Recommended: A World in Disarray

Richard Haas is the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a onetime Director of Policy Planning for the State Department, among other high profile assignments. His new book A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order is very, very good. He reviews the emergence of the world order - World Order 1.0 -  that has prevailed roughly since the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), and which is now beginning to break down, and he speculates, in the latter part of this book, on what a new world order - World Order 2.0 - might look like, and what American foreign policy ought to be to help arrive at a workable new world order.

In my previous post I suggested that America (and indeed, the whole world) faced a tsunami of exceedingly difficult problems.  One of the components of this presumed tsunami is the disruption of the world order, so this book is a good follow-on to Luce's book recommend above.  A dispassionate (ie- nonpartisan) view of American foreign policy in recent administrations, both Republican and Democratic, would suggest that those administrations (ie. presidents and the policy advisors who shape their policies and views) have been largely out of their depth, wasting inordinate amounts of money and lives and American influence and soft power on fruitless military adventures in the Middle East. The second Bush administration got us into the Middle Eastern quagmire, the Obama administration fumbled badly and naively both the so-called "Russian reset" and the rise of ISIS, and the current Trump administration thus far seems no better, and perhaps worse.

This is a book well worth reading for those who care about our foreign policy.