What do you think?
Rate this book
Inside the Situation Room: The Theory and Practice of Crisis Decision-Making
Combining decades of diplomacy and world-renowned scholarship, Inside the Situation Room bridges the gap between politics and academia to illuminate how world leaders make decisions in times of crisis. For decades, people have sought to understand how and why decisions are made in times of crisis, but very few get the opportunity to witness leaders' decision-making process. The result has been a persistent disconnect between the theory and the practice of decision-making. Now, a former US Secretary of State has joined forces with a world-renowned scholar to bridge that gap, first in their ground-breaking class at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, and now in the pages of this book. In Inside the Situation Room, Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton and Dr. Keren Yarhi-Milo bring together insights from more than a dozen leading policymakers and scholars so readers can experience a masterclass in global policy and crisis decision-making. The book includes everything from the psychology and mechanics of threat assessment; the role of advisors; the effects of group think and trust; real-life stories of diplomatic efforts and covert operations; how women have shaped decisions over peace and security; and the impact of public opinion. Inside the Situation Room offers an insider look at how decisions are actually made, what theoretical insights might be useful to current and future generations of leaders, and where research still needs to be done. This book will serve as the first step toward a new standard more active, iterative collaboration among two communities—scholars and practitioners—who have a great deal to contribute and learn from one another.
- GenresPoliticsNonfiction
513 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 15, 2025
About the author
Hillary Rodham Clinton
90 books3,198 followersHillary Diane Rodham Clinton (born October 26, 1947) was the 67th United States Secretary of State, serving in the cabinet of President Barack Obama. In 2016, she became the first woman in U.S. history to win a major party's presidential nomination, and the first woman to win the popular vote in a presidential race - despite losing the election.
She was a Senator from the state of New York from 2001 to 2009. As the wife of the 42nd, President of the United States, William Jefferson Clinton, Hillary served as First Lady from 1993 to 2001. In the 2008 election Clinton was a leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.
A native of Illinois, Hillary Rodham attracted national attention in 1969 when she was chosen by her peers to be the first student commencement speaker at Wellesley College. As a graduate of Yale Law School, Class of 1973, she served temporarily as a Congressional legal counsel. Rodham moved to Arkansas in 1974, marrying Bill Clinton a year later. Hillary Rodham Clinton co-founded the Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families in 1977, and became the first female chair of the Legal Services Corporation in 1978. Named the first female partner at Rose Law Firm in 1979, she was twice listed as one of the 100 most influential lawyers in America. First Lady of Arkansas from 1979 to 1981 and 1983 to 1992 with husband Bill as Governor, Clinton successfully led a task force to reform Arkansas's education system. She has served on the board of directors of Wal-Mart as well as several other prominent corporations.
In 1994 as First Lady of the United States, her major initiative, the Clinton health care plan, failed to gain approval from the U.S. Congress. However, in 1997 and 1999, Clinton played a role in advocating for the establishment of the State Children's Health Insurance Program, the Adoption and Safe Families Act, and the Foster Care Independence Act. Her time as First Lady drew a polarized response from the American public. She is the only First Lady to have been subpoenaed, testifying before a federal grand jury in 1996 due to the Whitewater controversy, but was never charged with any wrongdoing in this or any of the other investigations during her husband's administration. The state of her marriage was the subject of considerable speculation following the Lewinsky scandal in 1998 that spurred Articles of Impeachment to be issued against her husband, Bill Clinton.
In January of 2000, Clinton was elected as senator to the State of New York after moving to the small suburban hamlet of Chappaqua in Westchester County. That election marked the first time an American First Lady had run for public office; Clinton was also the first female senator to represent New York. In the Senate, she initially supported the Bush administration on some foreign policy issues, including a vote for the Iraq War Resolution, subsequently opposing the administration on its conduct of the war in Iraq, and most domestic issues. Senator Clinton was re-elected by a wide margin in 2006. In the 2008 presidential nomination race, Hillary Clinton won more primaries and delegates than any other female candidate in American history, but narrowly lost to Senator Barack Obama. As Secretary of State, Clinton became the first former First Lady to serve in a president's cabinet
She was a Senator from the state of New York from 2001 to 2009. As the wife of the 42nd, President of the United States, William Jefferson Clinton, Hillary served as First Lady from 1993 to 2001. In the 2008 election Clinton was a leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.
A native of Illinois, Hillary Rodham attracted national attention in 1969 when she was chosen by her peers to be the first student commencement speaker at Wellesley College. As a graduate of Yale Law School, Class of 1973, she served temporarily as a Congressional legal counsel. Rodham moved to Arkansas in 1974, marrying Bill Clinton a year later. Hillary Rodham Clinton co-founded the Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families in 1977, and became the first female chair of the Legal Services Corporation in 1978. Named the first female partner at Rose Law Firm in 1979, she was twice listed as one of the 100 most influential lawyers in America. First Lady of Arkansas from 1979 to 1981 and 1983 to 1992 with husband Bill as Governor, Clinton successfully led a task force to reform Arkansas's education system. She has served on the board of directors of Wal-Mart as well as several other prominent corporations.
In 1994 as First Lady of the United States, her major initiative, the Clinton health care plan, failed to gain approval from the U.S. Congress. However, in 1997 and 1999, Clinton played a role in advocating for the establishment of the State Children's Health Insurance Program, the Adoption and Safe Families Act, and the Foster Care Independence Act. Her time as First Lady drew a polarized response from the American public. She is the only First Lady to have been subpoenaed, testifying before a federal grand jury in 1996 due to the Whitewater controversy, but was never charged with any wrongdoing in this or any of the other investigations during her husband's administration. The state of her marriage was the subject of considerable speculation following the Lewinsky scandal in 1998 that spurred Articles of Impeachment to be issued against her husband, Bill Clinton.
In January of 2000, Clinton was elected as senator to the State of New York after moving to the small suburban hamlet of Chappaqua in Westchester County. That election marked the first time an American First Lady had run for public office; Clinton was also the first female senator to represent New York. In the Senate, she initially supported the Bush administration on some foreign policy issues, including a vote for the Iraq War Resolution, subsequently opposing the administration on its conduct of the war in Iraq, and most domestic issues. Senator Clinton was re-elected by a wide margin in 2006. In the 2008 presidential nomination race, Hillary Clinton won more primaries and delegates than any other female candidate in American history, but narrowly lost to Senator Barack Obama. As Secretary of State, Clinton became the first former First Lady to serve in a president's cabinet
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
April 28, 2026
In what I can only imagine is my bizarre quest to someday myself become an associate professor of Hillary Rodham Clinton studies, I took the liberty of reading this textbook she co-edited for a course she now teaches at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) along with the department's dean, Keren Yarhi-Milo.
I'm obviously biased considering that, judging from my "read" list on Goodreads, HRC is clearly my personal hero. But even with that bias accounted for, I still feel like I really did just get a world class education in the reality of diplomacy and decision-making (and how decision-making interacts with the varying levels of human neuroticism embodied in even our most esteemed leaders) by reading this textbook and would highly recommend it to anyone!
Just to give you one tidbit from the book, I didn't know that leaders in both democracies and autocracies might sometimes choose advisors who are less qualified but also less politically influential and thus less likely to publicly challenge their decisions or policy efforts if spurned. I suppose that could explain some things about our current administration?
Anywho, the book is composed of chapters written by various policymakers and officials as well as academics and provides a variety of perspectives. And when I say "a variety of perspectives," I really do mean *a variety of perspectives.* There's a chapter written by a former Trump administration official that ground my gears enough that I'm gonna rant about it at the end of this review.
There were some other chapters that literally gave me a headache from having to think so hard (which I like to fancy means my brain is becoming really big and strong) by the end. I had to admit to myself that I didn't actually know what an "intifada" was or which Arab nations compose the "Gulf States." It was humbling to have to get down on my knees and beg Google for a potentially hallucinated answer, only to still struggle to make sense of each country's motivations and how they apparently influenced the current state of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as I continued reading the chapter (if I'm understanding this correctly...:something, something... the Saudis were on the verge of normalizing relations with Israel... something, something the other nations were likely to follow Saudi Arabia's lead because they're basically the it girl of the region for x or y reason... Something, something Hamas planned the October 7th attack to sabotage this deal because, I'm guessing, they were afraid of Israel gaining more leverage in the region??? Is that right?) Whatever the case, I deeply appreciated how much chapters like this challenged me to think harder.
Notably though, there were a few other chapters, the ones dealing with the effects of human emotion and psychology on decision-making, that sometimes sounded like they were written by a robot suddenly discovering human social dynamics for the first time. Apparently some guy named Thomas Schelling even won a Nobel Prize in the 1960s for, at least from what I could gather from the chapter mentioning him, ...acknowledging that humans (well, political leaders in this case) might either choose coercion or brute force to deter an adversary, depending on the adversary's level of resolve.
Gee, who'da thunk?
That being said, i'm almost certainly oversimplifying his actual work, and even those chapters contained really useful insights most of the time. The closing chapters on public opinion were also *fascinating.* One gets a sense of the actual stakes finicky public opinion imposes on decision-makers. For example, it was just a reality in 2002 that voting against the then overwhelmingly publicly supported decision to invade Iraq would sabotage even Democrat lawmakers in their impending reelection campaigns. Trade-offs are a fact of life after all and, for those of us who complain about politicians compromising and switching their positions like Ariana Grande too much, it would be wise to remember that one of the biggest, often misguided interest groups politicians must compromise with most often is *us*, the finicky voters who suddenly change our minds and decide we don't enthusiastically want to go to war anymore once we see the actual consequences of our own desires that, admittedly, a similarly inclined leader might have impulsively played into without adequately considering the consequences either.
The only chapter I don't feel like I learned much from was the one on covert operations... If I had to guess why, I'd assume the author wasn't actually authorized to reveal anything juicy about how classified operations actually work. 😂 So it was a whole lot of “yeah, adversary nations like Russia engage in covert information warfare against us. What do we actually do about it?" and then "uhh, well we have to decide what we want to do if we want to do anything at all," followed by me asking "can you be any more specific about what 'what' is??”l and then a smoke bomb appearing out of nowhere as I read through the rest of the chapter.
Anywho, dear imaginary reader, I believe I promised a rant, so here goes:
One of the most page-turning chapters was written by a former cabinet member from Trump's first term of all people and details the Baghdadi raid (Baghdadi was the leader of ISIS; somehow I didn't actually know anything about this event before picking up this book.) While most of the chapter reads like a genre of fiction I'm not sure exists, a "geopolitical thriller" as I labeled it in my head and in my notes, there are other parts that instantly made me roll my eyes.
For instance when he insists that Baghdadi, by choosing to detonate his suicide vest and kill both himself and his two children rather than surrender to the American "infidels," had revealed his true "cowardly" nature. This reads to me like pointless moralizing and "in-group" tribal signalling on the part of the chapter's author. Anyone who's seen a 9/11 documentary knows that radical Islamists overwhelmingly believe that martyring one's self for Islam is pretty much the highest honor a person can achieve (do you really think anyone, save for a genuinely suicidal person, would voluntarily fly a plane into a building if they viewed it as a sad, cowardly act?)
He lost me even more when he recounted Trump's speech about the operation where he asserted before the American people that Baghdadi was "whimpering" and basically crying like a little girl (btw there's a chapter on women's roles in peacemaking in the book that's also really timely and worth reading ) when met with the brute force of the American military and that, although many doubted this claim from Trump, it's "plausible" that Trump could have learned this previously unknown detail from his privileged personal talks with the military men involved in the raid. I immediately wrote "yeah, right!!!" next to the paragraph.
The author then goes on to basically telegraph that he doesn't actually believe Trump's claim (without saying this or even criticizing him in any other way outright throughout the chapter) but that he apparently thinks denigrating Baghdadi to his followers was a "smart" choice on Trump's part... This despite the fact that the claim was obviously absurd on its face. Who chooses to defiantly detonate their suicide vest if they are genuinely bent over whimpering and begging to be spared from the might of an adversary nation's military operation? I imagine that one does not need to agree with a foreign adversary's ideological reasoning in order to understand it accurately enough to predict their behavior. Choosing to martyr one's self for Islam in the face of enemy capture because you believe you will achieve eternal, heroic glory and get 70+ virgins in Paradise is a very predictable jihadist behavior and it's ridiculous to pretend otherwise. Students of foreign affairs need to know this. Perhaps it's easier though to imagine that monsters are fundamentally unlike ourselves and our "in-group," to borrow a phrase from another chapter. I suppose it's easier to pretend a deluded man like Baghdadi was simply born a monster than to consider the role that literal distorted information (including distorted media and distorted statements from mainstream political leaders) can play in radicalizing even someone from our own "in-group" enough to commit a despicable, "cowardly" act.
Anyway, rant over! That was fun 😂
That being said, even chapters like that were still full of valuable insights. He made a pretty smart observation about how, by all outward appearances, American analysts and policymakers had failed to predict that Baghdadi might be hiding out with an affiliate of Al Qaeda because the two groups were generally known to be enemies. The naive westerners appatently failed to remember "the old adage that 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend,'" as the chapter's author writes. I imagine that's an important possibility for students in this field to keep in their head.
Anywho, now that I've rambled long enough, I hope at least one person read at least part of this admittedly long-winded review and decides to give this book a chance, because I'm certainly glad I did!
I'm obviously biased considering that, judging from my "read" list on Goodreads, HRC is clearly my personal hero. But even with that bias accounted for, I still feel like I really did just get a world class education in the reality of diplomacy and decision-making (and how decision-making interacts with the varying levels of human neuroticism embodied in even our most esteemed leaders) by reading this textbook and would highly recommend it to anyone!
Just to give you one tidbit from the book, I didn't know that leaders in both democracies and autocracies might sometimes choose advisors who are less qualified but also less politically influential and thus less likely to publicly challenge their decisions or policy efforts if spurned. I suppose that could explain some things about our current administration?
Anywho, the book is composed of chapters written by various policymakers and officials as well as academics and provides a variety of perspectives. And when I say "a variety of perspectives," I really do mean *a variety of perspectives.* There's a chapter written by a former Trump administration official that ground my gears enough that I'm gonna rant about it at the end of this review.
There were some other chapters that literally gave me a headache from having to think so hard (which I like to fancy means my brain is becoming really big and strong) by the end. I had to admit to myself that I didn't actually know what an "intifada" was or which Arab nations compose the "Gulf States." It was humbling to have to get down on my knees and beg Google for a potentially hallucinated answer, only to still struggle to make sense of each country's motivations and how they apparently influenced the current state of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as I continued reading the chapter (if I'm understanding this correctly...:something, something... the Saudis were on the verge of normalizing relations with Israel... something, something the other nations were likely to follow Saudi Arabia's lead because they're basically the it girl of the region for x or y reason... Something, something Hamas planned the October 7th attack to sabotage this deal because, I'm guessing, they were afraid of Israel gaining more leverage in the region??? Is that right?) Whatever the case, I deeply appreciated how much chapters like this challenged me to think harder.
Notably though, there were a few other chapters, the ones dealing with the effects of human emotion and psychology on decision-making, that sometimes sounded like they were written by a robot suddenly discovering human social dynamics for the first time. Apparently some guy named Thomas Schelling even won a Nobel Prize in the 1960s for, at least from what I could gather from the chapter mentioning him, ...acknowledging that humans (well, political leaders in this case) might either choose coercion or brute force to deter an adversary, depending on the adversary's level of resolve.
Gee, who'da thunk?
That being said, i'm almost certainly oversimplifying his actual work, and even those chapters contained really useful insights most of the time. The closing chapters on public opinion were also *fascinating.* One gets a sense of the actual stakes finicky public opinion imposes on decision-makers. For example, it was just a reality in 2002 that voting against the then overwhelmingly publicly supported decision to invade Iraq would sabotage even Democrat lawmakers in their impending reelection campaigns. Trade-offs are a fact of life after all and, for those of us who complain about politicians compromising and switching their positions like Ariana Grande too much, it would be wise to remember that one of the biggest, often misguided interest groups politicians must compromise with most often is *us*, the finicky voters who suddenly change our minds and decide we don't enthusiastically want to go to war anymore once we see the actual consequences of our own desires that, admittedly, a similarly inclined leader might have impulsively played into without adequately considering the consequences either.
The only chapter I don't feel like I learned much from was the one on covert operations... If I had to guess why, I'd assume the author wasn't actually authorized to reveal anything juicy about how classified operations actually work. 😂 So it was a whole lot of “yeah, adversary nations like Russia engage in covert information warfare against us. What do we actually do about it?" and then "uhh, well we have to decide what we want to do if we want to do anything at all," followed by me asking "can you be any more specific about what 'what' is??”l and then a smoke bomb appearing out of nowhere as I read through the rest of the chapter.
Anywho, dear imaginary reader, I believe I promised a rant, so here goes:
One of the most page-turning chapters was written by a former cabinet member from Trump's first term of all people and details the Baghdadi raid (Baghdadi was the leader of ISIS; somehow I didn't actually know anything about this event before picking up this book.) While most of the chapter reads like a genre of fiction I'm not sure exists, a "geopolitical thriller" as I labeled it in my head and in my notes, there are other parts that instantly made me roll my eyes.
For instance when he insists that Baghdadi, by choosing to detonate his suicide vest and kill both himself and his two children rather than surrender to the American "infidels," had revealed his true "cowardly" nature. This reads to me like pointless moralizing and "in-group" tribal signalling on the part of the chapter's author. Anyone who's seen a 9/11 documentary knows that radical Islamists overwhelmingly believe that martyring one's self for Islam is pretty much the highest honor a person can achieve (do you really think anyone, save for a genuinely suicidal person, would voluntarily fly a plane into a building if they viewed it as a sad, cowardly act?)
He lost me even more when he recounted Trump's speech about the operation where he asserted before the American people that Baghdadi was "whimpering" and basically crying like a little girl (btw there's a chapter on women's roles in peacemaking in the book that's also really timely and worth reading ) when met with the brute force of the American military and that, although many doubted this claim from Trump, it's "plausible" that Trump could have learned this previously unknown detail from his privileged personal talks with the military men involved in the raid. I immediately wrote "yeah, right!!!" next to the paragraph.
The author then goes on to basically telegraph that he doesn't actually believe Trump's claim (without saying this or even criticizing him in any other way outright throughout the chapter) but that he apparently thinks denigrating Baghdadi to his followers was a "smart" choice on Trump's part... This despite the fact that the claim was obviously absurd on its face. Who chooses to defiantly detonate their suicide vest if they are genuinely bent over whimpering and begging to be spared from the might of an adversary nation's military operation? I imagine that one does not need to agree with a foreign adversary's ideological reasoning in order to understand it accurately enough to predict their behavior. Choosing to martyr one's self for Islam in the face of enemy capture because you believe you will achieve eternal, heroic glory and get 70+ virgins in Paradise is a very predictable jihadist behavior and it's ridiculous to pretend otherwise. Students of foreign affairs need to know this. Perhaps it's easier though to imagine that monsters are fundamentally unlike ourselves and our "in-group," to borrow a phrase from another chapter. I suppose it's easier to pretend a deluded man like Baghdadi was simply born a monster than to consider the role that literal distorted information (including distorted media and distorted statements from mainstream political leaders) can play in radicalizing even someone from our own "in-group" enough to commit a despicable, "cowardly" act.
Anyway, rant over! That was fun 😂
That being said, even chapters like that were still full of valuable insights. He made a pretty smart observation about how, by all outward appearances, American analysts and policymakers had failed to predict that Baghdadi might be hiding out with an affiliate of Al Qaeda because the two groups were generally known to be enemies. The naive westerners appatently failed to remember "the old adage that 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend,'" as the chapter's author writes. I imagine that's an important possibility for students in this field to keep in their head.
Anywho, now that I've rambled long enough, I hope at least one person read at least part of this admittedly long-winded review and decides to give this book a chance, because I'm certainly glad I did!
December 16, 2025
Great guide to the class and was privileged to be in the room. At times a bit repetitive/ stuffed with discursive essays meant to accommodate the other side of the aisle. As a stand alone book, I’m not so sold, but as a companion to the lectures, worked well.
December 12, 2025
Finished - excellent book! I was soooo prepared not to like it, but it turned out to be a comprehensive yet readable examination of how (USG-centric) crisis decision-making, with an emphasis on fusing actual practice and academic theory. Anyone working in IntRel should read it. It still ignores some key aspects of decision-making (elite capture, slow crises), but on the whole a really useful and engaging book.
November 11, 2025
The editors - one a practitioner of crisis-management in international relations and the other an academic - marry the theoretical framework of decision-making in crisis situations to real world examples. The book makes for interesting reading for someone wanting to make sense of world events and getting an insight into decision-making process during certain events in contemporary world.
December 1, 2025
objectively cool to have taken a class with hillary clinton
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews