In 2025, International Coverage contributors leaned on their distinctive areas of experience to weigh in on the buzziest books of the 12 months. Whether or not it was geostrategist Zbigniew Brzezinski’s onetime analysis assistant reviewing a biography of his boss or celebrated novelists recommending their favourite local weather fiction, the opinions under shed new gentle on titles which are driving ongoing conversations round historical past, technique, and overseas affairs.
1. The place Have All of the Geostrategists Gone?
By Theodore Bunzel, Might 16
In 2025, International Coverage contributors leaned on their distinctive areas of experience to weigh in on the buzziest books of the 12 months. Whether or not it was geostrategist Zbigniew Brzezinski’s onetime analysis assistant reviewing a biography of his boss or celebrated novelists recommending their favourite local weather fiction, the opinions under shed new gentle on titles which are driving ongoing conversations round historical past, technique, and overseas affairs.
1. The place Have All of the Geostrategists Gone?
By Theodore Bunzel, Might 16
How can we make sense of Zbigniew Brzezinski? Zbig, as he was recognized, was a fancy determine—and one important to understanding postwar U.S. overseas coverage.
U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s Polish-born nationwide safety advisor was “the Democrats’ Chilly Conflict sage who discovered admirers on Ronald Reagan’s foreign-policy workforce; an inveterate Russia hawk who was an arch-nemesis of neoconservatism within the George W. Bush years; and an early backer of Barack Obama,” writes Theodore Bunzel, Zbig’s former analysis assistant.
In accordance with Bunzel, Edward Luce’s current biography, Zbig, is a necessary information to Zbig’s thought and life, and it “correctly elevates Brzezinski’s standing within the pantheon of U.S. foreign-policy thinkers.” Bunzel writes that “Luce’s ebook leaves many impressions, however chief amongst them is that the USA now not produces many grand strategists like Brzezinski.”
2. How a ‘Fairy-Story Nation’ for Girls Turned Its Again on Feminism
By Laura Mills, Nov. 21
Alexandra Kollontai, a revolutionary feminist who turned the world’s first feminine cupboard minister after the 1917 Russian Revolution, as soon as referred to as the early Soviet Union a “fairy-tale nation” for ladies. Which will shock observers of contemporary Russia, a rustic beneath the grip of an avowedly anti-feminist regime.
Russian American journalist Julia Ioffe’s new ebook, Motherland, recovers this oft-forgotten historical past—reminding us, in reviewer Laura Mills’s phrases, “that the nation was dwelling to the world’s first feminist revolution and properly forward of the West on gender points for a lot of the twentieth century.”
“Ioffe takes us on a heady journey into the early Soviet period, when a largely rural and illiterate nation was, nearly in a single day, reworked into a spot with probably the most progressive gender norms on the planet,” Mills writes. “This soured within the postwar period, as—simply as as we speak—the catastrophic demographic fallout of struggle pushed anti-feminist backlash into overdrive, posing maybe the gravest risk to ladies’s rights but.”
3. How Washington’s Israel-Palestine Peace Course of Theology Failed Once more and Once more
By Khaled Elgindy, Oct. 6
A displaced baby waves a Palestinian flag whereas strolling on rubble within the Gaza Strip on Sept. 22. Eyad Baba/AFP by way of Getty Photos
There was no scarcity of autopsies on the two-state resolution lately. However based on scholar Khaled Elgindy, few works “do a greater job of capturing the persistent dissonance that plagued and finally doomed Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking than Tomorrow Is Yesterday.”
This new ebook, by Robert Malley and Hussein Agha—two veteran negotiators who suggested U.S. presidents and Palestinian management, respectively—provides perception into the failures of previous Center East diplomacy and the challenges going through U.S. President Donald Trump’s peace plan in Gaza.
“Finally, Agha and Malley search to dismantle the mythology of the peace course of, which, along with the two-state resolution, has come to occupy an area extra akin to faith than to diplomacy—a magical world created and sustained by U.S. officers wherein proof and expertise, in addition to trigger and impact, could possibly be suspended with out trigger or consequence,” Elgindy writes.
4. Can the U.S. Be a Nice Energy With out Harvard?
By Howard W. French, June 10
Because the Trump administration has launched unprecedented assaults on Harvard College and different establishments of upper schooling, many have questioned how the White Home’s marketing campaign will have an effect on U.S. universities and, in flip, the trajectory of the nation as a complete.
Enter Empire of Concepts by William C. Kirby, a former dean of Harvard College’s School of Arts and Sciences. A brand new version of the 2022 ebook was launched this summer season within the wake of lots of Trump’s measures. “On the coronary heart of Kirby’s engrossing ebook is the concept ‘a permanent[ly] wealthy nation can’t have, as a rule, poor universities,’” FP columnist Howard W. French writes. “And because the ebook suggests, nothing about Harvard’s present preeminence—or that of the USA’ world-leading college system—is a given.”
Within the face of Trump’s aggressive measures, French writes, “the query of whether or not the USA can maintain its nationwide wealth and energy has turn out to be an pressing one.”
5. 5 Novelists on Their Favourite Local weather Fiction
By Amitav Ghosh, Jessi Jezewska Stevens, Megha Majumdar, Eric Puchner, and Madeleine Thien, Nov. 7
“In technocratic settings, the specter of local weather catastrophe can appear distant—a future risk that some mixture of monetary pledges and fantastic print might nonetheless mitigate,” FP’s Allison Meakem writes. “Literature isn’t as charitable, and up to date novels typically powerfully discover the long-term penalties of our disregard for the Earth. For some readers, digesting a fictional worst-case state of affairs can compel real-life political shifts; they don’t need the plot to turn out to be true.”
On this books listing, which we launched simply forward of the 2025 United Nations local weather convention in November, 5 celebrated novelists—who’ve themselves written about local weather and the surroundings— suggest their favourite local weather fiction (or cli-fi) novels, starting from speculative ecological thrillers to a bildungsroman set in opposition to the backdrop of the fossil gas trade.
