Three top recent books on economic statecraft

Daniel W. Drezner is Professor of International Politics, a nonresident senior fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and the co-director of Fletcher's Russia and Eurasia Program. He has written seven books, including All Politics is Global and Theories of International Politics and Zombies, and edited three others, including The Uses and Abuses of Weaponized Interdependence.

On his Substack Drezner tagged "three recent books on [economic statecraft] that merit a closer look from anyone interested in the topic." One title on the list:

Paul Blustein’s King Dollar: The Past and Future of the World's Dominant Currency

A lot of books have been written in recent years about whether the dollar will persist as the global reserve currency. Blustein, a longtime economics reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, argues that it will take an awful lot for the dollar to be displaced as the main global currency. Blustein’s greatest gift as a writer is to make arcane concepts — like the payments and settlement systems that let banks transfer money to each other — accessible to the reader. In King Dollar, Blustein explains why reports of the dollar’s demise have been greatly exaggerated, and examines all the pretenders to the dollar’s throne — including, yes, cryptocurrencies. The result is an engaging read.

Of course, Blustein argues that the dollar’s status is impregnable “barring catastrophic policy missteps by the U.S. government.” And as he acknowledges in the book’s introduction, the responsibility to manage the dollar wisely, “may not count for much in the mind of Donald Trump.” One could argue that the next few years will be a tough test of the dollar’s resilience as a reserve currency.

Read about another book on Drezner's list.

--Marshal Zeringue