domestic and foreign policies in a way which has never before been achieved. Governing Global Health: Who Runs the World and Why?
Clinton, Chelsea & Sridhar, Devi 362.1 CLI
The past few decades have seen a massive increase in the number of international organizations focusing on global health. One of the more important recent trends in global health governance, though, has been the rise of public-private partnerships (PPPs) where private non-governmental organizations, for-profit enterprises, and various other social entrepreneurs work hand-in-hand with governments to combat specific maladies. A primary driver for this development is the widespread belief that by joining together, PPPs will attack health problems and fund shared efforts more effectively than other systems. But what do we actually know about the accountability and effectiveness of PPPs? An even-handed and thorough empirical analysis of one of the most pressing topics in world affairs, Governing Global Health will reshape our understanding of how organizations can more effectively prevent the spread of communicable diseases reduce pervasive chronic health problems like malnutrition.
Who Lost Russia? How the World Entered a Conradi, Peter 327.47 CON New Cold War When the Soviet Union collapsed on December 26, 1991, it looked like the start of a remarkable new era of peace and co-operation. Some even dared to declare the end of history, assuming all countries would converge on enlightenment values and liberal democracy. Nothing could be further from the truth. Russia emerged from the 1990s battered and humiliated. Goaded on by a triumphalist West, a new Russia has emerged, with a large arsenal of upgraded weapons, conventional and nuclear, determined to reassert its national interests in the near abroad. In this provocative new work, Conradi argues that we have consistently failed to understand Russia and its motives and, in doing so, have made a powerful enemy. Everything Under the Heavens: Empire, Tribute, French, Howard 327.51 FRE and the Future of Chinese Power For many years after its reform and opening in 1978, China maintained an attitude of false modesty about its ambitions. That role, reports French, has been set aside. China has asserted its place among the global heavyweights, revealing its plans for pan-Asian dominance by building its navy, increasing territorial claims to areas like the South China Sea, and diplomatically bullying smaller players. Underlying this attitude is a strain of thinking that casts China's present-day actions in decidedly historical terms, as the path to restoring the dynastic glory of the past. If we understand how that historical identity relates to current actions, in ways ideological, philosophical, and even legal, we can learn to forecast just what kind of global power China stands to become. Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in Hansen, Suzy 070.92 HAN a Post-American World In the wake of the September 11 attacks and the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Suzy Hansen, who grew up in an insular conservative town in New Jersey, was enjoying early success as a journalist for a high-profile New York newspaper. Increasingly, though, the disconnect between the chaos of world events and the response at home took on pressing urgency for her. Seeking to understand the Muslim world that had been reduced to scaremongering headlines, she moved to Istanbul. Over the course of her many years of living in Turkey and traveling in Greece, Egypt, Afghanistan, and Iran, she learned a great deal about these countries and their cultures and histories and politics. But the greatest, most unsettling surprise would be what she learned about her own country―and herself, an American abroad in the era of American decline. The World America Made
Kagan, Robert
327.73 KAG
In these incisive and engaging pages, Kagan responds to those who anticipate—or even long for—a postAmerican world order by showing what a decline in America’s influence would truly mean for the United States and the rest of the world, as the vital institutions, economies, and ideals currently supported by American power wane or disappear. As Kagan notes, it has happened before: one need only to consider the consequences of the breakdown of the Roman Empire and the collapse of the European order in World War I. This book is a powerful warning that America need not and dare not decline by committing preemptive superpower suicide. The Next Pandemic: On the Front Lines Against Khan, Ali & Patrick, William 614.4 KHA Humankind’s Gravest Dangers Throughout history, humankind's biggest killers have been infectious diseases. In his long career as a public health first responder, Khan has found that rogue microbes will always be a problem, but outbreaks are often caused by people. We make mistakes, politicize emergencies, and, too often, fail to imagine the consequences of our actions. The Next Pandemic is a firsthand account of disasters like anthrax, bird flu, and others—and how we could do more to prevent their return. It is both a gripping story of our brushes with fate and an urgent lesson on how we can keep ourselves safe from the inevitable next pandemic.
The Darkening Web: The War for Cyberspace
Klimburg, Alexander
327.0285 KLI
Not only have hacking and cyber operations fundamentally changed the nature of political conflict—ensnaring states in a struggle to maintain a precarious peace that could rapidly collapse into all-out war—but the rise of covert influencing and information warfare has enabled these same global powers to create and disseminate their own distorted versions of reality in which anything is possible. At stake are not only our personal data or the electrical grid, but the Internet as we know it today—and with it the very existence of open and democratic societies. Putin: His Downfall and Russia’s Coming Crash
Lourie, Richard
947.086 LOU
An electrifying and timely book that explores Putin's failures and whether Trump's election gives Putin extraordinarily dangerous opportunities in our mad new world. For reasons that are made clear in this book, Putin’s Russia will collapse just as Imperial Russia did in 1917 and as Soviet Russia did in 1991. The only questions are when, how violently, and with how much peril for the world. Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power
Maddow, Rachel
355.0335 MAD
Written with bracing wit and intelligence, Rachel Maddow's Drift argues that we've drifted away from America's original ideals and become a nation weirdly at peace with perpetual war. To understand how we've arrived at such a dangerous place, Maddow takes us from the Vietnam War to today's war in Afghanistan, along the way exploring Reagan's radical presidency, the disturbing rise of executive authority, the gradual outsourcing of our war-making capabilities to private companies, the plummeting percentage of American families whose children fight our constant wars for us, and even the changing fortunes of G.I. Joe. Ultimately, she shows us just how much we stand to lose by allowing the scope of American military power to overpower our political discourse. The Health Gap: The Challenge of the Unequal World
Marmot, Michael
362.1042 MAR
Dramatic differences in health are not a simple matter of rich and poor; poverty alone doesn’t drive ill health, but inequality does. In every country, people at relative social disadvantage suffer health disadvantage and shorter lives. Within countries, the higher the social status of individuals, the better their health. These health inequalities defy the usual explanations. Conventional approaches to improving health have emphasized access to technical solutions and changes in the behavior of individuals, but these methods only go so far. Empowerment is the key to reducing health inequality and thereby improving the health of everyone. Marmot emphasizes that the rate of illness of a society as a whole determines how well it functions; the greater the health inequity, the greater the dysfunction. The Health Gap presents compelling evidence for a radical change in the way we think about health and indeed society, and inspires us to address the societal imbalances in power, money, and resources that work against health equity. Asia’s Reckoning: China, Japan, and the Fate of the McGregor, Richard 327.73051 MCG U.S. Power in the Pacific Century The toxic rivalry between China and Japan, two Asian giants consumed with endless history wars and ruled by entrenched political dynasties, is threatening to upend the peace underwritten by Pax Americana since World War II. Combined with Donald Trump’s disdain for America’s old alliances and China's own regional ambitions, east Asia is entering a new era of instability and conflict. If the United States laid the postwar foundations for modern Asia, now the anchor of the global economy, Asia’s Reckoning reveals how that structure is falling apart.
The Invention of Russia: From Gorbachev’s Freedom Ostrovsky, Arkady 947.086 OST to Putin’s War The breakup of the Soviet Union was a time of optimism around the world, but Russia today is actively involved in subversive information warfare, manipulating the media to destabilize its enemies. How did a country that embraced freedom and market reform 25 years ago end up as an autocratic police state bent once again on confrontation with America? A winner of the Orwell Prize, The Invention of Russia reaches back to the darkest days of the cold war to tell the story of Russia's stealthy and largely unchronicled counter revolution. War in 140 Characters: How Social Media is Reshaping Patrikarakos, David 355.0202 PAT Conflict in the Twenty-First Century War is, more than ever, a clash of narratives--with each state/party fighting to control the spread of information and project their narrative to the outside world. Social media has shattered traditional hierarchies between the state and its citizens, enabling the individual or networks of individuals to influence the direction of conflict to a degree previously thought impossible. War in 140 Characters provides a new narrative for modern warfare, exploring the way social media has transformed the way that we fight, win, and consume wars, and what that means for the world going forward. The Hacked World Order: How Nations Fight, Trade, Segal, Adam 327.1 SEG Maneuver, and Manipulate in the Digital Age The internet today connects roughly 2.7 billion people around the world. The myth of cyberspace as a digital utopia has long been put to rest. Governments are increasingly developing smarter ways of asserting their national authority in cyberspace in an effort to control the flow, organization and ownership of information. Statebacked hacking initiatives can shut down, sabotage trade strategies, steal intellectual property, sow economic chaos, and paralyze whole countries. Diplomats, who used to work behind closed doors of foreign ministries, must now respond with greater speed, as almost instantaneously they can reach, educate, or offend millions with just140 characters. A Hacked World Order exposes how the internet has ushered in a new era of geopolitical maneuvering and reveals the tremendous and terrifying implication on our economic livelihood, security, and personal identity. Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Shah, Sonia 362.1 SHA Ebola and Beyond More than three hundred infectious diseases have emerged or reemerged in new territory during the past fifty years, and 90 percent of epidemiologists expect that one of them will cause a disruptive, deadly pandemic sometime in the next two generations. To reveal how that might happen, Sonia Shah tracks each stage of cholera's dramatic journey from harmless microbe to world-changing pandemic, from its 1817 emergence in the South Asian hinterlands to its rapid dispersal across the nineteenth-century world and its latest beachhead in Haiti. By delving into the convoluted science, strange politics, and checkered history of one of the world's deadliest diseases, Pandemic reveals what the next epidemic might look like-and what we can do to prevent it. Before the First Shots Are Fired: How American Can Win or Zinni, Anthony 327.73009 ZIN Lose Off the Battlefield For the better part of the last half century, the United States has been the World's Police, claiming to defend ideologies, allies, and our national security through brute force. But is military action always the most appropriate response? Drawing on his vast experience, retired four-star General Tony Zinni argues that we have a lot of work to do to make the process of going to war―or not―more clear-eyed and ultimately successful.
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