David Austen Walsh’s “The Conservative Movement and the Far Right” commits the historical sin of projecting contemporary categories onto past figures and events

George Kennan was among the greatest American foreign policy minds of the 20th century

George Kennan’s “Sources of Soviet Conduct” article in Foreign Affairs remains one of the most influential of all time

May America amid its sins seek virtue and justice. And may America never be at peace with a world led by tyrants.

The fact that Americans have shifted their focus back to domestic concerns isn’t abnormal or un-American. It is the predictable resurgence of the two domestically focused schools of the American foreign policy tradition.

Matthew A. Sutton’s Double Crossed is an important book that offers a case study of how religious leaders contributed to national security in a challenging wartime environment.

Beginning in 1940, Reinhold Niebuhr made the case for a sober, realistic, and morally grounded US involvement overseas, out of the central admission that whatever America’s own faults, a punctilious detachment from world affairs might very well result in the triumph of greater imbalances and injustices

Here are some of the top books to help you understand the history of American foreign policy.

Born a hundred years ago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn would write The Gulag Archipelago, a blistering account of the Gulag system under Stalin. George Kennan called this novel “the most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be levied in modern times.”