American Foreign Policy

From the Pulitzer Prize—winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb: the story of the entire postwar superpower arms race, climaxing during the Reagan-Gorbachev decade when the United States and the Soviet Union came within scant hours of nuclear war–and then nearly agreed to abolish...

struggling with a recession . . . European nations at risk of defaulting on their loans . . . A possible global financial crisis. It happened before, in the 1970s. Oil Kings is the story of how oil came to dominate U.S. domestic and international affairs. As Richard Nixon fought off Watergate...

A riveting, deeply personal account of history in the making—from the president who inspired us to believe in the power of democracy #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER NAACP IMAGE AWARD NOMINEE NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW AND PEOPLE NAMED ONE...

A New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker Nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction Finalist for the PEN America Literary Award “Excellent . . . A more intimate picture of the dictator’s thinking about...

This riveting inside account combines history and memoir to tell the full story of US-Russia relations from the fall of the Soviet Union to the new rise of the hostile, paranoid Russian president....

Packed with insider information based on interviews, declassified files, and forensic analysis of company reports, The Hacker and the State sets aside fantasies of cyber-annihilation to explore the real geopolitical competition of the digital age....

From renowned foreign policy expert Angela Stent comes a dissection of how Putin created a paranoid and polarized world—and increased Russia's status on the global stage. "Putin's World is the definitive guide to understanding the tangled history of post-Cold War Russia and its place in the...

In The Cold War, Odd Arne Westad offers a new perspective on a century when a superpower rivalry and an ideological war transformed every corner of our globe....

New York Times Bestseller An exploration of the age-old complicity between skywatchers and warfighters, from the best-selling author of Astrophysics for People in a Hurry. In this fascinating foray into the centuries-old relationship between science and military power, acclaimed astrophysicist...

The Cold War dominated international life from the end of World War II to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. But how did the conflict begin? And why, after lasting so long, did the war end so suddenly and unexpectedly? Robert McMahon considers these questions and more....

President George W. Bush describes the critical decisions of his presidency and personal life. Decision Points is the extraordinary memoir of America’s 43rd president. Shattering the conventions of political autobiography, George W. Bush offers a strikingly candid journey through the defining...

Plan of Attack is the definitive account of how and why President George W. Bush, his war council, and allies launched a preemptive attack to topple Saddam Hussein and occupy Iraq. Bob Woodward's latest landmark account of Washington decision making provides an original, authoritative narrative...

From the author of the classic The Wizards of Armageddon and Pulitzer Prize finalist comes the definitive history of American policy on nuclear war—and several presidents’ actions in nuclear crises—from Truman to Trump. Fred Kaplan, hailed by The New York Times as “a rare combination of...

To understand world politics, you need to understand how states think. Are states rational? Much of international relations theory assumes that they are. But many scholars believe that political leaders rarely act rationally....

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR A hugely ambitious, “delightfully readable, genuinely informative” portrait (The New York Times) of the two-centuries-long entwined histories of Iran and America—two powers who were once allies and now adversaries—by an admired historian and...

A fast-paced narrative history of the coups, revolutions, and invasions by which the United States has toppled 14 foreign governments, not always to its own benefit....

Stone and Kuznick construct an often shocking but meticulously documented "people's history" of the American empire that challenges the notion of American exceptionalism....

The #1 New York Times bestseller that charts America’s dangerous drift into a state of perpetual war. "One of my favorite ideas is, never to keep an unnecessary soldier," Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1792. Neither Jefferson nor the other Found­ers could ever have envisioned the modern national...

Riveting, revelatory, and wise, The Cold War tells a story whose lessons it is vitally necessary to understand as America once more faces an implacable ideological enemy....

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction Nominated for the National Book Award for Nonfiction From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ghost Wars and The Achilles Trap, the epic and enthralling story of America's intelligence, military, and diplomatic efforts to...