What should aspiring politicians read in IR? The readers strike back!!

The reader response to my IR 101 contest was truly overwhelming.  The variety and intensity of the responses is quite impressive, and merits a blog popst on its own. 

To recall the assignment:

[I]f a newly-minted U.S. Senator did want to seriously bone up on foreign affairs, what books should he or she read?….

[I]f you’re educating a politician from scratch, you need something relatively pithy, accessible, relevant to current events, and America-centric….

I therefore call upon the readers of this blog to proffer up their suggestions — if you had to pick three books for an ambitious U.S. politician to read in order to bone up on foreign affairs, what would they be? 

Before I get to the reader suggestions, I heartily encourage the rich variety of responses in the foreign policy blogosphere:  see Stephanie Carvin, Brian Rathbun, Andrew Exum, Rob Farley, Justin Logan, Will Winecoff, Phil Arena, and Steve Saideman, for starters.   

A few of them challenge some of the underlying premises of my question.  Arena asks, in essence, "does it really matter?"  If IR scholars believe that structural, impersonal factors are what guide American foreign policy, then a reading list won’t make a difference.  Rathbun implicitly endorses this point in observing that us IR folk basically write books saying that the first image of leadership doesn’t matter all that much. 

There is an theoretical and empirical response to this.  The theoretical response is that even the most ardent structuralist would acknowledge that there is a stochastic element to any political model — indeed, in most tests, random chance explains more than the non-random model.  What books leaders read falls into the stochastic category (we never know ex ante), so any attempt to influence on that factor is not trivial.

The empirical is that we have at least anecdotal evidence that books occasionally do affect the thinking of American foreign policy decisionmakers.  Bill Clinton was famously reluctant to intervene in Bosnia after reading Robert Kaplan’s Balkan Ghosts.  I’d argue that Kenneth Pollack’s  The Threatening Storm was the most important book-length contribution to the 2003 debate about going to war in Iraq — because it provided intellectual cover for Democrats supporting the Bush administration.  Bush himself touted Natan Sharansky’s The Case for Democracy as a book that influenced his thinking on the Middle East. 

Exum also asks a fair quesion — why books? 

A lot of the reading material I digest comes from blogs as well as newspaper and magazine articles. A lot of it comes from scholarly and policy journals as well…. I generally find articles in International Security, Survival, Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy, though, to be both accessible and thought-provoking. And asking a senator to read a few articles in Foreign Affairs each month en route back to his or her constituency actually sounds like a reasonable request. So I am not sure I would actually recommend a junior senator read a book so much as I would ask him or her to read a few carefully selected articles or scan through ForeignPolicy.com every other day.

This is a fair point — if we could get our junior Senator/aspiring presidential candidate to read up on foreign affairs every day.  I’m pessimistic about that happening, however, for the reasons I gave in the prevous post. 

Also, here’s the thing — oddly enough, politicians want to tell everyone how many Very Important Books they read.  Consider Condoleezza Rice’s New York Times Magazine interview, in which she stresses that, "[George W. Bush] read five books for every one I read. He read something like 12 biographies of Lincoln in office."  Bush is not someone who seemed worried that he wasn’t egghead-y enough, and yet even he and his acolytes feel compelled to point out what’s on his bookshelf.  We might living in a Twitter age, but books still possess some totemic value of intellectual gravitas. 

Picayune disagreements aside, I do encourage readers to click through each of the above links to see their book recommendations. 

Below, however, is the aggregate list produced by my readers.  At least three different commenters recommended or endorsed all thrirteen books below.  [And what do you think of the list?–ed.  I’m a big fan of many of these books, I confess I haven’t read several of them, and there are a few that I think are mind-boggingly stupid.  I suspect that would be the same response of any other IR scholar to the list below — though which ones are "mid-boggingly stupid" would be a furious subject for debate.] 

In alphabetical order:

 THE TOP THIRTEEN FOREIGN AFFAIRS BOOKS EVERY ASPIRING POLITICIAN SHOULD READ

(As selected by readers of Foreign Policy)

Andrew Bacevich, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War

Steve Coll, Ghost Wars   

Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

Robert D. Kaplan, Monsoon  

Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers

Parag Khanna, How to Run the World

Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy

Walter Russell Mead, Special Providence

John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics

Joseph Nye, The Future of Power

Ahmed Rashid, Descent Into Chaos

Stephen Walt, Taming American Power

Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World

Your humble blogger will be posting his book selections on Monday. 

Let the fight/snark in the comment thread…. begin!!