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Diplomats should read about war
War Reading
The reading shows what failure costs and what follows when the use of force comes without enough forethought. Pressfield's Gates of Fire covers Thermopylae in 480 BC, and Michael Herr's Dispatches covers the Vietnam War.
Burns read The Red Badge of Courage in junior high without fully understanding it. The book captures the psychological stresses of war and how human beings try to cope with them. It shows that courage is a very complicated thing to acquire, let alone display.
Diplomacy Reading
For the diplomatic side, Dean Acheson's memoir Present at the Creation covers the pressures and opportunities at the very beginning of the Cold War, from the seat of Harry Truman's second Secretary of State. John Lewis Gaddis, a historian at Yale, wrote a biography of George Kennan, a quirky personality and a brilliant, observant writer.
Why does force matter in negotiation?
Economist Thomas Schelling argued in his 1966 book Arms and Influence that the power to hurt is a form of bargaining power. A party that can credibly impose costs can persuade without fighting. Schelling called this approach coercive diplomacy, and it shaped thinking during the Cold War. He won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2005 for his work on conflict and cooperation.
How did Crane write war without fighting?
Stephen Crane was born in 1871 and wrote The Red Badge of Courage in his early twenties, before he had seen combat. He drew on accounts from Civil War veterans and on the war stories published in magazines of the time. The novel appeared in 1895, thirty years after the war ended. Crane later worked as a war correspondent, covering conflicts in Greece and Cuba.
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