NBN Book of the Day

An in-depth examination of how the United States can build more effective partner militaries.

Military assistance has a bad reputation. Large-scale attempts to build partner militaries in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam cost the United States billions of dollars and ended ignominiously, with the collapse of local forces as American troops withdrew. Arms transfers of sophisticated, American-made weapons often appear to do more harm than good. Yet military assistance and support—operating indirectly through partners—when done right, can deliver remarkable strategic results for the United States and its partners. Working effectively with partner militaries is one of the most pressing national security challenges for the United States today.

In their latest book, War at Arm's Length: How America Can Build Effective Partners Through Military Assistance (Yale University Press, 2026), Richard Bennet and Alexander Noyes offer a systematic look at military
assistance in the twenty-first century, examining a frequently deployed
but often misunderstood set of tools that allows the United States to
leverage partner militaries to achieve national security objectives.
Bennet and Noyes posit that two main factors—the degree of interest
alignment on security issues and the level of institutional capacity of
the receiving force—will be the most important variables in Washington’s
ability to build militarily effective partners.

Our guests today are Doctor Richard Bennet, who is a senior research associate at the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland, and Doctor Alexander Noyes, who is a fellow in the Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology at the Brookings Institution.

Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of Volatile States in International Politics (Oxford University Press, 2023). 
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Decades before Miami became Havana USA, a wave of leftist, radical,
working-class women and men from prerevolutionary Cuba crossed the
Florida Straits, made Ybor City the global capital of the Cuban cigar
industry, and established the foundation of latinidad in the
Sunshine State. Located on the eastern edge of Tampa, Ybor City was a
neighborhood of cigar workers and Caribbean revolutionaries who sought
refuge against the shifting tides of international political turmoil
during the early half of the twentieth century.In Ybor City: Crucible of the Latina South
(University of North Carolina Press, 2023), Historian Sarah McNamara
tells the story of immigrant and U.S.-born Latinas/os who organized
strikes, marched against fascism, and criticized U.S. foreign policy.
While many members of the immigrant generation maintained their
dedication to progressive ideals for years to come, those who came of
age in the wake of World War II distanced themselves from leftist
politics amidst the Red Scare and the wrecking ball of urban renewal.
This portrait of the political shifts that defined Ybor City highlights
the underexplored role of women’s leadership within movements for social
and economic justice as it illustrates how people, places, and politics
become who and what they are.
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Modern environmentalism often frames conservation as moral, humans damage nature, and conservation protects it. But Mardi Reardon-Smith’s Making Do: Conservation Ethics and Ecological Care in Australia, published by Stanford University Press in 2025, dismantles that comforting narrative and replaces it with something far more complex and candid.

Set on the Cape York Peninsula, the book explores how Aboriginal traditional owners, pastoralists, conservation workers, and government institutions navigate landscapes shaped by colonialism, climate instability, species diversity, cattle grazing, fire, and ecological loss. What emerges is not a story of heroes versus villains but a portrait of people trying to “make do” within damaged systems.

One of the book’s most provocative arguments is that care itself can be violent. Conservation often entails killing feral animals, managing landscapes by burning and fencing ecosystems, and deciding which species merit protection and which do not. Mardi challenges the romantic assumption that ecological care is inherently gentle or morally pure. Instead, care becomes a form of intervention, practical, political, and deeply contested.

Perhaps most importantly, Making Do rejects the illusion that environmental crises can be neatly solved. Climate change, biodiversity collapse, and ecological instability have already irreversibly transformed the world. The challenge now is not to return to an imagined past but to learn how to build livable futures amid uncertainty.

In a time when environmental discourse often swings between apocalyptic despair and technological optimism, Mardi offers a more grounded perspective. Ecological responsibility is imperfect, exhausting, and full of contradictions, yet it remains necessary.

Amisah Bakuri (PhD) is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her research examines the intersections of religion, sexuality, gender, and migration, particularly within African diasporic communities in the Netherlands.
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What would the Enlightenment look like if we viewed it through the eyes of the philosophers as they were facing death? Joanna Stalnaker turns our usual perspective on the Enlightenment on its head, bringing to light a set of works written at the end of the Old Regime and at the end of their authors’ lives. These works, all written before the French Revolution, cast a retrospective glance over the intellectual movement their authors participated in, and over the authors’ own lives and works. Stalnaker shows that the beauty of these works stems from their authors’ efforts to give literary form to the materiality and fragility of their dying bodies. As they reflected on writing as a means of reaching posterity, Enlightenment philosophers embraced the possibility that neither their names nor their writings would survive long beyond the decomposition of their bodies. They inscribed the silence and nothingness of death into their last works.

Stalnaker’s book The Rest Is Silence: Enlightenment Philosophers Facing Death (Yale UP, 2025) unsettles reigning interpretations of the Enlightenment as a precursor to our modernity and shows its protagonists at their moments of fragility and doubt, capturing their sense of an ending rather than the confidence in a glowing future so often attributed to them.

Joanna Stalnaker is professor of French at Columbia University. She is the author of a prizewinning first book, The Unfinished Enlightenment: Description in the Age of the Encyclopedia. She lives in New York City.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

YouTube Channel: here
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Revolutionary New York: 250 Years of Social Change (SUNY Press, 2026), edited by Bruce Dearstyne and published by SUNY Press, examines what the volume calls the “unfinished revolutions” of the Empire State. In sixteen essays by a varied cast of authors, the book explores efforts to achieve what the editor describes as the full promise of the revolution. Central to the book are ordinary New Yorkers who faced great challenges, such as the Oneida who tried to maintain sovereignty in the era of the American Revolution, women winning the vote, and African American soldiers who served in the United States Army in World War I. Together, Dearstyne writes, they tell a story of “the two-and-a-half century struggle to realize the Revolution’s ideals and bring increased freedom and opportunities to marginalized populations.”

Dearstyne is the editor of this volume and the author of several books, including The Spirit of New York: Defining Events in the Empire State’s History and The Crucible of Public Policy: New York Courts in the Progressive Era.

Robert Snyder, interviewing for the New Books Network and the Gotham Center for New York Cit History, is professor emeritus of Journalism and American Studies at Rutgers University. He is the author of When the City Stopped: Stories from New York’s Essential Workers (Cornell, 2025), winner of the Fiorello LaGuardia Book Prize. rwsnyder@rutgers.edu
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