Chapter 32 — Further Reading

The reading list below is consciously ideologically diverse. Foreign policy is a domain in which any single source — however authoritative — reflects the tradition its author works within. Readers who want to understand the policy debate need to read across traditions. The list begins with foundational works in each tradition, then moves to contemporary analyses of the major issues, and ends with periodicals and institutions to follow continuously.

Foundational works by tradition

Realism / restraint

  • John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (Norton, 2001; updated 2014). The canonical statement of offensive realism. Mearsheimer argues that great powers seek hegemony in their regions and that the structural logic of an anarchic international system produces recurring great-power competition. His more recent work has applied the framework to U.S.-China relations and the Ukraine war.
  • Stephen M. Walt, The Hell of Good Intentions: America's Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018). A critique of the post-Cold War foreign-policy establishment ("the Blob") from a realist perspective. Walt argues for a strategy of offshore balancing — letting regional powers manage their own neighborhoods while the U.S. focuses on preventing a single hostile power from dominating any major region.
  • Stephen Wertheim, Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy (Belknap / Harvard, 2020). A revisionist history of the U.S. shift to global hegemony in 1940–1945. Wertheim co-founded the Quincy Institute; the book is intellectual ground for restraint advocacy.
  • George F. Kennan, American Diplomacy (University of Chicago Press, 1951; expanded edition 1984). Kennan's classic critique of moralism in U.S. foreign policy, by the architect of containment. Still essential.

Liberal internationalism

  • Robert Kagan, The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World (Knopf, 2018). The contemporary statement of liberal-internationalist commitments. Kagan argues that the post-1945 international order is fragile, American-built, and worth defending.
  • G. John Ikenberry, A World Safe for Democracy: Liberal Internationalism and the Crises of Global Order (Yale University Press, 2020). The most rigorous academic defense of the liberal-internationalist tradition; takes seriously the criticisms while defending the core project.
  • Anne-Marie Slaughter, The Idea That Is America: Keeping Faith with Our Values in a Dangerous World (Basic Books, 2007); Slaughter's later work at the New America Foundation continues these themes.

Neoconservatism (and the post-Iraq tradition)

  • Robert Kagan and William Kristol, Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy (Encounter Books, 2000). The pre-9/11 statement of "neo-Reaganite" foreign policy.
  • Charles Krauthammer, "The Unipolar Moment Revisited" The National Interest (Winter 2002–03). The classic statement of unipolar U.S. primacy.
  • For honest reckonings with the post-Iraq legacy: Eliot Cohen's writing on civil-military relations and on the Iraq War's lessons, and Max Boot's The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam (Liveright, 2018), Boot's reconsideration of his earlier positions in light of post-Iraq experience.

Progressive internationalism

  • Ben Rhodes, The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House (Random House, 2018). The deputy national security advisor's account of the Obama-era foreign-policy framework — sympathetic to progressive internationalist commitments while honest about constraints.
  • Bernie Sanders and Matt Duss's various op-eds and floor speeches on foreign policy. Duss, Sanders's foreign-policy advisor, has written extensively in The Nation, The Washington Post, and elsewhere on a progressive-internationalist alternative.

"America First" / nationalist conservatism

  • Robert Lighthizer, No Trade Is Free: Changing Course, Taking on China, and Helping America's Workers (HarperBusiness, 2023). Trump-1's USTR makes the substantive case for the trade-policy turn.
  • Elbridge Colby, The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict (Yale University Press, 2021). Colby's argument for a defense posture focused on denying Chinese hegemony in the Indo-Pacific, with implications for U.S. commitments elsewhere.
  • Sumantra Maitra, "Pivoting the U.S. Away From Europe to a Dormant NATO" Center for Renewing America (2024). The "dormant NATO" proposal in detail.
  • Curt Mills's writing in The American Conservative and Sohrab Ahmari's in Compact magazine.

Libertarian non-interventionism

  • Christopher A. Preble, Peace, War, and Liberty: Understanding U.S. Foreign Policy (Cato Institute, 2019). The Cato foreign-policy team's general framework.
  • Ron Paul, A Foreign Policy of Freedom: Peace, Commerce, and Honest Friendship with All Nations (Foundation for Rational Economics and Education, 2007). The contemporary libertarian non-interventionist statement.

Contemporary issues and analyses

China policy

  • Hal Brands and Michael Beckley, Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China (Norton, 2022). Argues that the highest-risk window for U.S.-China conflict is the present decade.
  • Aaron Friedberg, A Contest for Supremacy: China, America, and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia (Norton, 2011), and his subsequent work. The architect of much of the current bipartisan consensus.
  • For an alternative view: Susan Shirk, Overreach: How China Derailed Its Peaceful Rise (Oxford University Press, 2023). Shirk argues against the "China is uniquely threatening" framing while accepting the need for competition.

Russia and Ukraine

  • Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy, Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin (Brookings Institution Press, 2015, updated 2017). Foundational analysis of Putin's worldview by Hill, who later served as senior director for Europe and Russia on the NSC.
  • John Mearsheimer's various essays and lectures on Ukraine, available in print and on YouTube. Read alongside the response from M.E. Sarotte, Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate (Yale University Press, 2021), which provides a careful history of NATO expansion that is empirically rigorous and challenges some of Mearsheimer's specific claims.

The Middle East

  • Walter Russell Mead, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East 1776 to the Present (Knopf, 2007). Mead's broad account of the historical evolution.
  • Hussein Agha and Robert Malley, "The Ages of Antonio Gramsci and the Long Twilight of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict" The New York Review of Books (multiple essays, 2022–2024).
  • Bret Stephens in The New York Times and Peter Beinart in Jewish Currents offer ideologically opposite serious treatments of U.S.-Israel policy.
  • Thomas Friedman's columns in The New York Times across multiple decades (read with the awareness that Friedman has shifted positions over time).

War powers and constitutional questions

  • Mary L. Dudziak, War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences (Oxford University Press, 2012). The legal-historical framework for understanding "war" as a constitutional category.
  • Senator Tim Kaine and Senator Mike Lee's various joint op-eds and speeches on war-powers reform.

Periodicals and institutions to follow

  • Foreign Affairs (quarterly, Council on Foreign Relations) — the establishment journal; reads across traditions but skews liberal-internationalist.
  • Foreign Policy (Slate Group) — daily; reads across traditions; somewhat to FA's left on average.
  • The American Conservative — paleoconservative / "America First" perspectives; founding home for non-interventionist conservatism.
  • Compact magazine — heterodox right; some "America First" content; some progressive-conservative fusion.
  • War on the Rocks (warontherocks.com) — practitioner-focused defense and foreign policy; pluralistic.
  • The National Interest — realist and conservative; founded by the late Owen Harries and others in the realist tradition.
  • Just Security (Reiss Center on Law and Security, NYU) — legal-policy focus; left-of-center on civil liberties.
  • Lawfare (lawfaremedia.org) — national-security law and policy; pluralistic but center-left in feel.

Institutions to follow

  • Council on Foreign Relations (cfr.org) — the establishment center; backgrounders and policy memos.
  • Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft (quincyinst.org) — restraint focus.
  • Center for a New American Security (cnas.org) — center-left, China and defense focus.
  • American Enterprise Institute (aei.org) — center-right, often hawkish.
  • Cato Institute (cato.org) — libertarian non-interventionism.
  • Center for Strategic and International Studies (csis.org) — establishment, China and defense.
  • Brookings Institution foreign policy program (brookings.edu) — center-left establishment.
  • Hoover Institution (Stanford) — center-right, particularly strong on China and defense.

Primary sources

For citizens who want to read past partisan filtering: - State Department press briefings and policy speeches (state.gov). - Department of Defense strategy documents — the National Defense Strategy is updated each administration. - Treasury / OFAC sanctions lists and program descriptions (home.treasury.gov). - Congressional Research Service reports (crsreports.congress.gov) — nonpartisan analysis prepared for Congress. - GAO reports on foreign-policy and defense topics (gao.gov). - National Intelligence Council assessments (open versions when available). - The Wilson Center (wilsoncenter.org) — area-studies-rich analysis without strong ideological bent.

Read across traditions. The point is not to find the source that confirms what you already believe but to find the strongest version of the arguments you find least congenial. Foreign policy is one of the few domains where the cost of being wrong can be measured in wars; understanding the disagreement is a citizen's responsibility.