Warrior Politics

“The side that knows when to fight and when not will take the victory. There are roadways not to be traveled, armies not to be attacked, walled cities not to be assaulted.” —Sun-Tzu We live in dangerous times, when a new kind of leadership is required. Visionary and ruthlessly strategic, Warrior Politics extracts the best of the wisdom of the ages for modern leaders who are faced with the complex life-and-death challenges of today’s world—and determined to win. Sun-Tzu urges leaders to “plan and calculate like a hungry man.” Machiavelli defines a policy not by its excellence but by its outcome. Churchill derives his greatness from his imagination of history. Livy shows that the vigor to face down adversaries must ultimately come from pride in our own past achievements. “Never mind if they call your caution timidity, your wisdom sloth, your generosity weakness,” he writes. “It is better that a wise enemy should fear you than that foolish friends should praise.” “Men often oppose a thing merely because they have no agency in planning it,” Alexander Hamilton says, “or because it may have been planned by those whom they dislike.” Replete with maxims, warnings, examples from history, and shrewd recommendations, Warrior Politics wrests from the past the lessons we need to arm ourselves for the present. It offers an invaluable template for any decision-maker—in foreign policy or in business—faced with high stakes and inadequate knowledge of a mine-filled terrain. As we gear ourselves up for a new kind of war, no book is more prescient, more shrewd, or more essential.

In Warrior Politics, the esteemed journalist and analyst Robert D. Kaplan explores the wisdom of the ages for answers for today’s leaders. While the modern world may seem more complex and dangerous than ever before, Kaplan writes from a deeper historical perspective to reveal how little things actually change. Indeed, as Kaplan shows us, we can look to history’s most influential thinkers, who would have understood and known how to navigate today’s dangerous political waters. Drawing on the timeless work of Sun Tzu, Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, among others, Kaplan argues that in a world of unstable states and an uncertain future, it is increasingly imperative to wrest from the past what we need to arm ourselves for the road ahead. Wide-ranging and accessible, Warrior Politics is a bracing book with an increasingly important message that challenges readers to see the world as it is, not as they would like it to be.

In a moment where unlawful pipelines are built on Indigenous territories, the RCMP make illegal arrests of land defenders on unceded lands, and anti-Indigenous racism permeates on social media; the government lie that is reconciliation is exposed. Renowned lawyer, author, speaker and activist, Pamela Palmater returns to wade through media headlines and government propaganda and get to heart of key issues lost in the noise. Warrior Life: Indigenous Resistance and Resurgence is the second collection of writings by Palmater. In keeping with her previous works, numerous op-eds, media commentaries, YouTube channel videos and podcasts, Palmater’s work is fiercely anti-colonial, anti-racist, and more crucial than ever before. Palmater addresses a range of Indigenous issues — empty political promises, ongoing racism, sexualized genocide, government lawlessness, and the lie that is reconciliation — and makes the complex political and legal implications accessible to the public. From one of the most important, inspiring and fearless voices in Indigenous rights, decolonization, Canadian politics, social justice, earth justice and beyond, Warrior Life is an unflinching critique of the colonial project that is Canada and a rallying cry for Indigenous peoples and allies alike to forge a path toward a decolonial future through resistance and resurgence.

Putting into question the conventional view that the military is detrimental to democratic development, Dolman provides a multifaceted examination of the institutional incentives of the military and its relations with civilian authorities. Drawing on classical political theory, a wide range of historical examples, and statistical findings, The Warrior State argues that the military can facilitate democracy as the result of specific norms and conditions that focus on individual action. Ironically, this may be best inculcated through a focus on the offensive, precisely the military doctrine commonly seen as most likely to result in international conflict. The paradox of offensive strategies possibly increasing international conflict while also enhancing democracy, which is supposed to decrease such conflict, from a core of this provocative book.

Explores the ominous campaign to change a nation's definition of itself

"This is a stunning and original book. It will intervene in existing fields and discourses to change the way Islamic fundamentalism is viewed in the West."—Caren Kaplan, Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies and Chair of Cultural Studies at the University of California Davis. "Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister is an original and venturesome piece of work. It is daring in its willingness to test just how far the definition of 'fundamentalism' might be extended in contemporary Iran. It sketches lucidly the gendered crises of identity that have emerged there in the wake of colonization/Europeanization and decolonization."—Parama Roy, Associate Professor of English at UC Riverside, author of Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India. "Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister is ground-breaking, enlightening, and challenges mainstream constructions of Islam as fanatic and backward. This book will similarly contribute to the writings on race and gender relations, religion and secularism, cultural nationalism, religious fundamentalism, and popular culture and visual media. The personal, biographical and visual examples are effective in making the more nuanced and complex theoretical arguments tangible and provocative. Exciting and innovative."—Ella Shohat, Professor of Cultural Studies, New York University

The colossal figures who shaped the politics of industrial America emerge in full scale in this comparative biography. In the depth and sophistication of intellect that they brought to politics and in the titanic conflict they waged, Roosevelt and Wilson were, like Hamilton and Jefferson before them, the political architects for an entire century.

In the early 1960s, American conservatives seemed to have fallen on hard times. McCarthyism was on the run, and movements on the political left were grabbing headlines. The media lampooned John Birchers's accusations that Dwight Eisenhower was a communist puppet. Mainstream America snickered at warnings by California Congressman James B. Utt that "barefooted Africans" were training in Georgia to help the United Nations take over the country. Yet, in Utt's home district of Orange County, thousands of middle-class suburbanites proceeded to organize a powerful conservative movement that would land Ronald Reagan in the White House and redefine the spectrum of acceptable politics into the next century. Suburban Warriors introduces us to these people: women hosting coffee klatches for Barry Goldwater in their tract houses; members of anticommunist reading groups organizing against sex education; pro-life Democrats gradually drawn into conservative circles; and new arrivals finding work in defense companies and a sense of community in Orange County's mushrooming evangelical churches. We learn what motivated them and how they interpreted their political activity. Lisa McGirr shows that their movement was not one of marginal people suffering from status anxiety, but rather one formed by successful entrepreneurial types with modern lifestyles and bright futures. She describes how these suburban pioneers created new political and social philosophies anchored in a fusion of Christian fundamentalism, xenophobic nationalism, and western libertarianism. While introducing these rank-and-file activists, McGirr chronicles Orange County's rise from "nut country" to political vanguard. Through this history, she traces the evolution of the New Right from a virulent anticommunist, anti-establishment fringe to a broad national movement nourished by evangelical Protestantism. Her original contribution to the social history of politics broadens—and often upsets—our understanding of the deep and tenacious roots of popular conservatism in America.