The Sino-American contest is driven by clashing geopolitical interests and a stark ideological dispute over whether authoritarianism or democracy will dominate the twenty-first century. But both history and China's current trajectory suggest that this rivalry will reach its moment of maximum danger in the 2020s. The Chinese challenge will most likely prove more manageable than many pessimists currently believe—but during the 2020s, the pace of Sino-American conflict will accelerate, and the prospect of war will be frighteningly real.

You may be surprised to learn that microchips are the new oil—the scarce resource on which the modern world depends. Today, military, economic, and geopolitical power are built on a foundation of computer chips. Virtually everything—from missiles to microwaves—runs on chips, including cars, smartphones, the stock market, even the electric grid. Until recently, America designed and built the fastest chips and maintained its lead as the #1 superpower, but America’s edge is in danger of slipping, undermined by players in Taiwan, Korea, and Europe taking over manufacturing.

Henry Kissinger analyses the lives of six extraordinary leaders—Konrad Adenauer, Charles de Gaulle, Richard Nixon, Anwar Sadat, Lee Kuan Yew, and Margaret Thatcher—through the distinctive strategies of statecraft that he believes they embodied. To each of these studies, Kissinger brings historical perception, public experience and, because he knew each of the subjects and participated in many of the events he describes, personal knowledge.

In The Long Game, Rush Doshi draws from a rich base of Chinese primary sources, including decades worth of party documents, leaked materials, memoirs by party leaders, and a careful analysis of China's conduct to provide a history of China's grand strategy since the end of the Cold War.

The relationship between the US and China, the world’s two superpowers, is peculiarly volatile. Their militaries play a dangerous game of chicken, corporations steal intellectual property, intelligence satellites peer, and AI technicians plot. The capacity for either country to cross a fatal line grows daily. Kevin Rudd, a former Australian prime minister who has studied, lived in, and worked with China for more than forty years, is one of the very few people who can offer real insight into the mindsets of the leadership whose judgment will determine if a war will be fought.

War Transformed provides insights for those involved in the design of military strategy, and the forces that must execute that strategy. Emphasizing the impacts of technology, strategic competition, demography, and climate change, Mick Ryan uses historical and contemporary anecdotes to highlight key challenges faced by nations in a new era of great power rivalry. Just as previous industrial revolutions have advanced societies, the nascent fourth industrial revolution will have a similar impact on how humans fight, compete, and build military power in the twenty-first century.

For generations, everything has been getting faster, better, and cheaper. Finally, we reached the point that almost anything you could ever want could be sent to your home within days - even hours - of when you decided you wanted it. America made that happen, but now America has lost interest in keeping it going.

This book by military strategist Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr., is the definitive take on the race for military dominance in the twenty-first century. It shows how militaries that successfully pursue disruptive innovation can gain a major advantage over their rivals, while those that fail to do so risk exposing their countries to great danger.

Two leading authorities—an acclaimed historian and the outstanding battlefield commander and strategist of our time—collaborate on a landmark examination of war since 1945. Conflict is both a sweeping history of the evolution of warfare up to Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine, and a penetrating analysis of what we must learn from the past—and anticipate in the future—in order to navigate an increasingly perilous world.

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. The issue is crucial for both the study and practice of international politics. John J. Mearsheimer and Sebastian Rosato argue that rational decisions in international politics rest on credible theories about how the world works and emerge from deliberative decision‑making processes.

The United States is entering an era of great-power competition with China and Russia. Such global struggles happen in a geopolitical twilight, between the sunshine of peace and the darkness of war. In this innovative and illuminating book, Hal Brands, a leading historian and former Pentagon adviser, argues that America should look to the history of the Cold War for lessons in how to succeed in great-power rivalry today.

Economic sanctions dominate the landscape of world politics today. First developed in the early twentieth century as a way of exploiting the flows of globalization to defend liberal internationalism, their appeal is that they function as an alternative to war. This view, however, ignores the dark paradox at their core: designed to prevent war, economic sanctions are modeled on devastating techniques of warfare.

Elliot Ackerman left the American military ten years ago, but his time in Afghanistan and Iraq with the Marines and later as a CIA paramilitary officer marked him indelibly. When the Taliban began to close in on Kabul in August 2021 and the Afghan regime began its death spiral, he found himself pulled back into the conflict. Afghan nationals who had worked closely with the American military and intelligence communities for years now faced brutal reprisal and sought frantically to flee the country with their families.

Drawing on new and often startling information from newly opened Soviet, Eastern European, and Chinese archives, this thrilling account explores the strategic dynamics that drove the Cold War, provides illuminating portraits of its major personalities, and offers much fresh insight into its most crucial events. Riveting, revelatory, and wise, it tells a story whose lessons it is vitally necessary to understand as America once more faces an implacable ideological enemy.

Using examples from a wide variety of conflicts, Lawrence Freedman shows that successful military command depends on the ability not only to use armed forces effectively, but also to understand the political context in which they are operating.

The relationship between the US and China, the world’s two superpowers, is peculiarly volatile. Their militaries play a dangerous game of chicken, corporations steal intellectual property, intelligence satellites peer, and AI technicians plot. The capacity for either country to cross a fatal line grows daily. Kevin Rudd, a former Australian prime minister who has studied, lived in, and worked with China for more than forty years, is one of the very few people who can offer real insight into the mindsets of the leadership whose judgment will determine if a war will be fought.

Russia and China are increasingly revisionist in their regions. The Middle East appears to be unraveling. And many Americans question why the United States ought to lead. What will great power competition look like in the decades ahead? What impact will geopolitics have on globalization? And what strategy should the United States pursue to succeed in an increasingly competitive world? In this book, Thomas Wright explains how major powers will compete fiercely even as they try to avoid war with each other.

In 1991, the United States was the only global superpower. It seemed that the 21st century, like the 20th, would belong to America. Then came the stock market bubble, the costly foreign unilateralism of the younger Bush presidency, and the financial catastrophe of 2008. Meanwhile, China was rising and the Middle East was awakening politically. Today it is clear that America is vulnerable - to domestic and international decline and unregulated greed.

Many see China's rise as a threat to US leadership in Asia and beyond. Thomas J. Christensen argues instead that the real challenge lies in dissuading China from regional aggression while eliciting its global cooperation. Drawing on decades of scholarship and experience as a senior diplomat, Christensen offers a deep perspective on China's military and economic capacity. Assessing China's political outlook and strategic goals, Christensen shows how nationalism and the threat of domestic instability influence the party's decisions about regional and global affairs.

In this sweeping and insightful history, Henry Kissinger turns for the first time at book length to a country he has known intimately for decades and whose modern relations with the West he helped shape. On China illuminates the inner workings of Chinese diplomacy during such pivotal events as the initial encounters between China and tight line modern European powers, the formation and breakdown of the Sino-Soviet alliance, the Korean War, and Richard Nixon’s historic trip to Beijing.

Henry Kissinger offers in World Order a deep meditation on the roots of international harmony and global disorder. Drawing on his experience as one of the foremost statesmen of the modern era Kissinger now reveals his analysis of the ultimate challenge for the 21st century: How to build a shared international order in a world of divergent historical perspectives, violent conflict, proliferating technology, and ideological extremism.

Most global citizens are well aware of the explosive growth of the Chinese economy. Indeed, China has famously become the "workshop of the world." Yet, while China watchers have shed much light on the country's internal dynamics - China's politics, its vast social changes, and its economic development - few have focused on how this increasingly powerful nation has become more active and assertive throughout the world.

When historians want to find out about the ideas that motivated American foreign policy in the early years of the twenty-first century, they would do well to read this book. Robert Kagan has formally set out a case for unilateralism on the part of the United States, as opposed to the multilateralism now characteristic of Europe. Kagan believes that the United States can disregard a weak Europe, and have a free hand in pursuing its global interests.

War with China is much more likely than anyone thinks. When Athens went to war with Sparta some 2,500 years ago, the Greek historian Thucydides identified one simple cause: A rising power threatened to displace a ruling one. As the eminent Harvard scholar Graham Allison explains, in the past 500 years, great powers have found themselves in "Thucydides's Trap" 16 times. In 12 of the 16, the results have been catastrophic.

Recent years have brought deeply disturbing developments around the globe. American sentiment seems to be leaning increasingly toward withdrawal in the face of such disarray. In this powerful, urgent essay, Robert Kagan elucidates the reasons why American withdrawal would be the worst possible response, based as it is on a fundamental and dangerous misreading of the world. Like a jungle that keeps growing back after being cut down, the world has always been full of dangerous actors who, left unchecked, possess the desire and ability to make things worse.

The World is designed to provide listeners of any age and experience with the essential background and building blocks they need to make sense of this complicated and interconnected world. It will empower them to manage the flood of daily news. Listeners will become more informed, discerning citizens, better able to arrive at sound, independent judgments. While it is impossible to predict what the next crisis will be or where it will originate, those who listen to The World will have what they need to understand its basics and the principal choices for how to respond.

The Future of War - which covers civil wars to as yet unknown nuclear conflicts, proxy wars (real) to the Cold War (not), fashionably small wars to the War to End All Wars (it didn't) - is filled with insight and fascinating nuggets of military history and culture from one of the most brilliant military and strategic historians of his generation.

Interventions, by Noam Chomsky, is getting new press after the Pentagon banned the book from Guantanamo Bay's prison library. Interventions is Noam Chomsky at his best. Not since his all-time best-selling title, 9/11, published in the Open Media series in 2001, have readers and listeners had a timely, short, affordable Chomsky. Unlike 9/11, Interventions is a writerly work - a series of more than 30 tightly argued essays aimed at various aspects of U.S. power and politics in the post-9/11 world. While critical of U.S. military interventions around the globe, each piece in the book is in itself an intellectual intervention.

Putin's World examines the country's turbulent past, how it has influenced Putin, the Russians' understanding of their position on the global stage and their future ambitions—and their conviction that the West has tried to deny them a seat at the table of great powers since the USSR collapsed.

Historian and geopolitical expert Michael Auslin argues that far from being a cohesive powerhouse, Asia is a fractured region threatened by stagnation and instability. Here he provides a comprehensive account of the economic, military, political, and demographic risks that bedevil half of our world, arguing that Asia, working with the United States, has a unique opportunity to avert catastrophe - but only if it acts boldly.