Your passport to global affairs

                    NCWA Foreign Affairs Book Club

The NCWA book club meets 

(usually) the first Tuesday of the month

from November to April

via Zoom from 12:00 to 1:30 p.m.

       All members are invited.

      

Bill Korstad, Chair

The 13th year of the NCWA Foreign Affairs Book Club looks at a world in the throes of a quietly disintegrating global order that's been in place for the past three-quarters of a century. American supremacy is giving way to an array of regional powers, many of which are autocratic, and an alliance of these powers threatens our grip on international order. Our book selections this year have reflected that reality. 

Past 2025-2026 Book Club topics:

November 4: ZBIG: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America's Great Power Prophet by Edward Luce

Follow-up after the discussion:  
An interview with Brzezinski by IRIS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ST4DkSqRH8c 
A 2014 interview by Politico: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/11/its-time-for-a-new-opening-to-china-112656/

December 2: The Man Who Would Be King: Mohammed bin Salman by Karen Elliot House, a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter. It is a concise, interview-driven portrait of MBS and his sweeping social/economic reforms and grand mega projects alongside autocratic consolidation and ruthless power plays.

January 6: 2025 National Security Strategy. The recent update to U.S. security strategy is a dramatic departure from the liberal internationalist foreign policy in place the last 80 years. Perhaps it's time for a change. The Book Club will discuss the side of the story that is not being widely told. The new 2025 NSS acknowledges these changes and deems the previous policy outmoded.  

I tried to tell part of it in an article on the new National Security Strategy (The 2025 National Security Strategy vs The Post-War Liberal Order). A second article explains the logic behind the recent expansion of presidential power in Latin America (The Accretion of Presidential Power: Institutional Cycles from George Washington to Donald Trump).

February 3: Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis by Robert D. Kaplan, an urgent exploration of a world in constant crisis, where every regional disaster threatens to become a global conflict, with lessons from history that can stop the spiral. 

March 3: Michael O’Hanlon’s recently released To Dare Mighty Things: U.S. Defense Strategy Since the Revolution. O’Hanlon argues that much, but not all, of the history of U.S. defense over the course of 250 years has been a story of success. Insulated by two oceans and mostly friendly neighbors, but constantly ambitious and more assertive abroad, America has dared mighty things and often achieved them. He spoke to the NCWA membership February 9.

6. April 7:  The highly acclaimed  The Coming Storm: Power, Conflict, and Warnings 

from History by Odd Arne Westad. Foreign Policy magazine called it the "most anticipated book of the year” and "from a renowned Yale historian comes a chilling look at the looming threat of the next Great Power war and the urgent interventions necessary to avoid it in the twenty-first century.” 

Professor Westad, who is from Norway, has held major academic posts at the London School of Economics, Harvard (S.T. Lee Professor of US–Asia Relations), and is now Elihu Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale, teaching in both the History Department and the Jackson School of Global Affairs.

For more information, contact Bill Korstad at bkorstad@mac.com or 303-887-7116.

Join us for these interesting discussions!

PLEASE NOTE: Hackers may try to direct you to a different Zoom address. Don’t be fooled. If in doubt about the authenticity of an email, please call me at 303-887-7116 for verification. 

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Book Club Archives

2024-04-02 - The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma by Mustafa Suleyman and Michael Bhaskar

2024-03-05 - The United States-South Korea Alliance: Why It May Fail and Why It Must Not by Scott Snyder

2024-02-06 - The Final Struggle: Inside China's Global Strategy by Ian Easton.

2024-01-02 - The Loom of Time: Between Empire and Anarchy, from the Mediterranean to China by Robert D. Kaplan

2023-12-05 - Three Dangerous Men: Russia, China and Iran by Seth Jones

2023-11-07 - How States Think: The Rationality of Foreign Policy by John J. Mearsheimer and Sebastian Rosato

2023-04-04 - War: How Conflict Shaped Us by Margaret MacMillan

2023-03-07 - Military History for the Modern Strategist: America's Major Wars Since 1861 by Michael O'Hanlon 

2023-02-07 - Kleptopia: How Dirty Money is Conquering the World by Tom Burgis

2023-01-03 - America's Great Power Opportunity: Revitalizing U.S. Foreign Policy to Meet the Challenges of Strategic Competition by Ali Wyne

2022-12-06 - Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China by Michael Beckley and Hal Brands

2022-11-01 - Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why It Matters and What to Do About It by Richard Reeves

2022-05-03 - Oceans of Grain: How American Wheat Remade the World by Scott Reynolds Nelson

2022-04-05 - Future War and the Defense of Europe by John R. Allen, Frederick Ben Hodges and Julian Lindley-French

2022-03-01 - A World Safe for Democracy: Liberal Internationalism and the Crisis of "Global Order" by John Ikenberry

2022-02-01 - Russia Resurrected: Its Power and Purpose in a New Global Order by Kathryn Stoner

2022-01-04 - Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India by Shashi Tharoor 

2021-12-07 - The Long Game: China's Grand Strategy to Displace the American Orderly by Rush Doshi

2021-11-02 - What the West is Getting Wrong about the Middle East: Why Islam Is Not the Problem by Omar Taspinar

2021-10-05 - The New Odyssey: The Story of Europe's Refugees by Patrick Kingsley 

2021-09-07 - The Nine Lives of Pakistan: Dispatches from a Precarious State by Declan Walsh

2021-08-03 - Invisible China; How the Urban-Rural Divide Threatens China's Rise by Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell 

2021-06-01 - Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Harira 

2021-05-04 - Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson

2021-04-06 - How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need by Bill Gates

2021-03-02 - Five short articles supplied by Bill Korstad

2021-02-02 - The New Map: Energy, Climate and the Clash of Nations by Daniel Bergen

2021-01-05 - Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World by H. R. McMaster

2020-12-01 - China's Western Horizon: Beijing and the New Geopolitics of Eurasia by Daniel Markey

2020-11-03 - Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion and Collective Memory in the Middle East by Kim Ghattas

2020-10-06 - The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties by Christopher Caldwell 

2020-04-01 - Political Tribes by Amy Chua 

2020-03-04 - Like War: The Weaponization of Social Media by Peter W. Singer and Emerson T Brookings 

2020-02-04 - Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall 

2020-01-07 - The Hundred Year Marathon by Michael Pillsbury 

2019-12-03  - The War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence by Ronan Farrow  

2019-11-04 - Messing With the Enemy by Clinton Watts

2019-03-30 - In Deep: The FBI, the CIA and the Truth About America's Deep State by David Rohde. 

2019-03-02 - The Myth of Capitalism - Monopolies and the Death of Competition by Jonathan Tepper with Denise Hearn 

2019-02-03 - The Next America by Paul Taylor and Pew Research 

2019-01-06 - The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World by Robert Kagan

2018-12-02 - The Back Channel: A Memoir of American Diplomacy and the Case for Its Renewal by Bill Burns

2018-10-29 - The Perfect Weapon by David Sanger

2018-04-02 - The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century by Walter Scheidel

2018-03-05 - How Everything Became War and Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon by Rosa Brooks

2018-02-05 - America's War for the Greater Middle East by Andrew J. Bacevich

2017-12-11 - The Invention of Russia: The Rise of Putin and the Age of Fake News by Arkady Ostrovsky

2017-11-13 - Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap? by Graham Allison