Joseph Stieb (Author of The Regime Change Consensus)

Joseph Stieb rated a book it was amazing The Push by Ashley Audrain (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
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Joseph Stieb made a comment on his review of The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II " Thanks!! "
Sep 01, 2026 08:16AM · see review
Joseph Stieb rated a book really liked it The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II by Denise Kiernan (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
A decent read, this book is a bit light and a little scattered in many ways. I think the way it was written detracted from its impact and clarity. For example, Kiernan does odd things like refer to Leslie Groves only as "the General' and the bomb as ...more
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Joseph Stieb rated a book it was amazing Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
I liked this a lot. It's fast-paced story with very well-drawn characters and interesting but non-preachy commentary on modern dating/marriage. The book also subtly shifts your perspective; the first 2/3 is all from Toby, the main male character's pe ...more
Aug 29, 2026 01:39PM · 1 like · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Joseph Stieb rated a book liked it The Folly of Realism: How the West Deceived Itself About Russia and Betrayed Ukraine by Alexander S. Vindman	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
This was ok...I think there are better books on the origins of the Ukraine War. I'm broadly sympathetic to the argument and to Vindman as a public figure, but I don't think the critique is super strong. Let me spell it out: Vindman argues that the Uni ...more
Aug 27, 2026 07:21AM · 5 likes · like · see review
Joseph Stieb made a comment on his review of The Vanished Imam: Musa al Sadr and the Shia of Lebanon " I agree! Great points, Jenna. "
Aug 26, 2026 08:44AM · see review
Joseph Stieb rated a book really liked it The Vanished Imam: Musa al Sadr and the Shia of Lebanon by Fouad Ajami	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Read this mainly for research, but it's pretty interesting, even if probably outdated. It's about Musa al-Sadr, an Iranian-born Shia cleric who became a political and religious leader of Lebanese SHia in the 60s and 70s. He helped bring about a sort ...more
Aug 24, 2026 07:21AM · 4 likes · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of The Vanished Imam by Fouad Ajami. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — The Vanished Imam by Fouad Ajami <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Joseph Stieb rated a book it was amazing The Jackal: The Rise and Fall of Carlos, the World's First Super-Terrorist by Joby Warrick	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Really enjoyed this! I didn't know much about Carlos the Jackal, the nom de guerre of Illich Ramirez Sanchez, one of the most notorious international terrorists of the 70s and 80s. Carlos started as an ideological convert to the Palestinian cause, wo ...more
Aug 23, 2026 01:37PM · 5 likes · like · see review
Joseph Stieb rated a book really liked it Tomorrow Is Yesterday: Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel/Palestine by Hussein Agha	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
This is probably the best Israel-Palestine book I have read thus far. The authors bring both academic experience and practical involvement in the peace processes (mainly in the 1990s) to bear in a thoughtful, balanced analysis. I think I disagree wit ...more
Aug 19, 2026 09:16AM · 6 likes · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Tomorrow Is Yesterday by Hussein Agha. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Tomorrow Is Yesterday by Hussein Agha <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Joseph Stieb rated a book it was amazing Blood and Ruins: The Great Imperial War, 1931-1945 by Richard Overy	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Magisterial doesn't even start to describe this book. It is long, dense, and utterly rewarding, although reader beware: it will take you some time to finish. It took me about a month, with short breaks to read some novels. But for taking in the full ...more
Aug 19, 2026 07:35AM · 5 likes · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Blood and Ruins by Richard Overy. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Blood and Ruins by Richard Overy <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">

Joseph Stieb rated a book it was amazing

The Push
by Ashley Audrain (Goodreads Author)

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Joseph Stieb made a comment on his review of The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II

The Girls of Atomic City by Denise Kiernan

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The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II
by Denise Kiernan (Goodreads Author)

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A decent read, this book is a bit light and a little scattered in many ways. I think the way it was written detracted from its impact and clarity. For example, Kiernan does odd things like refer to Leslie Groves only as "the General' and the bomb as ...more

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Fleishman Is in Trouble
by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

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I liked this a lot. It's fast-paced story with very well-drawn characters and interesting but non-preachy commentary on modern dating/marriage. The book also subtly shifts your perspective; the first 2/3 is all from Toby, the main male character's pe ...more

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The Folly of Realism by Alexander S. Vindman

The Folly of Realism: How the West Deceived Itself About Russia and Betrayed Ukraine
by Alexander S. Vindman

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This was ok...I think there are better books on the origins of the Ukraine War. I'm broadly sympathetic to the argument and to Vindman as a public figure, but I don't think the critique is super strong.

Let me spell it out: Vindman argues that the Uni This was ok...I think there are better books on the origins of the Ukraine War. I'm broadly sympathetic to the argument and to Vindman as a public figure, but I don't think the critique is super strong.

Let me spell it out: Vindman argues that the United States after the Cold War pursued a Russia-centric policy that focused on trying to reel Russia into the global marketplace and deal with a number of issues surrounding the collapse of the USSR, especially ethnic nationalist conflicts and the problem of the Soviet nuclear arsenal, which was partially spread in former Soviet republics like Ukraine and Kazakhstan. The US, AV contends, created a Ukraine policy that was "derivative" of Russia policy, as in our goals/interests v Russia would always determine what Ukraine policy would be, largely independent of what was going on in Ukraine. This led to a hesitance to let Ukraine into NATO, to arm Ukraine, or to openly support its aspirations to move away from Russia and toward Europe. The US continued this strategy in the early 21st century even as Putin became more authoritarian, anti-Western, and expansionist. The US repeatedly tried to "reset" relations with Russia and convinced itself that Medvedev might take the country in a new direction, but none of that worked.

Meanwhile, the Russia-centric policy led the US to shortchange Ukraine. The Budapest Memo in the 1990s promised security assurances to Ukraine for giving up its segment of the Soviet nuclear arsenal, but that was always a weak promise that didn't go fulfilled until after the 2022 Russian invasion. The 2000s Bucharest agreement was the worst of both worlds: it announced the goal of Ukrainian entry to NATO (thus pissing off Russia) without giving them a clear road map or timeline to do so (thus failing to shore up Ukrainian security). The fear of alienating Russia, AV concludes, prevented the US from putting its real weight behind an emerging democracy and sending a clear deterrent message to Putin, setting the stage for the 2015 seizure of Crimea and eventually the 2022 Russian invasion.

I don't totally disagree with this narrative, but I think the argument is under-developed. AV really detests realism, which he defines as short term thinking and the pursuit of narrow, immediate objectives, as well as the exclusion of values from policy-making. His definition, however, is highly imperfect; realism ends up being whatever AV needs it to be as a foil for his argument, or just a placeholder for "bad decisions." US policy toward Russia was not straightforwardly realist in the 90s and 2000s but included efforts to integrate Russia into world markets and global institutions. The US also had a lot that it needed to manage vis-a-vis Russia, especially its nuclear arsenal, that required a focus on the imperatives of the current moment (which, to be fair, is how most policy-making works). It also wasn't that clear that supporting Ukraine in the 90s and 2000s would be supporting democracy, as Ukraine was highly corrupt, semi democratic at best, and still beholden to Russia in many ways. I think AV's critique of the 2nd Bush administration was much stronger than his critique of Bush 1 and Clinton, as Bush 2 really softened policy toward Russia in order to get its cooperation in the GWOT.

There's a basic reality of international politics that AV ignores: big, threatening states like Russia or China will inevitably take higher priority for countries like the US than smaller states like Ukraine. This doesn't mean our policies toward those other, smaller states are always correct or that we always have to put the big states first. But there's a basic imperative to focus on the big states because whatever they do has greater consequences, which means they demand more attention. The better critique of U.S. policy in Eastern Europe is that we paid the wrong kind of attention to Russia: we coddled and dismissed its growing authoritarianism and aggression instead of building a cordon sanitaire around it and punishing its misdeeds. But that's not the critique of this book, which argues that we should have put Ukraine first the entire time.

I'm not a realist, but I think this book would drive realists crazy for its terminological imprecision. It treats academic forms of realism associated with Waltz, Morgenthau, and Mearsheimer as the same as the practical realism of Kissinger, Scowcroft, and other policy makers. Furthermore, the book is oddly malproportioned, as it focuses heavily on the 90s and 2000s but has comparatively little on post-2014 Russia-Ukraine-US relations and conflict. Finally, the book has some autobiographical elements but not enough for my taste; it would have been cool to get more of AV's story alongside the history. In sum, I wouldn't recommend this as a go-to book on Ukraine, although it's not terrible. ...more

Joseph Stieb made a comment on his review of The Vanished Imam: Musa al Sadr and the Shia of Lebanon

" I agree! Great points, Jenna. "

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The Vanished Imam: Musa al Sadr and the Shia of Lebanon
by Fouad Ajami

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Read this mainly for research, but it's pretty interesting, even if probably outdated. It's about Musa al-Sadr, an Iranian-born Shia cleric who became a political and religious leader of Lebanese SHia in the 60s and 70s. He helped bring about a sort ...more

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The Jackal: The Rise and Fall of Carlos, the World's First Super-Terrorist
by Joby Warrick

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Really enjoyed this! I didn't know much about Carlos the Jackal, the nom de guerre of Illich Ramirez Sanchez, one of the most notorious international terrorists of the 70s and 80s. Carlos started as an ideological convert to the Palestinian cause, wo Really enjoyed this! I didn't know much about Carlos the Jackal, the nom de guerre of Illich Ramirez Sanchez, one of the most notorious international terrorists of the 70s and 80s. Carlos started as an ideological convert to the Palestinian cause, working for the PFLP splinter group under Wadi Haddad. He carried out a number of attacks, some of them seemingly random, others more intentional, such as the kidnapping of the OPEC ministers in Vienna in in 1975. This revealed an interesting aspect of a lot of Palestinian terrorism in the 70s and 80s: it wasn't always against Israel but often against Arab states (like Egypt and Saudi ARabia) that were willing to make peace with Israel or unwilling to make Palestine their sole priority. In the Vienna attack, for instance, Carlos released the OPEC ministers from "rejectionist" countries that opposed any reconciliation with Israel. A lot of Palestinian terrorism from groups like the PFLP and Abu Nidal was about this kind of disruption of diplomacy and normalization (and that hasn't changed much!).

After the PFLP collapsed in the late 70s, Carlos became a sort of terrorist for hire, much less ideological and more about self-promotion and enrichment. He worked for governments like Libya and Syria and hid out in Eastern Bloc states that tolerated criminals like him as long as they didn't attack these sanctuaries. He also carried out terrorist attacks in France, killing several dozen people, simply to force the French gov't to release his girlfriend and several other members of his organization. You get a good sense from this book of how terrorists hopped from safe haven to safe haven in this period and took advantage of many EUropean countries' desire to not have terrorist ops pointed at them.

Eventually, Carlos was captured in Sudan and imprisoned in France for life. In sum, he was a narcissistic and brutal person, seemingly without a conscience and probably driven more by the desire for notoriety and action than by ideology. This is a great book if you want to know more about the world of terrorists, spies, intelligence operatives, and so on in the 70s and 80s because it it extremely well-paced, engagingly written, and clearly explained. ...more

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Tomorrow Is Yesterday: Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel/Palestine
by Hussein Agha

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This is probably the best Israel-Palestine book I have read thus far. The authors bring both academic experience and practical involvement in the peace processes (mainly in the 1990s) to bear in a thoughtful, balanced analysis. I think I disagree wit This is probably the best Israel-Palestine book I have read thus far. The authors bring both academic experience and practical involvement in the peace processes (mainly in the 1990s) to bear in a thoughtful, balanced analysis. I think I disagree with the core argument but agree with many of the sub-claims.

Let me try to explain that: Agha and Malley (AM) argue that the core problem with US peace process efforts (aside from favoritism to Israel) is the substitution of technical solutions (land swaps, conditional sovereignty, security agreements) for substantive considerations of how history shapes each side's perspectives and desires. The authors are critical of Oslo, Camp David, and similar efforts for not getting to the heart of each side's emotional perspective and identities, which ultimately derive from their historical experiences. The fact that Israel has been repeatedly rewarded with additional violence after withdrawing from southern Lebanon and Gaza, its longstanding experience of terrorism, and its sense of existential insecurity, will always get in the way of a meaningful peace agreement. For Palestinians, technical solutions cannot redress the pain of the Nakba, the humiliation and oppression of occupation, and the desire to return to what they see as their homeland.

However, this is exactly where I divide from AM, even if I think I share much of their perspective. This may be weird to say as a historian, but trying to redress past wrongs is exactly the wrong approach to this conflict. The past cannot be undone, certain injustices can never be rectified, and history has created a series of faits accompli in the Middle East that, while not abstractly fair, are real and unlikely to change. I think diplomacy is best guided not by constant referral to the past but by selective forgetting and the appraisal of realistic, politically sustainable solutions. I agree that the focus on technicalities in Oslo, Camp David, the Mitchell Plan, and other proposals is insufficient, but the kind of historical and identity claims that AM want the participants to wrestle with are even more irreconcilable.

For example, AM fault Camp David for not dealing with the right of return, but the right of return ain't happening; Israel simply will not allow it, and they have decent reasons for not doing so. It has been 75 years since the Nakba; it is time to give up this plank and look to other solutions that enable sovereignty, dignity, and opportunity for Palestinians. Israel has a similar choice with settlements: it can continue to eat up the WB and create a 1-state, apartheid-like system, or it can choose to be a Jewish majority democracy within a reasonably sized territory. Each side must give up core myths and goals to achieve something remotely just and feasible. AM, furthermore, never explain what historical reckoning would actually look like and how it would facilitate peace rather than, as I expect, further entrenching each side in its myths, fears, and hatreds.

This critique aside, this book has many excellent insights. One point that is especially sharp in this book is the imbalance of interests and capabilities in this conflict. Politicians have been saying forever that "the status quo is unsustainable," but AM show that this is false. The status quo is quite sustainable for Israel, which has vastly more power and the ability to dominate most of Palestinian life and deter other adversaries. Both sides have to take certain actions and changes of perspective to make this conflict solvable, but it is undeniable that Israel has to do more (actually freeze the settlements, allow Gaza to exist and rebuild, permit meaningful sovereignty/statehood in the WB, etc) to make a settlement possible. And yet, the authors note, US diplomacy has rarely acknowledged this imbalance or put much pressure on Israel to change policy (beyond rhetoric).

Another good point is that there is no solution that doesn't involve the extremists. This is hard to swallow, but on both sides extremists have become more powerful over time, not less. And yet, the peace process has always sought to freeze them out and focus on "responsible" actors like the Palestinian Authority or PLO and the mainstream Israeli negotiators like Rabin or Barak. However, without involving the extremists, from Hamas to the increasingly dominant Israeli right, the "moderates" don't have enough power to create a deal that will stick against these veto-holders. This is much easier said than done, but it's also true that freezing out extremists simply has not worked.

A few other problems: this book's organization is kind of odd. It isn't chronological, but the thematic choices for each chapter don't seem coherent, and it ends up retreading a lot of the same ground. Furthermore, AM like to chew on problems rather than offer solutions; I'm genuinely interested in hearing what they think all parties to this conflict should do moving forward, but they don't really say. Finally, the book is often lacking in detail. Camp David 2000, for example, is dismissed without much examination of what actually happened at Camp David.

Still, this is one of the few books I've read since 10/7 that attempts balance, sobriety, and historical perspective on this most intractable of conflicts. It has many great insights, and it should be read widely. ...more

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Blood and Ruins: The Great Imperial War, 1931-1945
by Richard Overy

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Magisterial doesn't even start to describe this book. It is long, dense, and utterly rewarding, although reader beware: it will take you some time to finish. It took me about a month, with short breaks to read some novels. But for taking in the full Magisterial doesn't even start to describe this book. It is long, dense, and utterly rewarding, although reader beware: it will take you some time to finish. It took me about a month, with short breaks to read some novels. But for taking in the full scope of the war, this is probably the best book I've read.

This book is organized semi-chronologically and semi-thematically. This works really well because it makes it feel like less of a slog. The first 2/5ths or so is a chronological account of the war, but one which starts with the rival projects of empire-building in the 20s and 30s and moves into what is conventionally understood as WWII (1939-1945). Then Overy moves on to the rest of the book, which is organized around thematic chapters: economics, popular mobilization, crimes/atrocities, technology, etc. This means that you could read the whole dang thing or pick and choose chapters if you are, say, writing lectures or lesson plans. I thought this scheme really worked.

This book has a lot of big points, but the main one is the idea of WWII as the last imperial war. WWII was a war of established v. rising nation-empires, with the US and the USSR joining somewhat late. Overy shows how nationalist movements of all kinds in the early 20th century conceived of power in terms of control of territory and trading blocs, in other words, empires. Britain and France had the world's 2 largest empires, and German, Japan, and Italy each sought to build their own, viewing this as a form of fairness, a historical right/destiny, and a matter of survival. These imperial dreams preceded the radicalization of German and Japanese foreign policy/domestic politics in the early 1930s; in other words, most German and Japanese leaders wanted empire well before the Nazis and the militarists took full power, although they certainly took that pursuit to brutal extremes.

World War II, Overy argues, essentially broke the world of nation-empires and ushered in one of nation-states. The British, French, and Dutch were already in relative decline before this war and gradually losing control of their empires, although they remained ideologically committed to holding onto those possessions in some form. But their defeats at the hands of Germany and Japan early in the war caused a fatal loss of prestige and ability to control their empires; this super-charged anti-colonial movements and further discredited the idea of empire. The Germans, italians, and Japanese sought their own empires and exceeded the already considerable brutality of the British and French; these would have been fascist-racialist settler empires rather than liberal and multiracial British/French/Dutch ones. But they were also crushed, mainly by the US and the Soviet Union.

The US and Soviets then ushered in a new international order that was hegemonic and bipolar, Overy argues, but not imperial in the sense of seeking direct control over massive amounts of territory. I might quibble with the idea that the Eastern Bloc wasn't a de facto Soviet empire, but I think he's basically right. States within the US or Soviet orbits were not colonies like Algeria to France or India to the British. And the revolts of decolonization further consolidated the shift from nation-empires to nation-states, in rapid fashion.

This is the big historical picture of WWII for Overy. There are many other important points in the book; I'll mention a few here:

1. Overy emphasizes that states in WWII were phenomenally good at controlling, motivating, and marshaling resources from their societies. Compared to WWI, it is remarkable how few internal revolts there were against these regimes, who used a mix of terror, discipline, state authority, and ideological mobilization to control and coordinate vast numbers of people, way way more than any war since. WWII was in a sense the apotheosis of the modern war state's ability to mobilize tens of millions of people, from soldiers to factory workers to administrators to air warning personnel and so on.

2. An interesting theme to me was the US-British tension over empire. Britain in many ways fought this war to save its empire, and it needed and exploited its empire to fight the war. FDR and most Americans, however, were sour on this form of formal empire. There was the classic republican aversion to imperial domination, plus resentment at the prospect of fighting to save someone else's empire, plus dislike of closed or tilted imperial trading blocs that prevented a larger world market from taking hold. So all throughout the war, the US was hesitant if not loathe to take steps that would allow the British to reassert control of their empire; this colored some of the US skepticism toward Britain's desire for operations in Italy and North Africa, which consolidated British control of Suez and the Middle East. Overall, the US helped usher in the new post-imperial world through determination principles embedded in the Atlantic and UN Charters, by nudging the British and French toward transferring authority to colonies, and by creating stipulations at Bretton Woods and for postwar aid programs that imperial trading blocs be opened up. There's a lot of chatter about the US as an empire, but in WWII its function was basically anti-imperial against both allies and adversaries.

3. Another interesting point in the economics sections of this book is that the kind of empires the main protagonists of this war wanted weren't actually very good for fighting these wars. The Germans, Japanese, and Italians had a highly extractive concept of empire in which they pulled labor and resources from the conquered periphery into the core. But this was not only expensive to set up and hard to manage logistically, it didn't make up for key weaknesses in each side's economic systems. This was especially true for Japan, which had vast territorial holdings but A. an under-developed domestic industrial and consumer economy and B. An inability, once the war with the US kicked off, to get resources from its overseas territories to the homeland. In short, the kind of empire everyone was fighting over was ironically not that valuable any more for sustaining a modern economy; this was a lesson the US learned better than anyone else in this conflict.

There's a lot more I could unpack from this book, but who has the time? Anyways, if you have the patience and a significant interest in WWII, this is a great book to pick up. ...more

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