Michael McFaul

Inequality is a choice.The United States bills itself as the land of opportunity, a place where anyone can achieve success and a better life through hard work and determination. But the facts tell a different storythe U.S. today lags behind most other developed nations in measures of inequality and economic mobility. For decades, wages have stagnat...

As the glittering skyline in Shanghai seemingly attests, China has quickly transformed itself from a place of stark poverty into a modern, urban, technologically savvy economic powerhouse. But as Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell show in Invisible China, the truth is much more complicated and might be a serious cause for concern.China’s growth has rel...

From a former senior advisor to Senator John McCain, an urgent wake-up call about how new technologies are threatening America's military might. When we think about the future of war, the military and Washington and most everyone gets it backwards. We think in terms of buying single military systems, such as fighter jets or aircraft carriers. And w...

Recalling pivotal moments from her dynamic career on the front lines of American diplomacy and foreign policy, Susan E. Rice--National Security Advisor to President Barack Obama and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations--delivers an inspiring account of a life in service to family and country.Although you may think you know Susan Rice--whose name b...

The exhilarating dystopian novel that inspired George Orwell's 1984 and foreshadowed the worst excesses of Soviet RussiaYevgeny Zamyatin's We is a powerfully inventive vision that has influenced writers from George Orwell to Ayn Rand. In a glass-enclosed city of absolute straight lines, ruled over by the all-powerful 'Benefactor', the citizens of t...

What are the costs of the Chinese regime's fixation on quelling dissent in the name of political order, or "stability?" In Welfare for Autocrats, Jennifer Pan shows that China has reshaped its major social assistance program, Dibao, around this preoccupation, turning an effort to alleviate poverty into a tool of surveillance and repression. This di...

In The Third Revolution, eminent China scholar Elizabeth C. Economy provides an incisive look at the transformative changes underway in China today. Chinese leader Xi Jinping has unleashed a powerful set of political and economic reforms: the centralization of power under Xi, himself, the expansion of the Communist Party's role in Chinese political...

A remarkable history of the two-centuries-old relationship between the United States and China, from the Revolutionary War to the present dayFrom the clipper ships that ventured to Canton hauling cargos of American ginseng to swap Chinese tea, to the US warships facing off against China's growing navy in the South China Sea, from the Yankee mission...

America is currently fighting its second Civil War. Partisan politics are ripping this country apart. The 2016 election will go down as the most acrimonious presidential campaign of all. Such statements have become standard fare in American politics. In a time marked by gridlock and incivility, it seems the only thing Americans can agree on is this...

From America's "secret diplomatic weapon" (The Atlantic), comes a memoir of service for five Presidents and ten Secretaries of State, an impassioned argument for renewing diplomacy as the tool of first resort in American statecraft.Ambassador William J. Burns is the most distinguished and admired American diplomat of his generation. Over the course...