Politics Foreign

A former member of the State Department's Policy Planning Council, Polk describes a country and a history misunderstood by many in the West. While Iranians chafe under the yolk of their current leaders, they also have bitter memories of generations of British, Russian, and American espionage, invasion, and dominance. There are important lessons to be learned from the past, and Polk teases them out of a long and rich history and shows that it is not just now, but for decades to come that an understanding of Iran will be essential to American safety and well-being.

In To Catch a Spy: The Art of Counterintelligence, James M. Olson, former chief of CIA counterintelligence, offers a wake-up call for the American public and also a guide for how our country can do a better job of protecting its national security and trade secrets. Olson takes the listener into the arcane world of counterintelligence as he lived it during his 30-year career in the CIA.

Terrorism in Europe has spun out of control. The United States has decided on a dramatic response. Now, the CIA needs a very special kind of operative. Scot Harvath has exactly the skills the CIA is looking for. He's a former U.S. Navy SEAL with extensive experience in espionage. Working for a private intelligence company, he will provide the CIA, and more important, the President, with absolute deniability.

A mistaken arrest puts Widow into the Miami criminal system. A mysterious phone call from the US Secret Service and Widow is on his way to DC to face a covert emergency.

At the start of the 1960s, John F. Kennedy and other American liberals expressed boundless optimism about the ability of the United States to promote democracy and development in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. With US power, resources, and expertise, almost anything seemed possible in the countries of the Cold War's "Third World"-developing, postcolonial nations unaligned with the United States or Soviet Union.

As a young girl in a working-class neighborhood of Sydney, Australia, Geraldine Brooks longed to discover the places where history happens and culture comes from, so she enlisted pen pals who offered her a window on adolescence in the Middle East, Europe, and America. Twenty years later, Brooks, an award-winning foreign correspondent, embarked on a human treasure hunt to find her pen friends. She found men and women whose lives had been shaped by war and hatred, by fame and notoriety, and by the ravages of mental illness.

Six weeks before she is due to take up her position as the first female head of MI6, Amelia Levene vanishes without a trace. Her disappearance is the gravest crisis MI6 has faced for more than a decade. There has been no ransom demand, no word from foreign intelligence services, and no hint of a defection. Should news of Levene’s disappearance leak out, the consequences would be catastrophic. But for disgraced MI6 officer Thomas Kell, the crisis offers a chance for redemption.

Buried within the black ops budgets of the Department of Defense, a new spy agency has been created. Unfettered by the oversight of self-serving politicians, it reports only to a secret panel of military insiders. Its job is to target Americas enemies - both foreign and domestic - under a charter of three simple words: Find, Fix, and Finish.

This is a story that starts off close and goes very big. The initial part of the story might sound familiar at first: it is about a platoon of mostly 19-year-old boys sent to Afghanistan, and an experience that ends abruptly in catastrophe. Their part of the story folds into the next: inexorably linked to those soldiers and never comprehensively reported before is the US Department of Defense’s quest to build the world’s most powerful biometrics database, with the ability to identify, monitor, catalog, and police people all over the world.

Complete with a road map of the trends and players shaping the world today, Never Give an Inch is more than a historical review of the Trump Administration's greatest victories. It is essential listening for anyone who wants to understand the challenges of the future. And it is an inspirational story of leadership through dangerous times that will leave you with a greater appreciation for America.

The Palestinian Delusion is unique in situating the Israeli/Palestinian conflict within the context of the global jihad that has found renewed impetus in the latter portion of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. Briskly recounting the tumultuous history of the "peace process", Robert Spencer demonstrates that the determination of diplomats, policymakers, and negotiators to ignore this aspect of the conflict has led the Israelis, the Palestinians, and the world down numerous blind alleys. This has often only exacerbated, rather than healed, this conflict.

The land of the free. The home of the brave. But what has America achieved in the aim of ‘spreading democracy’ — except wreak havoc across the globe and establish a reckless foreign policy that serves the interest of few and has endangered all too many? In this timely book, Noam Chomsky writing with Nathan J. Robinson, vividly traces America’s pursuit of global domination, offering an incisive critique of the self-serving myths that dominant elites in the United States continue to push.

Matthew Keating, a one-time Navy SEAL and a former US President, has always defended his family as fiercely as he has his country. Now these defences are under attack. And it's personal. Keating's teenage daughter, Melanie, has been abducted, turning every parent's deepest fear into a matter of national security. As the world watches, Keating embarks on a one-man special-ops mission that tests his strengths: as a leader, a warrior, and a father. Because Keating knows that in order to save Melanie's life he will have to put his own on the line . . .

More than 20 years have elapsed since the United States last brokered a peace agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians. In that time, three presidents have tried and failed. Martin Indyk - a former United States ambassador to Israel and special envoy for the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in 2013 - has experienced these political frustrations and disappointments firsthand.

Do you ever feel like you're too busy, too stressed, or just too distracted to concentrate and get work done? In Unlimited Memory you'll learn how the world's best memory masters get themselves to concentrate at will, anytime they want. When you can easily focus and concentrate on the task at hand and store and recall useful information, you can easily double your productivity and eliminate wasted time, stress, and mistakes at work. In this book you'll find all the tools, strategies, and techniques you need to improve your memory.

"Economic hit men," John Perkins writes, "are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. Their tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder."

The Greater Middle East—the vast region between the Mediterranean and China, encompassing much of the Arab world, parts of northern Africa, and Asia—existed for millennia as the crossroads of empire. But with the dissolution of empires in the twentieth century, postcolonial states have endeavored to maintain stability. Robert D. Kaplan explores Greater Middle East through reporting and travel writing to reveal deeper truths about the impacts of history on the present and how the requirements of stability over anarchy are often in conflict with the ideals of democratic governance.

In Battlegrounds, best-selling author, commander, scholar and National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster examines the rising strength of Russia and China, the threat from hostile states Iran and North Korea, the complex battlegrounds in South Asia and the Middle East, and the new arenas of international competition - space, cyberspace and emerging technology. How can foreign policy, which has across multiple administrations proved itself outdated, misconceived, inconsistent and poorly implemented, be transformed to face the challenges of today?

To understand world politics, you need to understand how states think. Are states rational? Much of international relations theory assumes that they are. But many scholars believe that political leaders rarely act rationally. The issue is crucial for both the study and practice of international politics. John J. Mearsheimer and Sebastian Rosato argue that rational decisions in international politics rest on credible theories about how the world works and emerge from deliberative decision‑making processes.

With a language disappearing every two weeks and neologisms springing up almost daily, an understanding of the origins and currency of language has never seemed more relevant. In this charming volume, a narrative history written explicitly for a young audience, expert linguist David Crystal proves why the story of language deserves retelling. From the first words of an infant to the peculiar modern dialect of text messaging, A Little Book of Language ranges widely, revealing language's myriad intricacies and quirks.