My End-of-Summer Reading List for 2024

School is starting soon. Time to start reading again!

Photo by Matt Ragland on Unsplash

It’s Labor Day weekend! This means that the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy begins its fall semester in just a few days. This is going to be an exciting year — Fletcher just hired a fabulous new Dean, one with more-than-passing familiarity with the school! Plus, there is an awful lot going on in the world right now, including a U.S. presidential election that is too close to call. Unfortunately, we live in very exciting times.

As August turns into September, the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World thought it might be appropriate to suggest some articles that will help prod returning students (and professors) back into thinking seriously about international relations and international political economy. Speaking for myself, I enjoyed my summer reads but it’s time to start thinking more rigorously about international relations and political economy.

My article recommendations, in no particular order:

Henry Farrell, “No Exit Opportunities: Business Models and Political Thought in Silicon Valley,” American Affairs 8 (Fall 2024). Nate Silver’s On The Edge: The Art of Risking Everything has been making a lot of waves, but based on his recent New York Times op-ed,¹ I’m not convinced by his argument. Silver typologizes that U.S. elites can be divided into the risk-averse center-left folks of the Village and the alt-right, all-in gamblers of the River. Silver has met a lot of the River folks from his poker-playing. Silver’s thesis is unpersuasive on multiple levels.² However, Farrell’s essay about the flaws in Silicon Valley philosophizing might serve as the best unintended rejoinder to Silver’s supposition that the folks of the River are onto something profound:

Silicon Valley entrepreneurs genuinely have a great amount to be proud of—some of their technological innovations have become cornerstones of modern society. Yet business plans and contemporary political spats are insecure foundations for grand theories of the deep future of human civilization and politics….

The problem is not that arguments for freedom and technological innovation are stupid or wicked. They are not. It is that political theory can’t do its proper job when it becomes an instrument of self-justification and self-soothing. It is very easy for highly intelligent people to find arguments and justifications for why they are right and ought to be allowed to do exactly what they want. This becomes even easier when they are surrounded by others who agree with them and sometimes even venerate them….

If Silicon Valley thinkers are to take their political commitments to liberty and technological progress seriously, they need to acknowledge and deal with the contradictions in their ideological positions rather than papering over them.

Yep.

Ryan Hass, “How does national confidence inform US-China relations?” Brookings Institution, March 2024. Part of my ongoing research this summer, building on some recent work, has focused on the relationship between expectations about the future and how states think about power. Hass’ essay echoes some of my own thinking on this subject:

By analyzing upturns and downturns in U.S.-China relations over the past 80 years, the U.S.-China relationship appears most prone to sharp volatility when both countries simultaneously are experiencing cycles of insecurity and pessimism about their futures. When only one of the two parties enters a cycle of national instability, the relationship generally can weather turbulence without experiencing sharp deterioration in relations. The moments of non-linearity in the trajectory of relations occur when both countries simultaneously enter domestic political down cycles.

The two periods in the last 80 years when the United States and China simultaneously were in such down cycles were the early 1950s and the period since 2016.

Kelly Sims Gallagher, “Climate Policy Is Working,” Foreign Affairs 103 (May/June 2024). Speaking of pessimistic expectations about the future, it would be easy for climate change to induce despair about what the future will hold. While fully cognizant of the reasons for pessimism, Gallagher made the case for optimism in her recent essay:

The climate crisis can seem daunting and immune to small human actions, but the world has made and continues to make remarkable progress. That is because the strategy to tackle climate change that governments have developed in the last 30 years is working. It should be strengthened, not disparaged. Most industrialized countries and even some developing ones are well on their way to reducing greenhouse gas emissions in pursuit of net-zero goals. Technological advances are making renewable sources of energy cheaper and more efficient. Both governments and civil society groups are now more adept at crafting the policies and legislation needed to address climate change.

What is needed now, however, is not just hope but also further concerted action. Rather than succumbing to the pessimism that assumes humans cannot arrest rampant climate change, countries should reaffirm their commitments to helping one another meet emissions reduction targets and work harder to generate the necessary financing. The longer the world delays in acting, the harder it becomes to prevent catastrophic change. And the more countries reduce their emissions—starting today—the more they can limit the climatic change that future generations will have to contend with. Every ton of emissions that is avoided counts in constraining rising temperatures. If global emissions peak around 2025 and then rapidly and steadily decline thereafter for the next 25 years, reaching net zero by 2050, it will still be possible to limit warming to between 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius and thus avoid aggravating the already evident effects of climate change.

Gallagher is that fabulous new Fletcher dean I referenced a few paragraph ago. Needless to say, she is extremely qualified to do this job well.

Wilfred Chow and Dov Levin. “The Diplomacy of Whataboutism and US Foreign Policy Attitudes.” International Organization 78 (Winter 2024): 103-133. Foreign policy observers are familiar with “whataboutism.” It’s a rhetorical defense by actors that violate international norms by claiming some variation of, “but what about these bad things that all these other holier-than-thou actors are doing?” Russia excels at whataboutism.

Chow and Levin conduct some excellent survey work to see how whataboutism affects U.S. public attitudes. The results are depressing but necessary reading:

Does whataboutism work in global affairs? When states face international criticism, they often respond with whataboutism: accusing their critics of similar faults. Despite its prevalence in policy discussions, whataboutism remains an understudied influence strategy. This study investigates how states use whataboutism to shape American public opinion across various international issues. We find, using survey experiments, that whataboutism mitigates the negative impacts of criticism by reducing public approval of US positions and backing for punitive actions. Whataboutist critiques referencing similar, recent misdeeds have more power to shape opinions. However, the identity of the whataboutist state does not significantly affect effectiveness. US counter-messaging often fails to diminish the effects of whataboutism. These results show that whataboutism can be a potent rhetorical tool in international relations and that it warrants greater attention from international relations scholars.

Soyoung Lee, “Resources and Territorial Claims: Domestic Opposition to Resource-Rich Territory,” International Organization 79 (forthcoming, published online August 29, 2024). I haven’t read this one yet, but it seems like a juicy thesis! Here’s the abstract:

Are states more interested in claiming territories that have economic resources? While previous theories of international relations assume that resources make a territory more tempting to claim, all else equal, I argue that certain types of economic resources can make states less willing to claim a territory. The presence of capital-intensive resources—such as oil or minerals—raises concerns about how the benefits of acquiring the territory would be distributed within the nation. These distributional concerns make it harder and costlier for leaders to mobilize widespread and consistent support for claiming resource-rich lands. Using original geocoded data on territorial claims in South America from 1830 to 2001, I show that states are indeed less likely to claim lands that have oil or minerals, even when they can be claimed for historical or administrative reasons. I then illustrate the theoretical mechanism through a case study of Bolivia, comparing Bolivian attitudes toward reclaiming its two lost provinces, the Chaco and the Litoral. By showing how the presence of economic resources can become a liability in mobilizing unified support, this paper questions the widespread assumption that resources make territories more desirable to claim.

Latin America is a slightly weird region when it comes to international relations theory testing, but this a very interesting argument — so interesting I might need to revise my fall course syllabi at the last minute!

Okay, everyone — back to reading!

1. How to put this… if you write the sentence, “In recent years, for a new book, I have spent time in a community of like-minded thinkers who take calculated risks for a living,” and you consider the possibility that this like-minded group might make correlated errors in their judgment, you might be suffering from groupthink.

2. Read Dave Karpf’s epic BlueSky thread for a page-by-page critique of Silver’s book.