Of Related Interest

Recent books of interest to the foreign affairs community.

Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare

Edward Fishman, Portfolio, 2025, $40.00/hardcover, e-book available, 555 pages.

Author Edward Fishman takes a close look at what he calls “the Age of Economic Warfare”—the period from 2006 to the present, which saw the development of “novel economic weapons” deployed against Iran, Russia (twice), and China. Fishman argues the sanctions imposed against Russia after its 2022 invasion of Ukraine marked a “hinge in history,” and the economic fragmentation that resulted, is leading us to a new geopolitical map and the end of globalization as we know it.

Edward Fishman was a State Department sanctions official who helped design and negotiate sanctions against Russia after its 2014 annexation of Crimea. He has also served at the Pentagon and in the Treasury Department. Fishman currently teaches at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and is a senior research scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy. He worked previously as an editor at Foreign Affairs and has published articles in The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, and other outlets.

Swap: A Secret History of the New Cold War

Drew Hinshaw and Joe Parkinson, Harper, 2025, $30.00/hardcover, e-book available, 304 pages.

After their Wall Street Journal colleague Evan Gershkovich was kidnapped and held by the Kremlin, investigative reporters Drew Hinshaw and Joe Parkinson worked with Gershkovich to uncover the previously unknown Russian intelligence agency responsible for arresting him and other Americans and using them as bargaining chips in negotiations with the U.S. government.

Swap tells the complex, behind-the-scenes story of the prisoner trades that ultimately brought Gershkovich home, along with American basketball star Brittney Griner, Paul Whelan, and others who were pawns in this secret conflict between superpowers. All told, 24 people from seven nations were exchanged in the August 2024 prisoner swap that brought Gershkovich home. This true story reads like a thriller but takes you deep inside the real-world spycraft and diplomatic negotiations between the United States and Russia.

Drew Hinshaw is a veteran Wall Street Journal reporter and a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist who has reported from more than 50 countries.

Joe Parkinson leads the WSJ’s world enterprise team and was previously the Africa bureau chief in Johannesburg and Turkey bureau chief in Istanbul.

Hinshaw and Parkinson won the Overseas Press Club’s 2021 Book of the Year award for Bring Back Our Girls.

Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization

Bill McKibben, W.W. Norton & Company, 2025, $19.99/paperback, e-book available, 240 pages.

Last summer’s fires ravaged the west coast of the United States, Canada, and Europe, making it yet more obvious that climate change is coming for us all. Environmentalist Bill McKibben’s latest book focuses not on the climate disasters unfolding globally, but on a solution that suddenly seems possible: harnessing the power of the sun to fuel the planet.

Energy from the sun and wind, he argues, has become the cheapest power source on the planet and has the potential to save us from the ravages of climate crisis while also building more humane political and economic structures that benefit us all. He points to successes such as in Pakistan, where ordinary citizens learned how to bypass the energy grid by installing their own solar panels, and California, which has nearly halved its use of natural gas in recent years.

Bill McKibben is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College and the author of The End of Nature (1989), Deep Economy (2007), and other books. He is the co-founder of Third Act, which mobilizes people over 60 for action on climate and justice and a past winner of the Gandhi Peace Prize.

The Milk Tea Alliance: Inside Asia’s Struggle Against Autocracy and Beijing

Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Columbia Global Reports, 2025, $18.00/paperback, e-book available, 104 pages.

In April 2020, netizens in Hong Kong, Bangkok, and Taipei joined forces to push back against supporters of mainland China. This online resistance movement became known as the Milk Tea Alliance—because most people in these countries use dairy products in their iconic tea drinks, whereas those in Beijing do not.

The author explores how alliance members—particularly, young activists Agnes Chow of Hong Kong and Netiwit Chotiphatphaisal of Thailand as well as an older Burmese activist, Ye Myint Win—have united to oppose the Chinese Communist Party. Through exchange tactics and pop culture, they have displayed solidarity and given young people hope for a better future.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom is a professor of history at the University of California–Irvine and the editor of the Journal of Asian Studies. He is also the Asia editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books and an associate fellow of the Asia Society.

The Struggle for the Market: Life and Hustle in Cuba’s New Economy

Ståle Wig, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025, $64.95/hardcover, e-book available, 224 pages.

Two years after Raúl Castro succeeded his brother as president of Cuba, he announced the country would begin reforming its economy. In a 2010 speech, he pointed to “the positive experience of capitalists” and made self-employment legal in the notoriously socialist country.

In The Struggle for the Market, anthropologist Ståle Wig looks at the market reforms that unfolded after that speech, telling the story of the Cubans who grappled with building a private market and the extent to which the government should stay involved in its development. Wig interviewed cuentapropistas—a newly invented term for now-legal private entrepreneurs who arose in the new economy—giving this book both an academic layer and personal angle.

Ståle Wig is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oslo and author of Havana Taxi.