What is the best international affairs book of 2011?

Here is an un-nomination:  Stephen Clarkson’s Dependent America? How Canada and Mexico Construct US Power(University of Toronto Press, 2011) has received quite a bit of attention in the media and is likely to be esteemed in some quarters.  But it presents a cartoon-like account of North American international relations and is not to be taken seriously. Clarkson’s central puzzle is this:  If Canada were to disappear, the US would lose a sizable fraction of its national income. Why, then, does Canada have such limited influence on US policy?  His answer in a nutshell:  Canadian diplomacy is too polite.  Canadians cannot bring themselves to use threats or punishments to induce American cooperation.  Other works on Canada-US relations—well actually, just about all of them—recognize the fundamental asymmetry of the relationship:  Most things that Canada could do to punish the US would at the same time punish Canada, even more severely—and might also lead to further retaliation.  On the whole, Canadian diplomats struggle competently in inherently difficult negotiating situations with the US.  The cartoon solution—pop open a can of spinach, and get tough—won’t work.  

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The Kissinger book on China must be among the best this year; since the 21st century, or at least the first part of it, will be shaped and defined by the US-China relationship in all aspects, this book analyzes the beginning of this relationship in the modern era.

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I’m currently reading, and would recommend to anyone, both: “House on Fire: The Fight to Eradicate Smallpox” by legendary global health leader William Foege and “The Unfinished Global Revolution: The Pursuit of a New International Politics” by international policy maestro and former UN Deputy Secretary-General Mark Malloch Brown.

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It was not a banner year for Canadian books of this sort, but I very much liked US State Department veteran Peter Van Buren’s We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. 

Insightful, disturbing, and at times darkly funny, I was constantly reminded of Robert Fisks’s poignant observation that it seems the only thing we ever learn is that we never learn…

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I suggest Ferguson’s new book, Civilization. 

In his latest work Civilization, Niall Ferguson, one of the most astute and celebrated historians working today, strikes at the heart of our current political and economic anxieties, exploring how the tables may now have turned on Western dominance and how political and economic competition now seems to undermine Western nations in the face of monolithic powers like China, India and Brazil. By laying out the West’s incredible rise to global dominance, and then assessing if we have finally ceded our once unshakable place in the world, Civilization is another masterpiece from Ferguson that is must-reading for the global citizen.
 

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In terms of academic books, I would say that Richard Ned Lebow’s Why Nations Fight was my favourite since it brings status and prestige back to the fore of the study of conflict and international relations. 

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