• Economics

At Foreign Policy, summer isn’t just about beach reads (though we’re fond of those, too). It’s also a time to dig into new nonfiction titles that are critical to our work. Below are 15 books coming out this summer that we expect to shape the conversation around international affairs for the rest of the year, from narrative histories of the Iranian Revolution and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process to in-depth investigations into the future of mining and emerging technologies.

The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century
Tim Weiner (Mariner Books, 464 pp., $35, July 15)
In this follow up to Legacy of Ashes, which won the 2007 National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize-winning national security journalist Tim Weiner uses his unparalleled access to CIA officials—including top operations officers who have never spoken to the press—to write a history of the agency in the 21st century. Read an excerpt of the book, which we published earlier this month, here.

King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation
Scott Anderson (Doubleday, 512 pp., $35, Aug. 5)
Recent U.S. military intervention in Iran has renewed public interest in the 1979 Iranian Revolution, which toppled the CIA-backed shah and established the Islamic Republic of Iran. In this narrative history, veteran war correspondent Scott Anderson chronicles the shah’s stunning fall, as well as U.S. officials’ roles in the events leading up to it. 

What Is Free Speech?: The History of a Dangerous Idea
Fara Dabhoiwala (Belknap Press, 480 pp., $29.95, Aug. 5)
Fara Dabhoiwala, a historian at Princeton University, writes what is billed as an “unsettling history” of free speech. He traces how the idea of free speech was invented—and repurposed—across the globe over the last 300 years, arguing that its origins have more to do with power and profit than with democratic principles.

First Among Equals: U.S. Foreign Policy in a Multipolar World
Emma Ashford (Yale University Press, 280 pp., $35, Aug. 26)
As the United States struggles to maintain its global primacy, Emma Ashford, an FP columnist and senior fellow at the Stimson Center, pushes back against the liberal internationalist playbook.  She argues that it’s time for Washington to adapt to the new multipolar world and adopt a realist approach to foreign policy.

The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide
Howard W. French (Liveright, 512 pp., $39.99, Aug. 26)
Today, few people know about Kwame Nkrumah, who became the newly independent Ghana’s first prime minister in 1957. But in his follow-up volume to Born in Blackness, Howard W. French, an FP columnist and journalism professor at Columbia University, centers Nkrumah as one of the 20th century’s great political leaders and a revolutionary at the heart of the global Black liberation movement.

Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future
Dan Wang (W. W. Norton & Company, 288 pp., $31.99, Aug. 26)
In modern-day China, dazzling economic progress coexists with widespread political repression. According to Dan Wang, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover History Lab, both realities are born of the country’s “engineering mindset”—and understanding China through this lens can help readers see the United States more clearly, too. 

The Backsliders: Why Leaders Undermine Their Own Democracies
Susan C. Stokes (Princeton University Press, 264 pp., $27.95, Sept. 9)
Why do democratically elected leaders attack their countries’ democratic institutions? Susan C. Stokes, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, seeks to answer this question through original research into the economic and institutional roots of democratic erosion—and offers strategies for civil society to fight back.

The World’s Worst Bet: How the Globalization Gamble Went Wrong (And What Would Make It Right)
David J. Lynch (PublicAffairs, 416 pp., $32, Sept. 9)
David J. Lynch, the Washington Post’s global economics correspondent, chronicles the rise and fall of globalization, examining how bipartisan consensus on worldwide free trade during Bill Clinton’s presidency backfired and gave way to the hyper-nationalism of today.

Peacemaker: U Thant and the Forgotten Quest for a Just World
Thant Myint-U (W. W. Norton & Company, 384 pp., $35, Sept. 9)
U Thant, the United Nations’ first non-Western secretary-general, has largely been forgotten. Yet in Peacemaker, Thant Myint-U—a historian, former U.N. official, and Thant’s grandson—turns to newly declassified archives to show that his grandfather had an indispensable role in defusing global conflicts, preventing nuclear escalation, and giving a voice to newly independent African and Asian countries in the 1960s. 

This Is for Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web
Tim Berners-Lee (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 400 pp., $30, Sept. 9)
British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989. Now, more than 35 years later, he reflects on his creation, reckons with its role in transforming human societies, and offers guidance on how to harness digital technologies for good—rather than power or profit—in the age of generative artificial intelligence.

Inside the Situation Room: The Theory and Practice of Crisis Decision-Making
Eds. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Keren Yarhi-Milo (Oxford University Press, 512 pp., $29.99, Sept. 15)
How do world leaders make decisions at critical moments? In Inside the Situation Room, former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Keren Yarhi-Milo, the dean of Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, bring together academics and policymakers to bridge the gap between theory and practice and offer insight into what happens behind the curtain. 

Tomorrow Is Yesterday: Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel/Palestine
Hussein Agha and Robert Malley (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 272 pp., $30, Sept. 16)
Two veteran negotiators—Hussein Agha and Robert Malley, who have advised Palestinian leadership and U.S. presidents, respectively—effectively write an obituary of the two-state solution. Their book bridges memoir, history, and analysis to offer unique insight into what went wrong with the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and in the lead-up to Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza.

How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations
Carl Benedikt Frey (Princeton University Press, 552 pp., $35, Sept. 16)
As debates rage about the revolutionary potential of AI, Carl Benedikt Frey, an economist and AI expert at the University of Oxford, draws on 1,000 years of global history to contend that rapid technological change more often than not leads to stagnation. History, he argues, has important lessons for nations hoping to innovate and flourish in the long term.

Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism
Thea Riofrancos (W. W. Norton & Company, 288 pp., $29.99, Sept. 23)
Lithium and other critical minerals are essential to the green energy transition. But mining them comes at a cost—both to the environment and to the communities that are home to them. Political scientist Thea Riofrancos, who has written on extractive capitalism and mining for FP, argues that despite this, there are ways to transform mining governance and create a truly just economy.

McNamara at War: A New History
William Taubman and Philip Taubman (W. W. Norton & Company, 512 pp., $39.99, Sept. 23)
Newly uncovered documents shed light onto the life of Robert S. McNamara, the U.S. secretary of defense under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, in a biography written by brothers William and Philip Taubman. The Pulitzer Prize-winning political scientist and former New York Times Washington bureau chief, respectively, paint a portrait of one of the key figures of the Vietnam War, whose hubris shaped the trajectory of U.S. foreign policy.