New Books in National Security

How has the FBI evolved since the days of chasing gangsters and bootleggers, and is it equipped to face the challenges of a global war on terror? According to Garrett Graff’s The Threat Matrix: The FBI at War in the Age of Global Terror (Little Brown, 2011), the FBI has come a long way since the days of J. Edgar Hoover, but it still has a ways to go. The author, the editor of the most excellent Wa...

How have the United States and Japan managed to remain such strong allies, despite having fought one another in a savage war less than 70 years ago? In Michael Auslin’s Pacific Cosmopolitans: A Cultural History of U.S.-Japan Relations (Harvard University Press, 2011), the author, an Asia expert at the American Enterprise Institute, explores the history of cultural exchange between the United State...

How have the United States and Japan managed to remain such strong allies, despite having fought one another in a savage war less than 70 years ago? In Michael Auslin's Pacific Cosmopolitans: A Cultural History of U.S.-Japan Relations (Harvard University Press, 2011), the author, an Asia expert at the American Enterprise Institute, explores the history of cultural exchange between the United State...

How do government officials decide key homeland security questions? How do those decisions affect our day to day lives? In Skating on Stilts: Why We Aren’t Stopping Tomorrow’s Terrorism (Hoover Institution, 2010), Stewart Baker, a former senior official from the Department of Homeland Security, takes us behind the scenes of government homeland security decision making. Baker, who was the DHS’s fir...

Where do we stand on the War on Terror? Is it still going on, and if so, are we winning or losing it? In William Bennett and Seth Leibsohn’s The Fight of Our Lives: Knowing the Enemy, Speaking the Truth, and Choosing to Win the War Against Radical Islam (Thomas Nelson, 2011), the authors look at the current state of the War on Terror, how it is going, and why it remains important. Bennett, a forme...

If you ask most Americans when the U.S. became heavily involved in the Persian Gulf, they might cite the Iranian Hostage Crisis of 1981 or, more probably, the First Gulf War of 1990. Of course the roots of American entanglement in the region run much deeper, as W. Taylor Fain shows in his excellent new book American Ascendance and British Retreat in the Persian Gulf Region (Palgrave-Macmillan, 200...

It’s one thing to say that the study of history is “relevant” to contemporary problems; it’s another to demonstrate it. In How Terrorism Ends: Understanding the Decline and Demise of Terrorist Campaigns(Princeton UP, 2009), Audrey Kurth Cronin does so in splendid fashion. She poses a common and very important question: what should we do about modern terrorism in general and Al-Qaeda in particular?...

I met George Kennan twice, once in 1982 and again in about 1998. On both occasions, I found him tough to read. He was a very dignified man–I want to write “correct”–but also quite distant, even cerebral. Now that I’ve read Nicholas Thompson‘s very writerly and engaging The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War (Henry Holt, 2010) I can see that my impressions...

Historians are by their nature public intellectuals because they are intellectuals who write about, well, the public. Alas, many historians seem to forget the “public” part and concentrate on the “intellectual” part. Our guest today–sponsored by the National History Center–is not among them. Julian Zelizer has used his historical research and writing to inform the public and public debate in a gre...

Gordon Brown, the British PM, came calling to Washington recently. He jumped the pond, of course, to have a chat with his new counterpart, President Barack Obama. They had a lot to talk about, what with the world economy melting down, the Afghan War heating up, and Iraq coming apart. But he had another purpose as well. In his speech before Congress Mr. Brown intoned: “Madam Speaker, Mr Vice-Presid...