Book Reviews

James Graham Wilson, America’s Cold Warrior: Paul Nitze and National Security from Roosevelt to Reagan (Cornell University Press, 2024) On May 11, 1987, Secretary of State George Shultz celebrated the 40th anniversary of his department’s…

Richard Beck, Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life (Penguin, 2024). Almost a quarter-century after 9/11, the War on Terror no longer dominates U.S. foreign policy and is less central to our politics and culture. While this conflict…

Elizabeth Varon, Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South (Simon & Schuster, 2023) When I recently visited Montgomery, Alabama, I went to see the rows of rusted plinths that together make up the city’s Peace and Justice…

Steve Coll, The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq (New York: Penguin, 2024). Was the Iraq War a product of mutual misperception by U.S. and Iraqi leaders? Since the United States…

Lee Hsi-ming, Taiwan’s Plan for Victory: An Asymmetric Strategy to Use the Small to Control the Large: All of Taiwan Should Understand the Overall Defense Concept (Linking Books, 2022). In 1874, the Japanese Meiji government dispatched a…

The literature on 21st-century naval warfare has been dominated by discussions focused on technology, discussions that consistently have lauded technology, argued for its inevitability, and fretted that China might already have an edge in…

Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerburg’s potential cage match was the talk of the summer, and it was easy to dismiss it as idle threats made by two unathletic billionaires. After reading “Elon Musk,” the new biography by Walter Isaacson, I’m not so…

In the dead of night on January 29, 2018, the Department of the Treasury published a list of senior political figures and oligarchs in Russia on a U.S. government website. With just 11 minutes to spare before a congressional deadline,…

It is widely believed that the world is on the brink of another military revolution. AI is about to transform the character of warfare, as gunpowder, tanks, aircraft, and the atomic bomb have in previous eras. Today, states are actively…

Melvyn Leffler, Confronting Saddam Hussein: George W. Bush and the Invasion of Iraq (Oxford University Press, 2023) Historians have always faced the problem of deciding how much to trust their sources, given that their sources often lie,…