Hot Off The Presses

Is the American Century Over?

By Joseph S. Nye, Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor, Polity Press (January 2015)

For more than a century, the United States has been the world's most powerful state. Now some analysts predict that China will soon take its place. Does this mean that we are living in a post-American world? Will China's rapid rise spark a new Cold War between the two titans?

In this compelling book, world renowned foreign policy analyst Joseph Nye explains why the American century is far from over and what the United States must do to retain its lead in an era of increasingly diffuse power politics.

America's superpower status may well be tempered by its own domestic problems and China's economic boom, he argues, but its military economic and soft power capabilities will continue to outstrip those of its closest rivals for decades to come.

With his usual clarity and insight, Joe Nye gives us a fascinating analysis of the complexities of power, exploring hard and soft power, state and non-state actors, and how to retain leadership once domination is over.

—Mario Monti, former Prime Minister, Italy

The future of American power is the great question of our century. No-one is better equipped than Joe Nye to answer it.

—Lt. Gen. Brent Scowcroft

Hitler's Shadow Empire: Nazi Economics and the Spanish Civil War

By Pierpaolo Barbieri, Former Ernest May Fellow in History and Policy, Harvard University Press (Forthcoming, April 2015)

Pitting fascists and communists in a showdown for supremacy, the Spanish Civil War has long been seen as a grim dress rehearsal for World War II. Francisco Franco's Nationalists prevailed with German and Italian military assistance—a clear instance, it seemed, of like-minded regimes joining forces in the fight against global Bolshevism.

In Hitler's Shadow Empire, Pierpaolo Barbieri revises this standard account of Axis intervention in the Spanish Civil War, arguing that economic ambitions—not ideology—drove Hitler’s Iberian intervention. The Nazis hoped to establish an economic empire in Europe, and in Spain they tested the tactics intended for future subject territories.

Hitler's Shadow Empire illuminates a fratricidal tragedy that still reverberates in Spanish life as well as the world war it heralded.

A fascinating, beautifully written account of a plan for the German economic domination of Europe that was pushed in the 1930s by the Nazis but above all by non-Nazi and more traditionally oriented German economic bureaucrats. Barbieri makes us think again about the relationship between economics and racial policies in the making of Nazi aggression.

—Harold James, author of Making the European Monetary Union

The Crisis with Russia

Edited by R. Nicholas Burns, Professor of the Practice of Diplomacy and International Politics, HKS; Jonathan Price, Aspen Strategy Group Policy Book, Aspen Institute (November 2014)

The Crisis with Russia is a collection of papers commissioned for the 2014 Aspen Strategy Group Summer Workshop.

On the occasion of the 30th year anniversary of the Aspen Strategy Group (founded in 1984), the Summer Workshop in Aspen, Colorado, convened a nonpartisan group of preeminent U.S.-Russia policy experts, academics, journalists, and business leaders. The Group's policy discussions were guided by the papers found in this volume, whose scope ranges from exploring the history of the U.S.-Russia relationship, current developments in the Sino-Russian relationship, the NATO and European responses to Russian aggression in Eastern Europe, energy considerations, areas of potential U.S.-Russia cooperation, and finally, the broader question of U.S. national security and interests in the European region.

Nuclear Authority: The IAEA and the Absolute Weapon

By Robert L. Brown, Former Stanton Nuclear Security Junior Faculty Fellow, Georgetown University Press (March 2015)

Robert L. Brown details the IAEA's role in facilitating both control of nuclear weapons and the safe exploitation of nuclear power. The agency's success in gaining and holding authority rests in part on its ability to apply politically neutral expertise that produces beneficial policy outcome.