Books for the Century: Foreign Affairs

From: Books for the Century: The United States | Foreign Affairs

For our centennial issue, our reviewers each selected a set of books essential to understanding the past century and another set essential for imagining the century ahead.

The twenty-first century will be defined in part by the U.S.-Chinese relationship and its possible devolution into war. China’s meteoric economic and technological rise over the past few decades, the end of U.S. global economic dominance, and the deepening cracks in American democracy make the threat all too real. Rudd offers the best available treatment of this potential clash and how it might be avoided. He speaks fluent Mandarin and has visited China more than 100 times during and after his stints as prime minister of Australia. His sober assessment of the high risk of war (Chinese President Xi Jinping is “a man in a hurry when it comes to Taiwan”) makes more urgent his call for much deeper mutual understanding “of the other side’s strategic thinking” and the need to “conceptualize a world” where the two powers can “competitively coexist.”