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In chronicling CIA operative Edward Lansdale's adventurous life and approach to counterinsurgency, The Road Not Taken definitively reframes our understanding of the Vietnam War.

In his book A Great Place to Have a War, Joshua Kurlantzick tells the story of the CIA’s covert war in Laos during the Vietnam War. He examines how the country became, surprisingly, a U.S. policy priority, and analyzes why and how the CIA was able to build the war into one of the biggest covert operations in U.S. history. He further uses the Laos war as a prism to examine the CIA’s operations in the global war on terror today.

Against the backdrop of China’s mounting influence and North Korea’s growing nuclear capability and expanding missile arsenal, South Korea faces a set of strategic choices that will shape its economic prospects and national security. In South Korea at the Crossroads, Scott A. Snyder examines the trajectory of fifty years of South Korean foreign policy and offers predictions―and a prescription―for the future. Pairing a historical perspective with a shrewd understanding of today’s political landscape, Snyder contends that South Korea’s best strategy remains investing in a robust alliance with the United States.

Getting Russia Right offers a practitioner’s account of why the great post-Cold War hopes for an enduring U.S.-Russian strategic partnership grounded in free markets and democratic values gave way to a bitter adversarial relationship that puts the United States and Russia on opposing sides of the critical issues in global affairs today.

While the United States has been the world’s greatest champion of international cooperation, it has often resisted rules it wishes to see binding for other countries. In The Sovereignty Wars, Stewart M. Patrick defines what is at stake in the U.S. sovereignty debate. To protect U.S. sovereignty while advancing American interests, he asserts that the nation must occasionally make “sovereignty bargains” by trading its freedom of independent action in exchange for greater influence through expanded international cooperation.

A World in Disarray traces the origins of contemporary "order," including the state of the world following the Cold War when, for the first time in the modern era, major power rivalry was not the principal cause of disorder.

In his new book, State Capitalism: How the Return of Statism is Transforming the World, Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow for Southeast Asia Joshua Kurlantzick analyzes the rise in state capitalism in developing nations, including China, Russia, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brazil, and South Africa, among other states. He defines state capitalism as situations in which governments control or exert significant influence over at least one-third of the largest corporations in a country.

Today, nations increasingly carry out geopolitical combat through economic means. Policies governing everything from trade and investment to energy and exchange rates are wielded as tools to win diplomatic allies, punish adversaries, and coerce those in between. Not so in the United States, however. America still too often reaches for the gun over the purse to advance its interests abroad. The result is a playing field sharply tilting against the United States.

In The Hacked World Order, Adam Segal shows how governments use the web to wage war, spy on, coerce, and damage each other. While scholars, activists, and technologists initially heralded the Internet as a space outside of state control, governments have been quick to step into this new domain—both to control activity that happens within it and to adopt it as a new tool of state power.

In this book, CFR Senior Fellow Scott A. Snyder and coauthor Brad Glosserman investigate the roots of fractured relations between Japan and South Korea and their ongoing threat to the region and the world. Teaching notes by the author.