Here’s trio of short books that to my mind are essential to understanding the contradictions inherent in the American approach to statecraft. They are all “old” books dating from the 1950s, yet each one could have been written yesterday.

The Irony of American History by Reinhold Niebuhr

Barack Obama has cited Niebuhr, the Christian realist who was such an influential figure from the 1930s to the 1960s, as a favorite philosopher. Here’s hoping that the president will consult this particular book from time to time — the most important essay on US foreign policy ever written. Available in a new paperback edition recently published by the University of Chicago Press.

The Tragedy of American Diplomacy by William Appleman Williams

Drawing on the legacy of Frederick Jackson Turner and Charles Beard, Williams founded the “Wisconsin School” of revisionist U. S. diplomatic history. This remains his most important book and is an essential primer for those seeking to understand the origins and the evolution of America’s informal empire. Just out in a fiftieth anniversary paperback edition.

The Quiet American by Graham Greene

A novel set in Indochina late in the first Vietnam war, with the Americans already beginning to elbow the French out of the way, setting the stage for the second Vietnam war that is to follow. Greene uses the book as vehicle to express his venomous anti-Americanism and to expose the underside of America’s benign intentions. “Innocence,” he writes at one point, “is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.”