Understanding Global Conflict and Cooperation: An Introduction to Theory and History

I picked this book up on a whim from a free books pile at a Stanford library as I remembered the name Joseph Nye from a high school international relations class. He coined the term “soft power”, the persuasive counterpart of hard power, which consisted of military intervention or economic sanctions. The book first delves into basic international relations theory and terms (not just classical Hobbesian realism and Lockean liberalism, but newer constructivism, neorealism, and Nye’s own neoliberalism as well). It then goes through the history from WWI to modern flashpoints. One thing that the book did very well was Prof. Nye’s tone in presenting opposing views, and instead of making the different thought schools clash, he presents their independent merits with very little affective bias. Keep in mind that the book is meant to be an academic textbook, but I found it to be a good overview on IR and presents a compact history of the 20th century, suitable for anyone and written lucidly.

The one point that surprised me was Nye’s keenness in the role of technology on the powers of states in the modern era. The edition I read was last updated in 2011, and Nye noted at that time that cybersecurity would be a primary transnational threat from several smaller cases of purported China hacking Germany, or Israel or US sabotaging Iran’s nuclear centrifuges with a worm. Only today have the public woken up to the cruel reality of the vulnerability of modern software with the Mueller investigation; many are still ignorant that attackers need one exploit whereas defenders need to find and patch every single exploit, and it doesn’t help that security only gets attention when it fails spectacularly. Nye is similarly ahead of the policymaker crowd in his stance on terrorism, especially the combination of rogue proliferation and decentralized groups that can lead to nuclear terrorism, and on the politics of climate change; it was deeply refreshing to read about these ideas and how they relate but differ from older history.