Looking for some interesting books to get you through this pandemic? Here are a few new books about world affairs to consider reading in your spare time this summer.                            

Spoiler alert: Richard Stengel and Matthew Kroenig are two of the 14 speakers that are coming to speak at WACHH’s Friday Speaker Series this year.

Information Wars: How We Lost the Global Battle Against Disinformation and What We Can Do About It
by Richard Stengel
Disinformation is as old as humanity. When Satan told Eve nothing would happen if she bit the apple, that was disinformation. But the rise of social media has made disinformation even more pervasive and pernicious in our current era. In a disturbing turn of events, governments are increasingly using disinformation to create their own false narratives, and democracies are proving not to be particularly good at fighting it. 

The Return of Great Power Rivalry: Democracy versus Autocracy from the Ancient World to the U.S. and China
by Matthew Kroenig
The United States of America has been the most powerful country in the world for over seventy years, but recently the U.S. National Security Strategy declared that the return of great power competition with Russia and China is the greatest threat to U.S. national security. 

Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism
by Anne Applebaum
A Pulitzer Prize–winning historian explains, with electrifying clarity, why elites in democracies around the world are turning toward nationalism and authoritarianism. 

The World: A Brief Introduction
by Richard Haas
An invaluable primer from Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, that will help anyone, expert and non-expert alike, navigate a time in which many of our biggest challenges come from the world beyond our borders. 

Exercise of Power : American Failures, Successes, and a New Path Forward in the Post-Cold War World
by Robert Gates
From the former secretary of defense and author of the acclaimed #1 best-selling memoir, Duty, a candid, sweeping examination of power in all its manifestations, and how it has been exercised, for good and bad, by American presidents in the post-Cold War world.