Fareed Zakaria, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2024, 400 pp.  
 
 
Fareed Zakaria tells the epic tale of unrest, progress, backlash and transformation that shaped the rise of western liberalism and industrial modernities, sifting through ideas to explain the global agitation of our day. Beginning with the “liberal revolutions” of the Dutch Republic in the 16th century and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in the United Kingdom, the book traces the convulsive journey to economic, technological, and political modernization through the eras of Britain’s and America’s industrial supremacy on down to post-Cold War globalization.  
Today, you’ll find dramatic change wherever you look. International rule-based order has been upended. Traditional left-right divides have shifted. Post-communist economic consensus, favourable to trade, has given way to protectionism. As we may be living through one of history’s most revolutionary moments, to paraphrase Zakaria, he believes we can learn from preceding disruptions, especially those that involved true revolutions. 
To round off the tale, the author adds a Trumpian backlash against his predecessors’ attempts to export the values of the American Revolution to the rest of the world through Wilsonian internationalism. In this particular case, the aim is to go back to a kind of American isolationism and protectionism that predates World War II. We seem to find ourselves amidst a multinational counter-revolution against a global system in place for eighty years, a system intended to build Western institutions that would bring major powers together under one roof. That system is on the verge of collapse, although it gave us the longest period in modern history without a war among great national powers. 

George Stephanopoulos, The Situation Room: The Inside Story of Presidents in Crisis, New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2024, 368 pp. 
 
 
No room better defines American power and its global role than the White House Situation Room. Yet no other of its kind is veiled by a thicker mist of secrecy. Created by President Kennedy after the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Situation Room has been the focal point where history-making crises were managed over the past six decades. Detailing hair-trigger decisions and close calls, this book will take readers through dramatic correction courses under a dozen presidential administrations. Among them you will find minute-to-minute transcripts of unfolding events, from Lyndon Johnson’s increasingly unpopular handling of the Vietnam War to Richard Nixon’s response to the Yom Kippur War, or the efforts to monitor the attempts on Kennedy and Reagan’s lives. You’ll witness the moment Henry Kissinger raised the Defcon level while an intoxicated Nixon stayed home. Carter’s decision to ask for help getting American hostages out of Iran. The agonizing hours following the 9/11 attacks. New details from Obama staff leading to the strike on Osama Bin Laden, and an unpublished report on January 6, 2021, the day of the infamous storming of the Capitol.  
George Stephanopoulos, political pundit and former adviser to Bill Clinton, wisely focuses on a single crisis for each of the twelve administrations as he drafts the history of the Situation Room. Along the way, he sheds light on diverse presidential management styles and serves up a satisfying portion of historical moments. 

Eunice Goes, Social Democracy, Newcastle: Agenda Publishing, 2024, 176 pp. 
 
 
Social democracy arose in the late 19th century and became one of the leading ideologies in Europe. Eunice Goes, a Portuguese scholar long established in the United Kingdom, where she lectures at the University of Richmond, parses the evolution of this ideology as a corpus of political thought and praxis. She lays out the development, transformation, and practice of European social democracy by analysing four key moments: origin and rise as a fundamental political force in public European legislature, distancing itself from Marxist tenets to embrace parliamentary socialism; a second stage entailing revisionism and acceptance of capitalism in the post-war period as counterpoint to the horrors of totalitarian regimes; the Third Way of the 1990s and the adoption of triumphalist liberalism; and at last the contemporary crisis of social democracy in an era of partisan fragmentation and multiple bumps in the road for democracies and globalization, demanding new solutions. 
The book offers a holistic, systemic and profoundly captivating discussion on one of Europe’s most long-lived ideologies, its different expressions in several European countries, and the changes demanded of it at a time of epochal disruption and unrest.