Diplomatic Discourse

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Contradiction

I was digging through my archives recently and found this picture I took in 2006. Reflecting on it, I thought, what a contradiction this image represents. Sometimes we just need to pause for a moment and wonder.

Book-a-Week Club

January – Power

The Cold War — Kennan’s 1946 “Long Telegram” followed by the 1947 adaptation published in Foreign Affair, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct.” Follow Kennan’s thoughts in sequence with the 1950 “NSC 68” report during the Truman administration and the 1953 “NSC 162/2” during the Eisenhower administration.

Power and Policy by Thomas Finletter, published in 1954. If you can get your hands on a 1954 copy, trust me, you will enjoy this powerful piece.

Soft Power by Joseph Nye. If you can get his Foreign Policy essay of the same title from 1990, you can get the gist of his power thesis.

One week open to suggestions.

February – Hannah Arendt

The Life of the Mind

The Human Condition

The Origins of Totalitarianism

Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil

March – Functional Fictions

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

The Ugly American by Eugene Burdick and William J. Lederer

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

April – Holy Reform Part I

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbons. An abridged version is perfectly acceptable.

City of God by Saint Augustine

1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church

Open to suggestions

May – More Holy Reform

95 Theses by Martin Luther

Something on the 30 Years War — still trying to nail down a good reference.

The Peace of Westphalia treaties.

Something else, but I’m not yet sure what that something is.

June – Another Holy Reform

The Muqaddimah by Ibn Khaldun

The Arab Awakening by George Antonius, published in 1939

The Second Arab Awakening by Marwan Muasher, published in 2014

An Introduction into Islamic Law by Joseph Schact from 1964

July – World War I

The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 by Christopher Clark

The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman

The War That Ended Peace by Margaret MacMillan

The World Crisis by Winston Churchill, abridged version is perfectly applicable because he can say a lot about a lot.

August – Thought

Readings from Immanuel Kant

The Anarchical Society by Hedley Bull

The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

Patterns of Conflict by John Boyd

The Scientific Way of Warfare by Antoine Bousquet

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Khun

September – Biographies

Biography of Otto von Bismark. I haven’t narrowed the selection here, so I am open to suggestions.

Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant by Ulysses S. Grant

Atatürk: The Rebirth of a Nation by Lord Patrick Kinross

George F. Kennan: An American Life by John Lewis Gaddis

October – December

I am open to ideas. I think another month of fictions could be useful. I also think a month of antiquities could be useful, such as revisiting Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. Somehow, we will weave in a classic of strategy like The Campaigns of Napoleon by David Chandler. In fact, why don’t we dedicate a month to strategists: Napoleon, Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, Saul…as in Saul Alinsky. Since we began the year with power, I think it would be fitting to end the year with peace. December will likely be a month to look at beautiful works like Anna Badkhen’s Peace Meals: Candy-Wrapped Kalishnikovs and Other War Stories.

Diplomatic Discourse

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

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