Michael Desch, “Cult of the Irrelevant: The Waning Influence of Social Science on National Security (Princeton UP, 2019)

To mobilize America’s intellectual resources to meet the security challenges of the post–9/11 world, US Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates observed that “we must again embrace eggheads and ideas.” But the gap between national security policymakers and international relations scholars has become a chasm. In Cult of the Irrelevant:...