Bill Clinton was famously reluctant to intervene in Bosnia after reading Robert Kaplan’s Balkan Ghosts. The empirical is that we have at least anecdotal evidence that books occasionally do affect the thinking of American foreign policy decisionmakers. 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 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. There is an theoretical and empirical response to this. 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. 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. politician to read in order to bone up on foreign affairs, what would they be?īefore 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.Ī few of them challenge some of the underlying premises of my question. 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. Senator did want to seriously bone up on foreign affairs, what books should he or she read?….į you’re educating a politician from scratch, you need something relatively pithy, accessible, relevant to current events, and America-centric….
The variety and intensity of the responses is quite impressive, and merits a blog popst on its own.į a newly-minted U.S. The reader response to my IR 101 contest was truly overwhelming.
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