World Order

Henry Kissinger, one of the most prominent diplomats of his era, holds that no genuine world order has ever existed. For most of history, civilizations have each framed their own idea of order and treated it as universal, and now that international affairs play out globally, those ideas collide with no agreement on the rules. Kissinger explains how Western thinking changed with the 1648 Peace of Westphalia and sets out four historic systems: American democratic idealism, the Westphalian peace of 17th-century Europe, the religious supremacism of political Islam, and China's idea of a central imperium. He also takes up the challenge of building a shared order amid violent conflict, spreading technology and ideological extremism. Penguin published it in 2014.

Mark Zuckerberg chose it for his A Year of Books series, describing it as a book about foreign relations and building peaceful ties between countries, and James Mattis included it on his list of favorite books in Call Sign Chaos.