Videos

AHS’s Molly Tobin moderated this discussion with Daniel Samet to explore his latest book as it examines U.S. defense policy toward Israel during the Cold War, emphasizing arms sales, intelligence sharing, and other security cooperation. It argues that strategic interests drove American policy with other considerations, such as domestic politics and shared liberal values, mattering far less. It begins with the presidency of John F. Kennedy and ends with the presidency of George H. W. Bush with a particular focus on government officials: presidents, secretaries of state, secretaries of defense, national security advisors, other administration officials, and senators and Congressmen. The book explores the primacy of security as American officials feared nuclear proliferation, regional war, and a cut-off of oil supplies. All the while, tensions and often bitter disagreements in the U.S.-Israel relationship abounded over what to do about threats in the Middle East. This volume will be of interest to those studying American relations with the rest of the Middle East and U.S. security partnerships around the world.

Why does Israel exist? Why is it worthy of remaining a critical ally of the United States? Why have critical race theorists identified Israel and the U.S. as the most pernicious examples of “settler colonialism”?

In “The Battle for the Jewish State”, Dr. Victoria Coates shows how the current conflict in Israel is not a regional issue to be resolved through an interminable diplomatic peace process. Rather, it is a broader military and cultural war that must be won for the sake not only of Israel, but of the United States.

Hundreds of thousands of young Jews have drifted away from the American Jewish community and many more may follow. This book explains to Jewish parents, donors, and organizations how Jewish education, Jewish summer camping, and time spent in Israel can revive and strengthen Jewish identity.

American Jewish identity is steadily weakening. National surveys show hundreds of thousands of children with one, or even two, Jewish parents not being raised as Jews by religion or to think of themselves as members of the Jewish community. And the surveys show that young American Jews are far less engaged with and supportive of Israel than their parents’ and grandparents’ generations—even after the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023 and the Gaza war that followed.

What can Jewish parents and organizations do to ensure that future generations of American Jews will have a strong Jewish identity? Elliott Abrams looks at the history of the American Jewish community and its relationship with Israel—from the high points of Israel’s creation in 1948 and the Six-Day War in 1967, to the years before the Second World War and now in the 21st century when many American Jews turned away from the Jewish State. He tells American Jewish parents, donors, and organizations where to focus: on getting children a serious Jewish education, sending them to Jewish summer camps, and bringing them to Israel for weeks, semesters, or academic years. These are the building blocks for Jewish identity that work reliably for young American Jews—especially those who are not Orthodox in their faith.

Abrams, author of Faith or Fear: How Jews Can Survive in a Christian America, brings together the latest survey data, his own experiences at the highest levels of the US government, his knowledge of Israel, and his role as chairman of Tikvah, the Jewish educational non-profit organization, to provide the answers to the toughest questions American Jews—especially American Jewish parents—are facing.

In “Collisions,” Michael Kimmage, a historian and former State Department official who focused on the Russia-Ukraine conflict, offers a wide-angle, historically informed account of the origins of the current Russia-Ukraine war. Tracing the development of Ukraine and Russia’s fractious relationship back to the end of the Cold War, Kimmage takes readers through the central events that led to Vladimir Putin seizing a large portion of Ukraine–the Crimea–in 2014 and, eight years later, initiating arguably the most intensive military conflict of the entire post-World War II era.

From the halls of power in Washington, Kyiv, and Moscow to the battlefields of Ukraine, Kimmage chronicles Putin’s ascendancy to the Russian presidency, delves into multiple American presidencies and their dealings with Russia and Europe, and recounts Europe’s efforts to bring Ukraine closer to the European Union. He tells the story of how Ukraine went from an embattled country on the edge of Europe to a formidable military power capable of pushing back the Russian military. Just as importantly, Kimmage captures how the current war has transformed multiple centers of power–from China to the United States–and dramatically altered the path of globalization itself. He makes the case that the war in Ukraine has shifted the direction of major macro-trends in world politics, contributing to the fragmentation of international politics, higher inflation, greater food insecurity, and the general collapse of arms control.

These intersecting dangers amount to a new age of global instability, born in war and in the collision between Russia and the United States that has brought the world to the brink of a new Cold War. An authoritative interpretation of possibly the most important geopolitical event of the post-Cold War era, Collisions is essential reading for anyone interested in the origins of this epochal conflict and its ripple effects across the globe.

The United States is in the midst of a new cold war with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and America is losing. That claim, at the core of Michael Sobolik’s new book Countering China’s Great Game: A Strategy for American Dominance, challenges the Washington, D.C. conventional wisdom about U.S.-China relations. Officials in Washington are reacting to the CCP and playing defense. Like America’s efforts to contain the Soviet Union in the twentieth-century Cold War, the United States needs a strategic vision to overcome the CCP. Sobolik offers a plan for American victory over the CCP and presents a roadmap to sabotage the crux of the CCP’s foreign policy: the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

At its core, the BRI is not an economic venture. It is a geopolitical gambit. Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s “project of the century” has entered its second phase: leveraging yesterday’s investments for today’s political and military ends. Xi will never do away with the BRI because it is strengthening Beijing’s strategic position from Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands to Africa and Latin America. The BRI is the apotheosis of the CCP’s grand strategy. America needs a blueprint to take it down. Sobolik provides this blueprint by identifying the BRI’s core weakness: imperial overstretch. After identifying China’s penchant for empire-building, he identifies the BRI’s key weaknesses globally and traces them back to the CCP’s vulnerabilities at home. Sobolik’s work offers policymakers a plan to go on the offense and win America’s new cold war.

In Defending Democracy in an Age of Sharp Power, editors William J. Dobson, Tarek Masoud, and Christopher Walker bring together leading analysts to explain how the world’s authoritarians are attempting to erode the pillars of democratic societies—and what we can do about it. Popular media, entertainment industries, universities, the tech world, and even critical political institutions are being manipulated by dictators who advance their regimes’ interests by weakening democracies from within.

Autocrats’ use of “sharp power” constitutes one of the gravest threats to liberal, representative government today. The optimistic, early twenty-first-century narrative of how globalization, the spread of the internet, and the rise of social media would lead to liberalization everywhere is now giving way to the realization that these same forces provide inroads to those wishing to snuff out democracy at the source. And while autocrats can do much to wall their societies off from democratic and liberal influences, free societies have not yet fully grasped how they can resist the threat of sharp power while preserving their fundamental openness and freedom.

Far from offering a counsel of despair, the international contributors in this collection identify the considerable resources that democracy provides for blunting sharp power’s edge. With careful case studies of successful resistance efforts in such countries as Australia, the Czech Republic, and Taiwan, this book offers an urgent message for anyone concerned with the defense of democracy in the twenty-first century. Contributors: Ketty W. Chen, Sarah Cook, William J. Dobson, John Fitzgerald, Martin Hála, Samantha Hoffman, Aynne Kokas, Edward Lucas, Tarek Masoud, Nadège Rolland, Ruslan Stefanov, Glenn Tiffert, Martin Vladimirov, Christopher Walker

In Paper Soldiers, Saleha Mohsin reveals how the Treasury Department has shaped U.S. policy at home and overseas by wielding the American dollar as a weapon—and what that means in a new age of crisis. For decades, America has preferred its currency superpower-strong, the basis of a “strong dollar” policy that attracted foreign investors and pleased consumers.

Drawing on Mohsin’s unparalleled access to current and former Treasury officials like Robert Rubin, Steven Mnuchin, and Janet Yellen, Paper Soldiers traces that policy’s intended and unintended consequences, including the rise of populist sentiment and trade war with China—culminating in an unprecedented attack on the dollar’s pristine status during the Trump presidency—and connects the dollar’s weaponization from 9/11 to the deployment of crippling financial sanctions against Russia. Ultimately, Mohsin argues that, untethered from many of the economic assumptions of the last generation, the power and influence of the American dollar is now at stake.

In “Riding the Tiger,” Dr. Leon Aron, an acclaimed Russian studies scholar and a Moscow native who was sanctioned by President Vladimir Putin’s regime, chronicles the transformation of Russian politics and society under Putin. Through hundreds of Russian-language sources, Dr. Aron shows how Putin uses militarist propaganda and sanitized revisionist images of World War II, Stalin, and the Soviet Union to forge a nationalist and loyal core of his regime’s support. And the “new Russia” suddenly looks a lot like the old USSR. Dr. Aron’s bold, expert analysis of Russian political culture under Putin helps us better understand Russia’s revanchist tendencies, its invasion of Ukraine, and the perilous road ahead.

Jared Cohen, the New York Times bestselling author of Accidental Presidents, explores what happens after leaving the most powerful job in the world: President of the United States. Former presidents have an unusual place in American life. King George III believed that George Washington’s departure after two terms made him “the greatest character of the age.” But Alexander Hamilton worried former presidents might “[wander] among the people like ghosts.” They were both right. Life After Power tells the stories of seven former presidents, from the Founding to today. Each changed history. Each offered lessons about how to decide what to do in the next chapter of life.