Tomorrow is election day. It brings -- at last -- an end to this exhausting campaign season. A respite that I'm sure President Obama and Gov. Romney welcome more than anyone. By this point just about everyone who cares in the outcome has had their chances to pontificate, contribute, mobilize, volunteer, and otherwise do their part for their chosen candidate. Our crew here at Shadow Government has expressed our opinions.

Many have observed that this is one of the most consequential elections in recent American history, and I don't disagree. There are not just two candidates competing but two different visions over the American future, and fundamental questions such as whether our nation can still be a place of opportunity, enterprise, aspiration, upward mobility, and limited yet effective government. But without downplaying the gravity of tomorrow's vote, here I want to pivot away from any last minute campaign interventions and instead reflect on this moment in the life of our nation - at once still young yet also the oldest constitutional republic in the world. History and geography both offer some welcome perspective and, I hope, reassurances for all Americans.

First, let us take pride in but never take for granted the fact that whichever candidate loses will honor the will of the electorate. Every time an incumbent American president is defeated, he willingly steps aside and permits the greatest peaceful transfer of power in world history. Every time a challenger loses to an incumbent, he accepts the result and submits to the authority of his president. Even the most fervent partisans on both sides will appreciate that should President Obama lose, he will graciously relinquish power to President-elect Romney. And if Gov. Romney loses, he will graciously step aside and honor President Obama's second term. Americans don't have to worry about the defeated candidate mobilizing a militia of tanks in the streets, or riots in the cities, or secession. (Sure, Florida in 2000 wasn't pretty, but the fact that it was peacefully resolved further reinforces this point).

Second, while the consequences of this election are substantial, they are not existential. Our nation's current trials are severe, but we have been through worse. This is not 1796, when the question of whether our republican experiment in ordered liberty would endure was answered by George Washington's willingness to step aside and allow an election for his successor. This is not 1860, when secession and war loomed, and the nation's very existence was in peril. This is not 1940, when world war approached. And this is not any of the Cold War elections, when Americans voted not just for the man who would preside over their economy but also over the launch codes and contest with the Soviet Union that threatened global apocalypse.

Third, the very fact that we can vote and choose our leaders is a blessing that many in the world today do not know. Two days after our presidential election, the Chinese government will also begin to transfer power from Hu Jintao to Xi Jinping - an outcome that is foreordained, and that 1.3 billion Chinese citizens will have no say in. Russia held its own stage-managed election earlier this year, when the only uncertainty was the final numbers in the manufactured margin of Vladimir Putin's coronation. Some 35,000 Syrian citizens have been killed by their own government for their efforts to demand accountability of their rulers and a voice in their nation's future. Many Iranians risked (or even sacrificed) their lives for the same thing in 2009. The freedom we have in the United States to choose our own leaders and know that they will honor the democratic process "has been bought with a price," to invoke the biblical phrase. Let us honor it, and be thankful, as we vote this election day.

Last night's presidential debate was largely devoted to domestic and economic policy, reflecting the primary concerns of voters during this election season. Yet one of the few times that foreign policy came up has also generated a considerable amount of post-debate commentary -- the exchange between President Obama and Governor Romney over last month's Benghazi consulate attack. The complexities of the case came out when debate moderator Candy Crowley's clumsy effort to officiate actually made things worse, and was widely seen as an unfair intervention against Romney -- as Crowley now admits.

Even more notable, today's purported effort by the New York Times at "Clearing the Record on Benghazi" seems to be an unfortunate case of either sloppiness or partisan distortion in the guise of fact-checking. Reporter Scott Shane goes to great lengths to absolve President Obama of mischaracterizing the Benghazi consulate attack on September 11. Specifically, Shane says that "Mr. Obama applied the "terror" label to the attack in his first public statement on the events in Benghazi" and "the next day, Sept. 13, in a campaign appearance in Las Vegas, he used similar language." The article then tries to excuse the fact that the Obama administration refused to characterize the Benghazi atrocities as an organized attack by a terrorist group with the head-scratching assertion that "the 'act of terror' references attracted relatively little notice at the time, and later they appeared to have been forgotten even by some administration officials."

As anyone who has worked in either government or the media knows, senior administration officials use their public words carefully, deliberately, and in a coordinated manner -- they do not simply "forget" how to describe a major event in which four American officials were killed.

The fact that President Obama used the word "terror" is beside the point, since even a spontaneous mob lynching (the White House's preferred characterization at the time) is an "act of terror." Moreover, as anyone who has read the White House transcript can immediately tell, Obama used the word "terror" in reference to the anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks. Curiously Shane's article omits this context and fails to link to the transcript.

Rather, the core question from Benghazi is whether it was a pre-meditated attack by an organized terrorist group, or spontaneous mob violence in response to the anti-Muhammed video. The available evidence overwhelmingly substantiates that it was the former, yet for over a week after the attack the Obama administration systematically insisted that it was the latter.

This line was most evident in U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice's talking points, delivered verbatim at the behest of the White House on multiple news shows. Those talking points were explicitly designed to do two things: 1) knock back the "this was a terrorist attack" allegation and 2) advance the White House's preferred angle that the assault on the consulate was a spontaneous mob response to the offensive video. This deliberate messaging campaign achieved both goals temporarily, until more evidence began to surface publicly about both the nature of the attack and the early reporting on it by the American intelligence community.

Only after this campaign crumbled did the Obama administration decide to pivot awkwardly to the new angle that President Obama himself pushed last night -- creating the misleading impression that the White House had never peddled the "this wasn't a pre-meditated terrorist attack" line in the first place.

Why does this even matter? Because it is not a trivial quibble over words but rather a serious debate over some of the Obama administration's core national security doctrines and claims of success. To Shane's credit, he mentions this at the end of his article. Specifically, the White House has for months been boasting that Al Qaeda is near-defeat, and has been portraying the 2011 Libya intervention as an unqualified success. These are in part political claims that feature in the Obama re-election campaign, but they are also policy commitments that guide how the administration acts -- including mid-level State Department officials who deny requests for increased security in Libya.

The fact that an Islamist terrorist group with links to al Qaeda and operating in Libya could stage such a destructive attack on American property and personnel severely undercuts both of those White House claims. Al Qaeda and its fellow travelers may not be "on its heels" after all (as even the White House might now be acknowledging), and "leading from behind" coupled with anemic post-conflict stabilization efforts may not have led to a stable, peaceful Libya. At a minimum, those are legitimate topics for debate.  

A perpetual concern of policymakers is to learn from the purported "lessons of the past," and in particular to avoid the alleged mistakes of their predecessors. This mentality characterizes almost all presidential administrations that assume power following a presidency by the other party, and was especially explicit in the Obama White House as it took office determined to be the "un-Bush." Exhibit A in this paradigm was the Iraq War, and among the lessons that the Obama team took from Iraq were the profound risks and unintended consequences of American interventions in troubled Middle Eastern countries. These negative outcomes included sectarian strife, the strengthening of extremist elements, regional conflict and instability, massive civilian suffering, and loss of American prestige and influence. 

Yet here is the problem. Now that a year and a half has elapsed in the war in Syria, and the Obama administration's non-involvement has resulted in ... sectarian strife, the strengthening of extremist elements, regional conflict and instability, massive civilian suffering, and loss of American prestige and influence.  

Consider this grim assessment from today's New York Times article by David Sanger (a reporter generally quite sympathetic to the Obama administration). Reporting on how the arms being supplied to Syrian rebels by Saudi Arabia and Qatar are ending up in the hands of the most virulent Islamic extremists, Sanger observes this "casts into doubt whether the White House's strategy of minimal and indirect intervention in the Syrian conflict is accomplishing its intended purpose of helping a democratic-minded opposition topple an oppressive government, or is instead sowing the seeds of future insurgencies hostile to the United States." 

Jackson Diehl renders an even more caustic verdict in today's Washington Post. President Obama's posture on Syria "exemplifies every weakness in his foreign policy -- from his excessive faith in "engaging" troublesome foreign leaders to his insistence on multilateralism as an end in itself to his self-defeating caution in asserting American power. The result is not a painful but isolated setback, but an emerging strategic disaster: a war in the heart of the Middle East that is steadily spilling over to vital U.S. allies, such as Turkey and Jordan, and to volatile neighbors, such as Iraq and Lebanon."

In other words, the Obama administration's hands-off approach has contributed to the very outcomes that the White House presumably wanted to avoid, and thought it could avoid by "learning from Iraq." 

This does not mean that a more assertive American role -- whether directly supplying arms to the rebels, or more active covert support, or enforcing a no-fly zone, or even stronger measures -- would have been cost-free or even successful.  Policymaking is inherently uncertain, with risks, trade-offs, and potential downsides for just about any action taken or not taken.  We can't know for sure that an American intervention of some sort would have produced a substantially better outcome.  But we can (and do) know that the Obama administration's approach has been disastrous. 

What are some potential implications of all this? First, learning from history does not mean rigidly applying the template of the past to the present -- in other words, don't assume that just because one previous intervention turned out one way, any future intervention is bound to turn out the same way. Dissimilarities matter as much as similarities. Second, consider the past alternatives. When assessing a historical episode, don't just look at how it played out, but consider also how alternative courses of action might have transpired. In the case of learning the lessons of Iraq, this means not only examining the many mistakes made by the Bush administration, but also examining how if at all the past containment and sanctions regime could have been maintained, or what the consequences of a Saddam Hussein still in power might be. Third, when weighing the costs of any particular action, consider the costs of inaction as well. In the case of Syria, those latter costs are becoming sadly and regrettably clear. 

I've periodically commented here at Shadow Government on the issue of religious freedom, especially in the context of the Arab Awakening and the Obama administration's relatively weak commitment to an effective international religious freedom policy. On that note, Shadow readers might be interested in an article I've just written here for Policy Review, taking a deeper look at the potential connection between international religious freedom and national security.

Religious freedom is one of those issues that few leaders in the American national security community would actually oppose (after all it is one of our nation's founding principles), but few are willing to make it a foreign policy priority because it is often regarded as a merely humanitarian issue of little if any strategic consequence. In the article I explore some possible ways that religious freedom might actually be related to other strategic priorities such as peace and stability, and ways that religious freedom violations might actually be indicators of potential security threats. This leads to my provisional conclusion that "There is not a single nation in the world that both respects religious freedom and poses a security threat to the United States." In turn, I suggest ways that making international religious freedom more of a policy priority can potentially help diagnose, ameliorate, and even prevent emerging security concerns.

This is admittedly just an initial exploration, and my conclusions are both tentative and speculative. At a minimum I hope it encourages deeper and more sustained research into this area (PhD students take note: This could make for an interesting dissertation topic). And for the policy community, as I've said before I hope that religious liberty advocates will consider whether and why this issue might have strategic relevance beyond its innate moral appeal. As the broader Middle East faces an uncertain future and continues to be convulsed by competing visions that largely fall along the fault lines of religious intolerance and religious tolerance, an effective religious freedom policy will be a strategic necessity for the next four years -- regardless of which presidential candidate wins on November 6.

Last summer I ruminated on President Obama's curious lack of personal connections with any global leaders of note. Peter Feaver's post below on Iraq and this New York Times story both demonstrate how this deficiency continues to hinder the Obama administration's foreign policy. The Times article describes Obama's "failure to build close personal relationships with foreign leaders that can, especially in the Middle East, help the White House to influence decisions made abroad."

Peter's post and the Times article both point to diplomatic mistakes made with Maliki in Iraq and Mubarak in Egypt. Meanwhile, the list continues to grow of President Obama's other missed opportunities, failures, and simmering crises that all could have benefitted from better personal relationships and rapports -- such as with Karzai in Afghanistan, Abdullah in Saudi Arabia, Merkel in Germany, Harper in Canada, Noda in Japan (the Senkaku Islands standoff between Japan and China could get much worse), Singh in India, Zardari in Pakistan, and especially Netanyahu in Israel. Sure, some of these global leaders can be difficult to get along with, but diplomacy has never been easy.

The two cases of Obama's positive relationships that have been reported were with Dmitri Medvedev, the erstwhile Russian president (and current but largely irrelevant Prime Minister), and Prime Minister Erdogan in Turkey. These are exceptions that prove the rule, and notably neither relationship seems to have produced significant policy results. Turkey's democracy continues to erode while it pursues a hedging strategy in the region. The White House's earlier effort to cultivate Medvedev was a failed bet on the wrong leader that damaged the U.S. posture with Russia, exemplified by Obama's hot-mic supplications to the Russians for "flexibility."

It may well be that President Obama has cultivated strong personal relationships with some other world leaders that have not yet been publicly disclosed. But given this White House's propensity to leak foreign policy information intended to cast the boss in a favorable light, the fact that a credulous media hasn't run many stories on such friendships probably means they don't exist. This lack of personal chemistry with foreign leaders seems of a piece with Obama's lack of personal connections with American Congressional leaders, as described in unflattering detail by many sources such as Bob Woodward's new book.

In my post last year I observed how previous leaders such as Secretary of State George Shultz and President Bush 43 cultivated personal relationships with their international counterparts, often doing so deliberately during times of calm, before crises struck. Other positive examples abound in the annals of American diplomacy, such President Clinton's close rapport with Tony Blair, or President Bush 41's deft statecraft with numerous leaders in ending the Cold War and successful efforts to line up multinational support for the Persian Gulf War. Or from the more distant past, my class this week read Mary Ann Glendon's excellent book on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, where Eleanor Roosevelt's personal warmth and persistent diplomacy brought together a wildly diverse and fractious group of international leaders behind a common human rights framework at the outset of the Cold War.

Personal relationships among leaders by themselves do not guarantee success. And for all of their advantages, they can also at times cloud good judgment, such as when Ronald Reagan's personal loyalties to German Chancellor Helmut Kohl led to the infamous visit to the Bitburg cemetery.

Yet the advantages of cultivating close bonds are manifest, and the failure to do so can be costly. For the Obama administration, the strategic consequences of this deficiency have resulted in a largely reactive foreign policy. While it is impossible to anticipate and stay abreast of all events, this White House to a surprising degree still seems to be regularly caught off guard, and leaves much of the rest of the world wondering where it stands and where it wants to steer the ship of state going forward. Having a few more world leaders on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue's direct dial would be a small but meaningful step in the right direction.

Reading the recent spate of Democratic attacks on Republican foreign policy, particularly against the Romney foreign policy platform, I have been struck by how frequently Democrats invoke the "bipartisan" foreign policy traditions of the past, and laud previous Republican presidents such as Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush for their wise statecraft. These sanctimonious hymns to bipartisanship are invariably accompanied by shrill denunciations of Gov. Mitt Romney and today's Republicans as "reckless," "ideological," and "extreme."

For example, Charlie Kupchan and Bruce Jentleson lament that "the United States is today deeply polarized, bereft of the bipartisan consensus that long anchored its statecraft." Democrat columnist Michael Cohen pines (or rather feigns pining) for the bygone days when "Republicans owned the issue of national security. They radiated confidence, experience, and self-assuredness on how they would manage the responsibilities of America's unique global role." Most recently, Democratic Senator and Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry wrote here at FP.com that:

"The tragedy of the divisive remarks about Obama's national security record we have heard recently is the missed opportunity it represents. A more bipartisan approach would be in the best interest of the nation. The irony is it was not always this way and does not have to be this way in the future. In the past, both parties have come together in common cause. For example, President George H.W. Bush and his excellent foreign-policy team of James Baker, Brent Scowcroft, and Larry Eagleburger did a very good job of uniting us after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, with the first Gulf War and even in Central America. Even if both parties didn't completely agree, they respected one another and held honest conversations about what was in the national interest."

Here's the problem: this "bipartisan consensus" has rarely existed. The Republican policies that now receive Democratic praise were often in their day subject to partisan Democrat attacks. And many of the past Republican presidents now lauded by Democrats on foreign policy grounds -- such as Eisenhower, Reagan, and Bush 41 -- were often vilified by Democrats while in office. For example, after Reagan famously called the Soviet Union an "evil empire" in 1983, Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill derisively accused Reagan of "red-baiting." As Steve Hayward points out in this excellent Commentary article, the next year O'Neill's rhetoric became downright vicious with his assertion that "the evil is in the White House at the present time. And that evil is [Ronald Reagan]." Likewise, reflecting the views of many Democrats at that time, Senator Alan Cranston made the reckless accusation that "Reagan is a trigger-happy president [with a] simplistic and paranoid worldview leading us toward a nuclear collision that could end us all."

Sen. Kerry's paean of bipartisan praise for the George H. W. Bush foreign policy also reflects a selective historical memory. Bush's signature national security initiative after the end of the Cold War was the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Bush's request to Congress for war authorization very narrowly passed the Senate by a 52-47 vote, with the vast majority of Senate Democrats opposing it, accounting for all but two of the negative votes. These opposing votes included one Democrat who compared the war to Vietnam, called it a "mistake," and declared on the Senate floor that:

"...if we do go to war, for years people will ask why Congress gave in. They will ask why there was such a rush to so much death and destruction when it did not have to happen. It does not have to happen if we do our job. So I ask my colleagues if we are really once again so willing to have our young and our innocent bear the price of our impatience. I personally believe, and I have heard countless of my colleagues say, that they think the President made a mistake to unilaterally increase troops, set a date and make war so probable. I ask my colleagues if we are once again so willing to risk people dying from a mistake."

That Democrat was Senator John Kerry. And while he now praises Bush 41's foreign policy for "uniting" Americans, at the time this unity did not include Kerry's support.

Yes, partisanship and history can go both ways. The Democrat Harry Truman is rightly revered by many Republicans today for his robust anticommunism and hawkish internationalism, but during his presidency his foreign policy endured partisan attacks from Republicans such as Robert Taft -- though Truman also enjoyed strong support from other Republicans such as Senate Foreign Relations Committee leader Arthur Vandenberg. In more recent years, some Congressional Republicans launched irresponsible partisan criticisms of the Clinton administration over the 1999 Kosovo bombing campaign. Yet on the other side of the ledger, many Republicans have lent bipartisan support for some of the Obama administration's foreign policy initiatives. These include the letters organized by the Foreign Policy Initiative and signed by many Republicans (including me) endorsing the Libya intervention, or the fact that Republicans account for virtually all of the popular support for the Obama administration's ongoing deployment of 68,000 American troops to fight the war in Afghanistan.

Of course supporting one aspect of a foreign policy does not obligate an opposition Party to support all aspects, or to give the governing administration a free pass on the failure to implement the policy faithfully. Democrats who voted for the use of force against Iraq in 2002 (such as Kerry, Biden, and Clinton) certainly felt free to criticize the war when it went poorly -- and to continue criticizing it a decade later. And Republicans such as myself who supported Obama's decision to intervene in Libya are likewise free to point out how myriad failures in implementation and execution helped contribute to the ongoing chaos and extremism there. This by no means implicates the White House in the horrific murders of American officials in Benghazi yesterday, but as with Iraq it does highlight the tragic costs of post-conflict stabilization failures.

All things considered, looking through the light of history at the recent proliferation of Democratic paeans to past "bipartisan" foreign policies and previous Republican presidents, one cannot escape a suspicion. Too often the Democratic role has entailed vocally opposing Republican policies at the time, and then later when those Republican policies have proven successful, either embracing them retrospectively (as with the recent Democratic encomia to Eisenhower, Reagan, and Bush 41), or adopting them outright (as President Obama has done with many of Bush 43's policies). All of which should at the least raise a skeptical eyebrow at the ongoing Democratic denunciations of Romney's foreign policy.

[Full Disclosure: Like Kori Schake, I have also served as an informal advisor to the Romney campaign, though I do not speak for the campaign.]

For the past decade, it has been virtually impossible to attend a conference or panel discussion on United Nations reform without someone within the first five minutes making the point that the current lineup of permanent UN Security Council members is a hopelessly archaic snapshot of great powers in 1945 and desperately needs updating. I have long agreed, and even indulged in that talking point myself on numerous occasions. [Sidenote: A tip for students and interns looking for an easy way to get senior policy leaders to notice you and nod in agreement at cocktail receptions -- if there is ever a lull in the policy chatter, just clear your throat and solemnly make this point about U.N. reform. And if one of your friends who read this beats you to it in the conversation, other reliable stand-bys include saying "You know, I really think the US needs to think more strategically" and "I must say, our national security system is broken and really needs a comprehensive interagency reform, just like Goldwater-Nichols."  Of such points are blue-ribbon task forces and future conferences made...] 

But every now and then -- every four years to be precise -- something happens in world affairs that shows perhaps the current P-5 membership of the U.S., China, UK, Russia, and France isn't necessarily so obsolete after all. Yes, the Olympics. Looking at the medal tables from the just-concluded London Olympics, the top four medal winning countries also happen to be four permanent members of the UNSC: the U.S., China, UK, and Russia. And the fifth permanent UNSC member, France, is not far behind at all at eighth in the medal rankings.  Furthermore, the countries ranked fifth and sixth in the medal tables are Germany and Japan, both of whom have for years been making credible claims for permanent UNSC membership.  Nor is this year a fluke. The 2008 Beijing Olympics had the same four countries atop the medal tables, with France even closer in sixth place, while Germany and Japan were fifth and eleventh, respectively.  

What, if anything, do the Olympics tell us about measurements of national power? This is admittedly a question with a touch of frivolity -- perhaps all that the medal tables tell us is which countries are most devoted to sports. But as Victor Cha and other scholars have pointed out, sports have never been insulated from geopolitics. Even a cursory glance at past Olympics reveals this, whether Jesse Owens' one-man rebuttal of Hitler's racialism at the 1936 Berlin Games, the legendary "Blood in the Water" Hungary-USSR water polo match at the 1956 Olympics in the shadow of the Soviet invasion of Hungary, the reciprocal boycotts staged by the United States and Soviet Union in 1980 and 1984, or even China's use of the 2008 games to assert its global power status. As even a realist like Steve Walt has confessed, the Olympics can tap into and fuel incipient nationalist sentiments among the otherwise unsentimental.

Here I thought it would be interesting to look at Olympic medal counts in comparison with more traditional metrics of national power, such as GDP and defense budgets. (GDP and military expenditures are both admittedly crude proxies for national power; for a more extensive exploration of how power might be measured, see my American Interest article on same.) In putting together the table below, I listed the top 10 countries in total medals won at the London Olympics, and below them for comparison added six other countries that are generally considered "rising powers" in global affairs: India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Turkey, and South Africa. I then listed each nation's global rank in total GDP (nominal) and in defense spending. This is just a whimsical first cut, of course, so any political scientists out there are quite welcome to apply some methodological rigor and see if there are any genuine findings to be had.

What does this tell us? Overall that wealth, military spending, and Olympic success seem to go together -- not too surprising. The national characteristics necessary to produce Olympic-level elite athletes seem to involve a blend of hard and soft power quotients. The most obvious hard power dimension is economic; nations with more wealth are able to devote more resources to supporting Olympic training and facilities. Population levels are certainly a factor, but in relation to overall wealth. In the domain of soft power, nations with functioning governance can effectively direct their resources for determined purposes, such as developing a system to encourage Olympic athletes. Some dimension of culture is another soft power quotient that may play a part, for the self-evident reason that cultures that value sports in general, and in many cases particular sports, are more likely to produce Olympic athletes. To take just one example, as a former water polo player I've always been fascinated by the tremendously disproportionate number of elite water polo teams who come from south-central Europe, principally Hungary and the former Yugoslavia. The fact that three out of the four final teams in water polo this year were Serbia, Croatia, and Montenegro shows what a powerhouse the remnants of Yugoslavia remain. Or Jamaica in track and field, which despite its meager power measurements on traditional metrics (e.g. military, economy, governance) has produced the world's finest sprinting program. Or Romania in gymnastics, and so on. 

The other side of the coin is countries that are ascendant as economic and/or military powers but who still punch below their weight at the Olympics. From the table above, the three countries that stand out the most are India, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia -- all of which rank much higher in GDP and defense spending than in Olympic medal counts. This is understandable given that ascendant powers usually first focus on getting their fundamentals of economic growth, infrastructure, and defense on track before devoting national resources to sports sponsorship. Conversely, Olympic results are often a lagging indicator for declining powers. Nations such as Russia that are otherwise in relative economic and military decline still produce  Olympic successes, perhaps partly due to the inherited infrastructure and tradition of supporting elite Russian athletes.

Overall the American successes in London are perhaps another small but telling indicator that American decline is not yet upon us.  Now that the Olympics are over, here in Texas we are looking forward to the start of football season. As long as the United States still has football season come around every fall, I won't worry too much about American decline.  

As much of the world heads into August vacation season, we've canvassed our Shadow Government contributors to find out what they are reading (or plan to read) this month. Below are our book recommendations; in many cases our contributors added a few words of background as well. No surprise, many of the books are related to foreign policy, but with some creative twists here and there.

Mitchell Reiss:

I've just finished Christopher Buckley's new book, They Eat Puppies, Don't They? and Nate Fick's One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer, which is the assigned book for Washington College first year students this coming academic year. (Nate is coming to campus later this year to meet with the students and discuss the book's themes of leadership and responsibility.) I am currently finishing Maya Jasanoff's Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World, which won this year's George Washingtion Book Prize as the best book on the revolutionary era. And I hope to start next Rob Litwak's final installment of his foreign policy "trilogy," Outlier States: American Strategies to Change, Contain or Engage Regimes.

Paul Bonicelli:

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson. Excellent review of the causes of poverty and lack of development because it focuses on the absolute requirement for democratic governance and the rule of law to secure property rights. However, it fudges the culture issue by assuming that institutions and culture are somehow different things, as though the latter does not produce the former.

On China, by Henry Kissinger. Because it's Kissinger.

Eminence: Cardinal Richelieu and the Rise of France, by Jean-Vincent Blanchard. Diplomats and policymakers can learn much from this genius who shaped modern European and world affairs to this day by being the first to insist that his state's interests were his North Star. Leaders of an exceptional nation-state like the US have interests beyond power, but they can't achieve them without understanding what Richelieu knew and how he operated for good and bad.

Conspirata: A Novel of Ancient Rome, by Robert Harris. Harris is a master at showing us who Cicero was: a statesman who loved the republic but was a consummate realist in all he did to restore the liberties of Rome (such as they were). He got his hands dirty, but he saved the republic for a few more years by, among other things, defeating the Cataline Conspiracy, the subject of this novel. Harris takes liberties in this work of fiction, but it is nonetheless instructive.

Dan Runde:

State of Disrepair, by Kori Schake (yes, that Kori Schake!)

Why Nations Fail, by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson

Kori Schake:

Ranald S. Mackenzie on the Texas Frontier, by Ernest Wallace. A history of white settlement of the southwest and the role played in it by the soldier who finally figured out how to win the Indian wars.

Bright's Passage, by Josh Ritter. A lyrical novel about a World War I veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress, reminder of the toll that combat takes on the people who fight it for us, how important and difficult it is to stitch them back into society.

The Lost Books of the Odyssey, by Zachary Mason. A collection of short story excursions on themes from the Odyssey. Homer would be turning cartwheels to see his material used with such vigor and creativity.

Will Inboden:

War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy. Why? Because I've never read it before. Impression thus far: it's very long. And very good.

The Reason for God, by Timothy Keller. An erudite and winsome defense of the intellectual plausibility of the Christian faith.

Postwar by Tony Judt. The word "magisterial" is woefully overused, but in the case of Judt's elegant history of Europe from World War II to the present, it is wholly merited.

Phil Levy:

Capital: A Novel, by John Lanchester. A well-written tale of London that I started on a recent trip there.

Why Nations Fail, by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson. Two very good authors try to disentangle history, politics, and economics.

Bring Up the Bodies, by Hilary Mantel. The sequel to Wolf Hall! A distinctive writing style; not necessarily easy, but very rewarding.

Mike Singh:

George F. Kennan: An American Life, by John Lewis Gaddis. A great historian writing about one of the last century's most important diplomats.

At Home, by Bill Bryson. Bryson serves up a reminder about how advances in technology - including seemingly mundane ones - have repeatedly had a major and unforeseen impact on politics and international affairs. Plus beach reading is supposed to be entertaining, after all.

Dan Twining:

Why the West Rules (for Now), by Ian Morris. Meta-history at its best by an archaeologist who combines insights from history, geography, and sociology to explain why it was the West, not the East, that came to dominate the modern world. Like many students of the past, though, his predictions for the future are questionable. Read it for its rich historical insights rather than using it as a crystal ball.

Jews, God, & History (2nd edition), by Max Dimont. As a non-Jew, I discovered this book on my current trip to Israel. Excerpt: "Jewish history is too fascinating, too interesting, too incredible to remain the private property of Jews and scholars.... Jewish history cannot be told as the history of Jews only, because they have nearly always lived within the context of other civilizations. The destiny of the Jews has paralleled the destinies of those same civilizations, except in one important respect. Somehow the Jews managed to escape the cultural death of each of the civilizations within which they dwelled. Somehow the Jews managed to survive the death of one civilization and continue their cultural growth in another which was emerging at the time."

Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India, by Lawrence James. When I lived in New Delhi we shunned literature on Britain's Indian empire so as not to give our Indian friends the idea that we were colonial romanticists or Orientalists. However, the legacy of the Raj lives on in India's institutions and in its expanding foreign policy horizons, and it is difficult to understand modern India without an awareness of the nationalist and modernist currents that emerged from the colonial experience. To the extent that the modern world grew out of a British empire on which the sun never set, Britain's experience in India is central to the narrative of global history, and to understanding Asia's other big rising power.

The Irony of American History, by Reinhold Niebuhr. I recently rediscovered the joys of Niebuhr's philosophy when Shadow Government co-editor and German Marshall Fund fellow Will Inboden gave a presentation of his new paper on Niebuhr's relevance to our understanding of international politics today. During the early Cold War, Niebuhr's thinking on the intersection of human morality (including its darker undercurrents) with democracy, totalitarianism, and the international balance of power shaped the work of generations of scholars and practitioners. His rich understanding of the human condition and its expression in the instruments of state power are a welcome antidote for students of political science unconvinced by the austerity of structural realism and other modern theories of international relations.

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