Recent books of interest to the foreign affairs community.

Revolutionary Diplomacy: Spanish Connections and the Birth of the United States

Thomas E. Chávez, University of Virginia Press, 2025, $29.50/paperback, e-book available, 186 pages.

Historian Thomas Chávez spent nine years overseeing the collection, transcription, translation, and publication of all documents pertinent to Benjamin Franklin in Spain’s archives. From these he’s written four books; Revolutionary Diplomacy is his latest.

Chavez told the University of Virginia’s Author’s Corner that while many Americans know about France’s contributions to our fight for independence, fewer are aware that Spanish men, matériel, and “diplomatic muscle” also played a critical role.

Chávez outlines the successes and failures of the American partnership with Spain during the Revolutionary War. He also introduces readers to Franklin’s fellow envoys Silas Deane, Arthur Lee, John Jay, and Robert Morris, recounting their negotiations with Spain, which helped to expand a mere colonial rebellion into a full-fledged war.

Thomas Chávez has a PhD in history from the University of New Mexico.

Daughters of the Bamboo Grove: From China to America, a True Story of Abduction, Adoption, and Separated Twins

Barbara Demick, Random House, 2025, $32.00/hardcover, e-book available, 352 pages.

Already a mother of two, Yuan Zanhua knew her pregnancy was forbidden by China’s one-child policy. So when her twins, Fangfang and Shuangjie, were born in 2000, she and her husband left baby Fangfang in the care of relatives, hoping to evade punishment. But when Fangfang was nearly 2, she was violently taken from the family, who had no idea how or where to search for her.

Barbara Demick was the Beijing bureau chief for The Los Angeles Times when she began exploring the origins, cruelty, and long-term effects of China’s one-child policy, and the religious movement behind many international adoptions. Demick tracked down Fangfang—now living in the United States and renamed Esther by an adoptive family that had no idea of her traumatic past. The well-researched story hinges on whether the twins will meet again and what might happen if they do. China experts and consular officials focused on adoptions will find the story particularly compelling.

Barbara Demick is a former foreign correspondent for The Los Angeles Times who served as bureau chief in Beijing and in Seoul.

Decoding Iran’s Foreign Policy: Strategic Interests, Power and Influence

Ross Harrison, I.B. Tauris, 2025, $26.95/paperback, e-book available, 288 pages.

In Decoding Iran’s Foreign Policy, author Ross Harrison attempts to bypass the typically polarizing debates about Iran by using a “strategic lens” to offer an objective explanation of Iran’s foreign policy goals.

Harrison explains how the challenges posed by regional and global actors, as well as Iran’s own long history, affect Iranian foreign policy today. He argues that it is necessary to understand the different strains in Iran’s foreign policy—both ideological and practical—in order to predict its future behavior.

Ross Harrison is a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington, D.C., and an adjunct professor at the University of Pittsburgh. For more than 15 years, Harrison taught at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. His work has appeared in publications including The National Interest, Al-Monitor, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, and Parameters (U.S. Army War College).

Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future

Dan Wang, W. W. Norton, 2025, $31.99/hardcover, e-book available, 288 pages.

Author Dan Wang spent a decade living in Hong Kong, Beijing, and Shanghai, investigating and reporting on China’s astonishing technological progress during that period. He watched as bridges, railways, and buildings went up seemingly overnight, and with them the economic situations of everyday Chinese citizens. But, as he outlines in Breakneck, this progress hasn’t come without pain: China’s rapid advancement, he argues, has been thanks in part to political suppression, government surveillance, and social engineering.

Wang calls China an “engineering state,” comparing it to the U.S., where development has stalled because lawyers and others reflexively block even positive changes. Wang points to similarities between the two rival countries and argues that if China and the United States learned to value each other’s strengths, both Americans and Chinese would benefit.

Dan Wang is a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover History Lab. His essays have appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, and The Financial Times.

The Once and Future World Order: Why Global Civilization Will Survive the Decline of the West

Amitav Acharya, Basic Books, 2025, $32.50/hardcover, e-book available, 464 pages.

To understand today’s economic, political, and cultural collapse, political scientist Amitav Acharya takes readers back thousands of years, looking at examples of cooperation and peace that long predate the creation of the United States.

Acharya argues that the West does not have a monopoly on the concepts of individual rights, freedom, or democracy, and he cites examples from ancient Egypt, India, and China as he builds his case that today’s crisis is not unique in history. In fact, he argues, the end of Western dominance could allow non-Western nations to build a better, more prosperous world, if only we can learn from our joined history.

Amitav Acharya is a distinguished professor of international relations at American University, where he holds the UNESCO Chair in Transnational Challenges and Governance at the School of International Service, and serves as the chair of the ASEAN Studies Initiative.

Other Recent Books of Interest

Tomorrow Is Yesterday: Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel/Palestine

Hussein Agha and Robert Malley, Macmillan, 2025, $30.00/hardcover, e-book available, 272 pages.

 

The American Revolution and the Fate of the World

Richard Bell, Riverhead Books, 2025, $35.00/hardcover, e-book available, 416 pages.

 

The Good Allies: How Canada and the United States Fought Together to Defeat Fascism During the Second World War

Tim Cook, Penguin Canada, 2025, $26.00/paperback, e-book available, 576 pages.

 

Other Rivers: A Chinese Education

Peter Hessler, Penguin Press, 2025, $32.00/hardcover, e-book available, 464 pages.

 

Autocrats vs. Democrats: China, Russia, America, and the New Global Disorder

Michael McFaul, Mariner Books, 2025, $35.00/hardcover, e-book available, 544 pages.

 

Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis

Robert D. Kaplan, Random House, 2025, $31.00/hardcover, e-book available, 224 pages.

 

We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution

Jill Lepore, Liveright, 2025, $39.99/hardcover, e-book available, 720 pages.

 

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

Bill McKibben, W. W. Norton, 2025, $29.99/hardcover, e-book available, 224 pages.

 

The Collapse of Venezuela: Scorched Earth Politics and Economic Decline, 2012–2020

Francisco Rodríguez, University of Notre Dame Press, 2025, $75.00/hardcover, e-book available, 538 pages.

 

Statecraft 2.0: What America Needs to Lead in a Multipolar World, 2nd ed.

Dennis Ross, Oxford University Press, 2025, $21.95/paperback, e-book available, 496 pages.

 

Midnight in Moscow: A Memoir from the Front Lines of Russia’s War Against the West

John J. Sullivan, Little, Brown and Company, 2024, $32.50/hardcover, e-book available, 416 pages.

 

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