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Current Books Blog. Kevin Drum, to the rescue, writes a review round up of several current foreign policy books whose authors I have promised to try to write about, but have not yet had a chance. Kevin:
More at the link.Nixonland, by Rick Perlstein. This is a followup to Rick's phenomenal first book, Before the Storm, which chronicled Barry Goldwater's presidential run in 1964 and the birth of movement conservatism.
Nixonland is, for obvious reasons, a darker book than Before the Storm, and one that's narrated with less sympathy toward its subject, but it's really a must-read for anyone who wants to understand what happened to both Democrats and Republicans during the 60s and how our country managed to change so dramatically in the space of less than a decade. Before I read Nixonland, I think I'd pretty much blotted out my memory of the 1972 Democratic convention (with good reason), but now it's fresh in my mind and scaring the hell out of me. Thanks, Rick. I hope 2008 isn't a repeat. Nixonland's official release date is next Tuesday. [...]
U.S. vs. Them, by Peter Scoblic. This is another book in the same vein as the first two: a historical look at conservatism and its intersection with liberalism over the past half century. Where Teles focuses on law and Perlstein focuses on domestic turmoil, Scoblic focuses on foreign affairs.
Nickel summary: post-9/11 neoconservatives aren't really hawking anything all that new. American conservatives since World War II have always been militaristic and nationalistic, they've always hated the idea of wasting ink on treaties with other countries, and they've always been obsessed with total military superiority. For them, international affairs is a decidedly zero sum game, and George Bush is just the apotheosis of this belief system, not something truly new and different. The book's website is here; you can read the introduction here.
Heads in the Sand, by Matt Yglesias. Matt has taken on a pretty tough task in this book: trying to convince us that good 'ol liberal internationalism is the best foreign policy bet we have to deal with global terrorism and other threats over the next few decades.
This is a decidedly unsexy position to take (there's a funny section toward the end where he talks about desperate liberal efforts to rebadge liberal internationalism just to make it sound newer and more exciting than it is), but it has the virtue of being essentially correct. The final chapter, "In with the Old," is as good a brief for liberal internationalism as I've read recently. ...