Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s SitRep! Robbie and Jack here, with a special summer SitRep edition for all our fellow bookworms out there.

Hope everyone is staying cool amid all these record-shattering heat waves, but not to worry, world leaders have banded together to come up with a bold strategy to tackle global carbon emissions to stave off the dangerous and deadly effects from climate chan—Oh wait. Never mind.

But enough about escapist fantasy, let’s move on to other genres. We’ve compiled a great list of books for the national security wonks to add to their summer reading pile. Special thanks to all our readers who wrote in with their recommendations, and apologies that we couldn’t include them all. (For more summer book reads, check out this additional list from FP staff and contributors.)

Alright, here’s what’s on tap for the day: The ultimate summer reading guide for national security wonks, Russia-sized woes in the U.S.-South Africa relationship, Congress votes to future-proof NATO, and more.

It’s that time of year again: Carly Rae Jepsen is blasting from your car radio, the crack of baseball bats can be heard in the air, Kim Jong Un is looking at things, and Washington is basically an unlivable, 98-degree, mosquito-ridden swamp. You guessed it: it’s summer.

To get you through the dog days of summer, SitRep asked you, dear readers, for some of the best reads for the beach, the car, the airport, or wherever you may find yourself this summer. And you answered.

Here are some of the best ones that Jack and Robbie picked off the top of the stack.

Indo-Pacific. Thanks to SitRep reader Mike S. for recommending Our Man in Tokyo: An American Ambassador and the Countdown to Pearl Harbor, a tick-tock of Ambassador Joseph C. Grew’s time as America’s top diplomat in Japan in the lead-up to World War II, after naval officers assassinated the prime minister and the Japanese military began to take control of the government. Journalist Steve Kemper “is able to tell a complicated story, with echoes today, through the lens of one of America’s greatest diplomats, Joseph Grew,” Mike wrote.

Need something a little more current? Richard M. recommends Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong, journalist Louisa Lim’s story of the one-time colony now firmly under Beijing’s thumb. Also from Richard: former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s The Avoidable War: The Dangers of a Catastrophic Conflict Between the U.S. and Xi Jinping’s China. (That is relevant policy reading today, too: Rudd recently became the Australian ambassador to the United States.)

Spies, lies, and espionage. Amy Zegart’s history of U.S. espionage, Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence, from George Washington to the Cold War and beyond, is a favorite of reader Jennifer G. Can’t get enough intelligence history? Michael K. recommends Calder Walton’s Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West, which traces the Soviet intelligence war against the United States through the 20th century. If you want to go deeper on Russian military and nuclear operational behavior (and if you’re not afraid of wading through meaty, academic texts), Ine recommends Charles E. Tuten Jr.’s Matters of Perspective: Versioned Realities in Cold War WMD Intelligence.

Haven’t had enough espionage? I know we haven’t. Wall Street Journal reporter Brett Forrest’s gripping tale of Billy Reilly, an amateur keyboard warrior who was drawn into the shadowy world of FBI sources before disappearing in Russia, is recommended by his colleague—and FP alum!—Gordon Lubold. Lost Son: An American Family Trapped Inside the FBI’s Secret Wars is based on an amazing 2019 feature story in the Journal. And if you’re looking for a shorter read, Lubold is also the author of one of FP’s most loved stories ever.

Energy. Journalist Siddharth Kara was able to step inside the cobalt mines of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where men (and often children) are making as little as a dollar a day to mine the elements that are powering today’s electric car batteries out of toxic pits that are threatening to collapse on them. Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives is a disaster travelogue through the war-torn country, which makes clear the costs of our battery-fueled future.

“We’re all going to be spending a lot of time talking about cobalt and lithium for the foreseeable future,” wrote SitRep reader Kevin Y., who recommended the book. Yes, yes, we are. If you’re looking for a more macro analysis of the current energy climate, Lluis T. recommends Michael T. Klare’s Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict, dating back to 2001. And if you want something really at the macro level and no less depressing, Huda K. recommends The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) by Katie Mack. Yes, it’s the end of the world as we know it. Sidebar: Robbie has read this with absolutely zero knowledge of physics and absolutely loved it—it’s a very digestible read on a really wonky topic.

Guns and butter. How about that military-industrial complex? Katherine D. recommends V Is for Victory: Franklin Roosevelt’s American Revolution and the Triumph of World War II, the saga of FDR’s cajoling of America’s top industrialists to join the stateside war effort during World War II. Need to snap back to reality? Friend of the program Taylor Barnes recommends Six Stops on the National Security Tour: Rethinking Warfare Economies by Miriam Pemberton, which covers local U.S. economies dependent on Pentagon spending.

And you’ve probably already heard about it, but David Grann’s The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder is recommended by Phillip C. It’s the story of a 1740 British naval expedition gone wrong. And if you’re worried about Grann falling off after Killers of the Flower Moon and The Lost City of Z, don’t. The talents that Grann showed in those books, Phillip wrote, “are on full display.”

From your hosts. Jack has read a piddling 20 books this year but has succeeded in getting off of strictly work reads. Other than Cobalt Red, he recommends Andrea Wulf’s The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World, the story of the 19th-century Prussian naturalist on his five-year journey through the Amazon and up the highest volcano in the Andes as well as into the White House, where he tried to prod an unmoved President Thomas Jefferson to change his views on slavery. (If the name Humboldt sounds vaguely familiar, the Humboldt Current in South America and California’s Humboldt County are named for the Prussian explorer.)

And if you need to get up to speed on Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Jack recommends Harvard University historian Serhii Plokhy’s The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History (though it falls short of Plokhy’s books on the fall of the Soviet Union and the history of Ukraine).

Devoid of any semblance of a social life, Robbie has read 48 books so far this year. For some pulse-pounding military fiction, he can’t recommend enough The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy. It’s no hidden gem, but when he finally got around to reading it, he couldn’t put it down.

For the natsec sci-fi nerds, you can’t go wrong with Joshua Dalzelle’s Black Fleet Trilogy, chock-full of 25th-century space battles and a healthy dose of political intrigue and grand strategy. (The second book goes off the rails at one point a bit, but it’s an enjoyable series overall.)

And finally, a book that has absolutely nothing to do with anything related to national security or foreign policy (all our brains need a break from time to time) that Robbie loved: Carrie Soto Is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid. It’s about a tennis star supposedly past her prime fighting for redemption, and, to borrow some fancy terminology from professional literary critics, it’s just really, really good.

After the Biden administration reversed a Trump-era measure and rejoined UNESCO, Erica Barks-Ruggles has been named as the next U.S. ambassador to the U.N. body.

Ambassador Rufus Gifford, the U.S. chief of protocol, announced on Twitter that he is leaving the Biden administration.

What should be high on your radar, if it isn’t already.

Things going South. A top Biden envoy and the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee are making separate trips to South Africa in the coming weeks to try to salvage a relationship that has been roiled by South Africa’s deepening military ties to Russia, as Robbie scoops this week. Some in Washington are incensed enough to push for an entire rethink of U.S. ties with South Africa, long considered one of the United States’ most strategically important partners on the African continent. Others say it’s too big to fail. Maybe time will tell, and luckily for South Africa, Russian President Vladimir Putin won’t be there to muddy the waters, at least in person.

Just in case. The Senate voted 65-28 to approve a bill put forward by Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine and Republican Sen. Marco Rubio barring a U.S. president from withdrawing from NATO without prior congressional review. In a parallel universe where Donald Trump was never president, this bill likely wouldn’t have ever been drafted. (Trump was a staunch critic of NATO allies and made some remarks early on about a U.S. withdrawal but never came close to following through, and his administration expanded U.S. military funding in Europe despite all the diplomatic headaches he created with European allies.)

But now, these senators have proactively pushed through this bill at a relatively uncontroversial moment in U.S. politics and on an issue that still has broad bipartisan support despite some very energetic skepticism of NATO within some corners of the MAGA world.

You wanna battle? The U.S. Navy is about 80 ships away from the fleet it needs to meet the Biden administration’s national security strategy, USNI News reports, or 381 ships. The finding came in the Navy’s annual ship assessment to Congress, which was classified, marking an increase of nine ships from last year’s report. Though it’s not clear in the assessment what ships might comprise the future U.S. fleet, the Navy told USNI that the service had a “future objective” to get 31 amphibious ships off the blocks. The U.S. Navy currently has 299 ships. China, the world’s largest naval fleet, has about 340 warships.

Put on Your Radar

Thursday, July 20: U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Bahraini Foreign Minister Abdullatif bin Rashid al-Zayani are set to meet in Washington. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is set to travel to Vietnam; U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai is traveling to Belgium. The FIFA Women’s World Cup kicks off in Australia and New Zealand.

Friday, July 21: Blinken and U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan are set to speak at the Aspen Security Forum.

Sunday, July 23: Cambodia and Spain are both set to hold parliamentary elections.

“I’d be happy to take some questions and hopefully not get fired.”

—Lt. Gen. Dan Caine, the CIA’s associate director for military affairs, at a public National Guard Bureau State Partnership Program conference this week, per CNN’s Haley Britzky

• Hydrogen Is the Future—or a Complete Mirage by Adam Tooze
• Chinese Scientists Are Leaving the United States by Christina Lu and Anusha Rathi
• The Long, Destructive Shadow of Obama’s Russia Doctrine by Adrian Karatnycky

Hmm, don’t like this headline. “Anthrax-Infected Russians Escape Siberian Hospital,” Newsweek reports.

Worth the risk? A man who stole 200,000 Cadbury Creme Eggs in the United Kingdom weeks before Easter has been jailed, as the BBC reports.