2018 Best Foreign Affairs Books

landarcht: Despite his efforts as both general and president to defend the newly freed slaves of the American South after the Civil War, Ulysses S. Grant lies almost forgotten in his grave. Chernow has undertaken to remedy this historical injustice. The result is a sympathetic but clear-eyed biography that will be the starting point for all future studies of this enigmatic man.

landarcht: Levitsky and Ziblatt argue in this important study that democracies are dying in slower and more subtle ways than they did in the past—and Western democracies, including the United States, are not immune.

landarcht: Gessen’s book is both a sweeping attempt to capture the last 40 years of Russian history and a personal reckoning. Gessen follows the lives of seven Russians and, in the process, recounts a battle of ideas about Russia and its future.

landarcht: In an earlier book, Bloodlands, Snyder told the story of Nazi and Soviet genocidal violence. In this new work, Snyder makes an eloquent and frightening argument that fascism and authoritarianism have returned in new and subtler guises.

landarcht: This brilliantly understated novel traces with uncommon delicacy and depth the interior transformation of a retired German classicist after he stumbles upon a group of unauthorized African migrants encamped in Berlin.

landarcht: This is the second volume of Kotkin’s massive biographical trilogy. In exquisite detail, it covers the critical years of Stalinism, from the decision to storm the country by collectivizing agriculture and imposing forced-draft industrialization, through the purges of the Great Terror, to the outbreak of World War II.

landarcht: This candid and chilling memoir describes how Ellsberg came to recognize that the U.S. military’s approach to preparing for nuclear war was terrifyingly casual. If war came, the United States was ready to obliterate not only the Soviet Union but also China—a plan that would have immediately produced 275 million fatalities and then led to another 50 million, owing to the effects of radiation.

landarcht: During World War II, almost 2,000 young Jewish men who had escaped to the United States from Austria and Nazi Germany joined the U.S. military, where their detailed knowledge of German military tactics and culture played a vital role as U.S. forces fought to liberate Europe. Henderson tells this tale skillfully, through the stories of eight young men.

landarcht: Many books have charted the use and misuse of social media, but this is one of the most comprehensive and up to date. Singer and Brooking explain not only how this new information environment developed but also why our attitudes and behaviors are so susceptible to manipulation.

landarcht: In his well-crafted book, Steil argues that although the Marshall Plan was a strategic success, it also contributed mightily to the evolving Cold War. He shows that key U.S. policymakers understood that the initiative would trigger a Soviet clampdown in Eastern Europe and solidify the division of the continent—and went ahead with it anyway.

landarcht: In this timely book, Goodhart identifies two basic groups in British society: “anywheres” and “somewheres” and shows how the cosmopolitan elite has stacked the educational, economic, and cultural deck against the latter group.

landarcht: In this lively and penetrating book, Rosenblatt offers an intellectual history of liberalism, from its roots in Roman notions of civic duty and public morality down to its modern incarnations.

landarcht: Was the U.S. Constitution a pro-slavery document, or did it, as President Abraham Lincoln argued, deny slavery a place in national law and point toward abolition? Wilentz’s qualified endorsement of Lincoln’s interpretation is both bracing and brave.

landarcht: The future, Maçães argues in this startlingly original assessment, will be dominated by an emerging Eurasian “supercontinent,” shaped by China’s, Russia’s, and the EU’s competing visions.

landarcht: Zito and Todd use a mixture of journalistic interviews and demographic analysis to understand why so many American swing state voters supported Donald Trump in 2016, challenging the idea that Trump voters were xenophobes and racists.

landarcht: In 1985, McAdams notes, 38 percent of the world’s population lived under communist regimes, and some 107 communist parties operated worldwide, with a total membership of 82 million people. McAdams tells the story of how this movement grew out of the crucible of nineteenth-century Europe, flourished in the Soviet Union, and then spread to China, Cuba, and beyond.

landarcht: Sivaram’s enlightening and candid book describes both the enormous progress that has already been made in exploiting solar energy and the major obstacles to further progress.

landarcht: In this book, the best history of the recent eurozone crisis yet to appear, Mody argues that the euro is dysfunctional “because it defies the principles of economics.”

landarcht: The 2013 Ebola outbreak in West Africa killed at least 11,000 people, mostly in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. This excellent book examines the global response to the epidemic and show how woefully unprepared the international community was for the crisis.

landarcht: In this one-of-a-kind book, Ahmad offers a simple and compelling hypothesis regarding the relationship between business elites and jihadists in Afghanistan and Somalia: anarchy is bad for business, so traders embrace Islam in order to create a black-market economy based on religious trust.

landarcht: A productive partnership between Brenner, a veteran Cuba expert, and Eisner, an accomplished journalist, has resulted in an eminently accessible, engaging journey through five centuries of Cuba’s tortured yet hopeful history.

landarcht: This penetrating account of the Singapore model explains why the model works—and why it is not transferable to other countries.

landarcht: Frampton exhaustively chronicles the history of the Muslim Brotherhood from its founding in 1928 to the Arab Spring of 2011.

landarcht: The contributors to this engrossing book reveal the ancient Andeans’ culinary habits, artistic practices, and social organization at what Dillehay labels “one of the most complex prepottery coastal sites” ever discovered.