2025’s Best Foreign-Policy Book Reviews
In 2025, Foreign Policy contributors leaned on their unique areas of expertise to weigh in on the buzziest books of the year. Whether it was geostrategist Zbigniew Brzezinski’s onetime research assistant reviewing a biography of his boss or celebrated novelists recommending their favorite climate fiction, the reviews below shed new light on titles that are driving ongoing conversations around history, strategy, and foreign affairs.
1. Where Have All the Geostrategists Gone?
By Theodore Bunzel, May 16
In 2025, Foreign Policy contributors leaned on their unique areas of expertise to weigh in on the buzziest books of the year. Whether it was geostrategist Zbigniew Brzezinski’s onetime research assistant reviewing a biography of his boss or celebrated novelists recommending their favorite climate fiction, the reviews below shed new light on titles that are driving ongoing conversations around history, strategy, and foreign affairs.
1. Where Have All the Geostrategists Gone?
By Theodore Bunzel, May 16
How can we make sense of Zbigniew Brzezinski? Zbig, as he was known, was a complex figure—and one essential to understanding postwar U.S. foreign policy.
U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s Polish-born national security advisor was “the Democrats’ Cold War sage who found admirers on Ronald Reagan’s foreign-policy team; an inveterate Russia hawk who was an arch-nemesis of neoconservatism in the George W. Bush years; and an early backer of Barack Obama,” writes Theodore Bunzel, Zbig’s former research assistant.
According to Bunzel, Edward Luce’s recent biography, Zbig, is an essential guide to Zbig’s thought and life, and it “properly elevates Brzezinski’s standing in the pantheon of U.S. foreign-policy thinkers.” Bunzel writes that “Luce’s book leaves many impressions, but chief among them is that the United States no longer produces many grand strategists like Brzezinski.”
2. How a ‘Fairy-Tale Country’ for Women Turned Its Back on Feminism
By Laura Mills, Nov. 21
Alexandra Kollontai, a revolutionary feminist who became the world’s first female cabinet minister after the 1917 Russian Revolution, once called the early Soviet Union a “fairy-tale country” for women. That may surprise observers of modern Russia, a country under the grip of an avowedly anti-feminist regime.
Russian American journalist Julia Ioffe’s new book, Motherland, recovers this oft-forgotten history—reminding us, in reviewer Laura Mills’s words, “that the country was home to the world’s first feminist revolution and well ahead of the West on gender issues for most of the 20th century.”
“Ioffe takes us on a heady journey into the early Soviet era, when a largely rural and illiterate nation was, almost overnight, transformed into a place with the most progressive gender norms in the world,” Mills writes. “This soured in the postwar era, as—just as today—the catastrophic demographic fallout of war pushed anti-feminist backlash into overdrive, posing perhaps the gravest threat to women’s rights yet.”
3. How Washington’s Israel-Palestine Peace Process Theology Failed Again and Again
By Khaled Elgindy, Oct. 6
A displaced child waves a Palestinian flag while walking on rubble in the Gaza Strip on Sept. 22. Eyad Baba/AFP via Getty Images
There has been no shortage of autopsies on the two-state solution in recent years. But according to scholar Khaled Elgindy, few works “do a better job of capturing the chronic dissonance that plagued and ultimately doomed Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking than Tomorrow Is Yesterday.”
This new book, by Robert Malley and Hussein Agha—two veteran negotiators who advised U.S. presidents and Palestinian leadership, respectively—offers insight into the failures of past Middle East diplomacy and the challenges facing U.S. President Donald Trump’s peace plan in Gaza.
“Ultimately, Agha and Malley seek to dismantle the mythology of the peace process, which, together with the two-state solution, has come to occupy a space more akin to religion than to diplomacy—a magical world created and sustained by U.S. officials in which evidence and experience, as well as cause and effect, could be suspended without cause or consequence,” Elgindy writes.
4. Can the U.S. Be a Great Power Without Harvard?
By Howard W. French, June 10
As the Trump administration has launched unprecedented attacks on Harvard University and other institutions of higher education, many have wondered how the White House’s campaign will affect U.S. universities and, in turn, the trajectory of the country as a whole.
Enter Empire of Ideas by William C. Kirby, a former dean of Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. A new edition of the 2022 book was released this summer in the wake of many of Trump’s measures. “At the heart of Kirby’s engrossing book is the idea that ‘an enduring[ly] rich country cannot have, as a rule, poor universities,’” FP columnist Howard W. French writes. “And as the book suggests, nothing about Harvard’s current preeminence—or that of the United States’ world-leading university system—is a given.”
In the face of Trump’s aggressive measures, French writes, “the question of whether the United States can sustain its national wealth and power has become an urgent one.”
5. Five Novelists on Their Favorite Climate Fiction
By Amitav Ghosh, Jessi Jezewska Stevens, Megha Majumdar, Eric Puchner, and Madeleine Thien, Nov. 7
“In technocratic settings, the specter of climate disaster can seem distant—a future possibility that some combination of financial pledges and fine print could still mitigate,” FP’s Allison Meakem writes. “Literature isn’t as charitable, and contemporary novels often powerfully explore the long-term consequences of our disregard for the Earth. For some readers, digesting a fictional worst-case scenario can compel real-life political shifts; they don’t want the plot to become true.”
In this books list, which we released just ahead of the 2025 United Nations climate conference in November, five celebrated novelists—who have themselves written about climate and the environment— recommend their favorite climate fiction (or cli-fi) novels, ranging from speculative ecological thrillers to a bildungsroman set against the backdrop of the fossil fuel industry.
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