War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence
Ronan Farrow
4.14 average rating, · 8.7k ratings
Future Diplomacy Space Cyber and Climate
A cross-domain reading path through negotiation, deterrence, norms, treaties, strategic ambiguity, climate conflict, cyber operations, orbital competition, and diplomacy in domains without mature rules.
The next diplomat may negotiate over a satellite collision, ransomware attack, climate migration corridor, or lunar mining zone. This Topreads collection brings together 50 books for diplomats, policy makers, security leaders, executives, international lawyers, and geopolitical strategists. Its purpose is to turn a strange, fast-moving subject into a structured reading path rather than another shallow list of fashionable titles.
A cross-domain reading path through negotiation, deterrence, norms, treaties, strategic ambiguity, climate conflict, cyber operations, orbital competition, and diplomacy in domains without mature rules. The list combines foundational explanations, historical parallels, operating knowledge, ethical disagreement, and selected fiction or speculative work where imagination is necessary to see consequences before they become ordinary. Each book is ranked to help readers begin with the strongest combination of relevance, credibility, and usefulness.
This page is designed as a living editorial resource. The current memberships were selected from Topreads’ verified catalogue of 163,349 books using metadata signals and related curated lists, then held as a draft for human review. Before publication, an editor must verify every title, remove weak or accidental matches, defend the top ten, and add book-specific annotations.
Ranked 1–24 of 50 — curated order, not the site-wide popularity formula.
High-value intersections where two or more industries collide and create professions, risks, and markets most reading lists still overlook. The subject matters now because developments that appear separate—technology, infrastructure, climate, biology, finance, law, and human behavior—are increasingly interacting as one system. Readers who understand only the headline technology can miss the constraints, institutions, incentives, and second-order effects that determine who benefits and who bears the risk.
This list is therefore not a prediction that every scenario will occur. It is an intellectual preparedness tool. It helps readers identify durable questions, recognize repeated historical patterns, evaluate competing claims, and build a vocabulary for decisions that may arrive sooner than conventional curricula expect.
The concept and editorial promise were designed first. Candidate books were then scored from Topreads’ verified 163,349-book catalogue using title and genre relevance, related curated-list membership, rating and readership confidence, exact-title duplicate suppression, controlled fiction representation, and author-diversity limits. Metadata scoring is a discovery aid, not a substitute for reading or expert judgment.
Ronan Farrow
4.14 average rating, · 8.7k ratings
William J. Burns
4.28 average rating, · 1.9k ratings
Richard A. Clarke
4.02 average rating, · 831 ratings
Ben Buchanan
4.18 average rating, · 884 ratings
David E. Sanger
4.25 average rating, · 3.5k ratings
Geoff White
4.14 average rating, · 1.7k ratings
Edward Hallett Carr
4.09 average rating, · 1.3k ratings
Rush Doshi
4.03 average rating, · 1.3k ratings
John Lewis Gaddis
4.08 average rating, · 855 ratings
Dafydd Stuttard
4.23 average rating, · 1.2k ratings
Fareed Zakaria
4.02 average rating, · 3.5k ratings
Ross J. Anderson
4.21 average rating, · 710 ratings
OccupyTheWeb
4.13 average rating, · 605 ratings
Eric O'Neill
4.08 average rating, · 1.4k ratings
Sarah Chayes
4.11 average rating, · 1.1k ratings
This page begins as a machine-assisted draft. Topreads does not claim that every selected book has been read by the editor or that the initial ranking is definitive. Before the page becomes indexable, a human must verify topical relevance, remove accidental editions or shallow matches, review the top ten, check controversial claims, and replace generic featured-book notes with book-specific editorial reasoning.
Spotted a book that doesn't belong here? Tell us — lists are reviewed and corrected.
