100 Books Like Projections of Power

Under what conditions will Americans support a president when he sends the nation to war? By looking at how the American public responded to the Korean and Vietnam wars in unprecedented breadth and depth, this is the question Mueller seeks to answer in arguably the most important book of the past half-century (or more) on American public opinion regarding war. This was one of the books that first got me interested in understanding why Americans respond the way they do to military conflicts, how presidential leadership, good and bad, can influence public support when American troops are in harm’s way.

This is my go-to reference book about American public opinion on all things foreign policy. Holsti is one of the most important public opinion scholars of the 20th Century and arguably this is his most important book. I assign it in all of my undergraduate classes on the subject. He explains not only what the public believes about foreign policy—through case studies ranging from international trade to all major U.S. military conflicts in the post-World War II era—but also does a brilliant job of synthesizing decades of research on human information processing, learning, and ideological reasoning to explain in straightforward terms why people react to events the way they do. He also explains the (substantial) differences between the foreign policy views of elites and average citizens

This is one of the most comprehensive books on the question of how Americans think about war. Berinsky reviews public opinion on every major war since World War II. He persuasively refutes most existing explanations for public opinion regarding these conflicts, while showing that Americans’ responses to foreign policy events are not really unique to foreign policy. Rather, Americans mostly respond to wars the way they respond to most other political issues. One of the most impressive aspects of the book is the vast trove of previously unknown public opinion data from World War II that Berinsky uncovers. This is a unique window into one of America’s defining military conflicts. We learn that, contrary to the received wisdom, Americans responded to World War II in much the same way as they did during more recent conflicts.

This book is a classic in the genre. Wittkopf develops a hugely influential, yet surprisingly simple and straightforward, ideological map to explain how Americans view the world. He finds that typical Americans are generally consistent over time in their reactions to American uses of force abroad, depending on their foreign policy ideology. From responses to a series of poll questions, Wittkopf classifies people as internationalists, accommodationists, hard-liners, or isolationists. This is a framework that I regularly teach to my students, as I find it extremely valuable in explaining how Americans have responded to U.S. foreign policy actions, as well as the apparent differences between the attitudes of leaders and different segments of the general public.

I’ll probably still be citing this book when they drag me into professorial retirement, yelling, “Did you know that popular representations of Israel as a hypermasculine superman helped justify the U.S.-Israeli alliance, particularly after 1967?!” “Obviously,” my colleagues will yell back, “that’s only one of the reasons why we are still assigning this book, even during the great 2051 AI-Robot rebellion!”

McAlister’s Epic Encounters came out around 2001 as many Americans were wondering, “Why do they hate us?” The ones that did not grab the Qur’an (wrong era, peeps!) or rightwing polemics, grabbed this excellent history of U.S. interests in the Middle East. McAlister interprets that word, “interests,” broadly, offering a holistic account of how Americans – not just diplomats – have imagined Southwest Asia and North Africa throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.

This book contains significant touchpoints, from 1950s Biblical Epics to Black Power’s connections with… show more.

Since I plowed my way through this rollicking 800-page epic, I have eagerly recommended it to others. It ranks as one of a select few long books that never bogged down and left me with a twinge of sadness that it did not just keep going.

When the curtain finally fell (as I knew it would, upon Confederate collapse in 1865), I had been enthralled by dozens of expertly drawn characters and episodes. Some of the ministers, soldiers, and publicists appear once or twice; others provide a narrative spine that charts developments across the entire struggle.

Collectively, this dramatis personae restores the drama to what less gifted story-tellers than Foreman have termed “Anglo-American relations” in the battle for and against the Confederate rebellion.

This is a now-classic essay that explores the ways mainstream news media (and subsequent academic studies) downplayed and/or misrepresented the revolutionary nature of the Spanish Civil War. Although the war began as a result of a failed military coup d’etat against a legally-elected republican government, it came to be seen simply as a battle between communists (identified with the government) and supporters of order (who were actually the fascist rebels!). Drawing parallels with the ways U.S. media represented the revolutionary forces in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, Chomsky makes clear just how significant that misrepresentation became—not just at the time, but in the continuing historiography of the Spanish Civil War.

I’ve always paired this book with Promised Land, Crusader State, not only because Mead is such an elegant writer, but I don’t think anyone surpasses him at explaining how and why we lurch back and forth between foreign policies. Mead’s account made such an impression on me when I first read it that it’s left me in a quandary ever since.

If I could recommend only one of these two books to time-strapped officers, which would benefit them more? Here is where, like a good academic, I always punted and told everyone to read both.     

This is a book by a former top diplomat of India that lays out in a clear and concise fashion India’s priorities, its interests, and its concerns. Real life examples are cited to explain the choices India made, or didn’t make, and the reasons behind those decisions. As someone who is passionate about foreign policy, and who loves archival research, I loved reading a book written by a practitioner in which he tells you about the challenges they face and the real-life choices they have to make.

I loved this book because it finally explained something I’d felt for years but couldn’t quite articulate: that International Relations theory, as I was taught it, never really made sense of the world I knew. I remember reading it and thinking—yes, this is why so much of what passes for "global" thinking felt alien to my own experience of politics, power, and history. I’d always recognised that IR was speaking a language of empire without realising it.

What I value most is how the authors expose the discipline’s deep entanglement with Western historical assumptions—something I’d long mistrusted as universally applicable—but have never seen mapped so clearly. It helped me understand not just what IR is but also what it gets wrong about the world.