The Book Club is the newest addition to the World Affairs Council of Hilton Head (WACHH) program offerings. The Book Club presents an opportunity for us all to learn more broadly and deeply about both world affairs and domestic politics, to engage in stimulating discussions, and to make new friendships.

The Book Club is free and open to WACHH members and the public, but advance registration is required. Registration for each book club discussion will open one month in advance and is limited to 30 participants.

The Book Club meets the second Thursday of each month from 4:30 to 6:00 pm at The Island Rec Center Board Room, 20 Wilborn Rd, Hilton Head Island (next to the High school).

November 13, 2025

The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and The Secret History of Nuclear War by Fred Kaplan

From the author of the classic The Wizards of Armageddon and Pulitzer Prize finalist comes the definitive history of American policy on nuclear war—and Presidents’ actions in nuclear crises—from Truman to Trump.

Fred Kaplan, hailed by The New York Times as “a rare combination of defense intellectual and pugnacious reporter,” takes us into the White House Situation Room, the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s “Tank” in the Pentagon, and the vast chambers of Strategic Command to bring us the untold stories—based on exclusive interviews and previously classified documents—of how America’s presidents and generals have thought about, threatened, broached, and just barely avoided nuclear war from the dawn of the atomic age until today.

Kaplan’s historical research and deep reporting will stand as the permanent record of politics. Discussing theories that have dominated nightmare scenarios from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Kaplan presents the unthinkable in terms of mass destruction and demonstrates how the nuclear war reality will not go away, regardless of the dire consequences.

December 11, 2025

The End Of Ambition: America's Past, Present, And Future In The Middle East by Steven Cook

A clear-headed vision for the United States' role in the Middle East that highlights the changing nature of US national interests and the challenges of grand strategizing at a time of profound change in the international order.

Following a long series of catastrophic misadventures in the Middle East over the last two decades, the American foreign policy community has tried to understand what went wrong. After weighing the evidence, they have mostly advised a retreat from the region. The basic view is that when the United States tries to advance change in the Middle East, it only makes matters worse. 

In The End of Ambition, Steven A. Cook argues that while these analysts are rightly concerned that engagement drains US resources and distorts its domestic politics, the broader impulse to disengage tends to neglect important lessons from the past. Moreover, advocates of pulling back overlook the potential risks of withdrawal. Covering the relationship between the US and the Middle East since the end of WWII, Cook makes the bold claim that despite setbacks and moral costs, the United States has been overwhelmingly successful in protecting its core national interests in the Middle East. Conversely, overly ambitious policies to remake the region and leverage US power not only ended in failure, but rendered the region unstable in new and largely misunderstood ways. 

January 8, 2026

Breaking the Engagement: How China Won & Lost America  by David Shambaugh 

For over five decades following the 1972 rapprochement between the United States and China, the two countries seemed to be steadily building a sound relationship, even accounting for periodic setbacks like the Tiananmen Square massacre. The last decade, though, has seen a sharp increase in tensions and a complete reorientation of American policies toward China―from "engagement" to "competition."

What happened? In Breaking the Engagement: How China Won & Lost America, esteemed scholar David Shambaugh examines the evolution, expansion, and disintegration of the American engagement strategy towards China.

Shambaugh attributes the recent sharp deterioration of relations to a combination of China's actions and American expectations. Xi Jinping's increasingly assertive foreign policy and domestic repression has directly challenged American interests. More deeply, he argues that the real underlying cause is America's longstanding paternalistic approach to transform China into a liberal state and society which conforms with the US-led global liberal order. When China has generally evolved in this direction― politically, economically, socially, intellectually, and internationally―it corresponds with American aspirations and the two could cooperate. But when Beijing pushes back against this transformative strategy―which Beijing sees as subversion―Americans become disillusioned and U.S. policymakers see China as a malign regime, which must be countered.

Past Book Club Selections

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