The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World is taking a quick jaunt to Hamburg, Germany to give a talk and maybe stroll along the Alster. Posting will likely be very light over the next couple of days, unless stories like this one or this one or this one prompt me to draft a lengthy rant about how the United States is currently governed by the dumbest motherfuckers alive.
In the meantime, however, I thought I would share the nonfiction that I am reading right now. One of these books I have already referenced in multiple posts already:
Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. Credit where due: Trump’s second term has been staffed by folks who are much more loyal to Trump than during his first term. This means that good sources are a bit scarcer to come by. That did not deter Haberman and Swan. They clearly worked their sources to produce a compelling chronicle of Trump’s first fourteen months in office. It starts off as a story about the Trump White House not giving a flying fig about laws and norms and discovering that they can bully an awfully large slice of American institutions. And then, of course, this eventually leads to Trump’s ruination. This book is a must-read to understand what happened during the first year of Trump’s second term.
One side note: I don’t entirely buy Haberman and Swan’s argument that had Trump won in 2020 he would have exercised less power than he did in 2025. By 2020 Trump had stumbled onto the formula of how he wanted to govern: prioritizing loyalty above all else. In essence, if he’d been re-elected in 2020 I suspect we’d have just been dealing with what happened in 2025 back in 2021.1 The only virtue of that would be that Trump’s time in the presidency would have come to an end.
Audrye Wong, Subversion and Seduction: China’s Economic Statecraft. There has been a large literature about how China practices economic diplomacy differently than the United States. Over the long run I have my doubts about whether this divergence will persist, but there is no denying that Beijing practices a different style of economic statecraft. Wong’s book — which I’ve read in article form — does a great job of delineating China’s different ways of using its economic power to pursue its foreign policy ends. It is well worth the read.
Tina Fordham, Mad World: A Geostrategy Survival Guide for Leaders. There are a lot of people who will say that geopolitical risk has reached unprecedented heights and that we need a new paradigm to think about it. There are very few people I would trust to provide much in the way of explanatory leverage. Fordham, who has been working on geopolitical risk for more than a quarter-century, is one of those people. She declares in her introduction that, “geopolitical volatility is now the central scenario and should become a core planning assumption rather than limited to being considered a risk factor.” That’s a sobering declaration — but as current events demonstrate, she’s not wrong.
Enjoy your weekends!
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Maybe if he had to deal with a Democratic Congress he would have been stymied a bit more — but a scenario where Trump wins in 2020 is one in which the GOP would likely control the House and Senate.
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