Steve Coll Wins the 2025 Arthur Ross Book Award for “The Achilles Trap”

Steve Coll has won the 2025 Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) Arthur Ross Book Award for The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the CIA, and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq (Penguin Press), an examination of the people and geopolitics that led to the United States’ war with Iraq and of the United States’ relationship with former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Coll, a visiting senior editor at the Economist, was awarded the Gold Medal. He also won the Arthur Ross Book Award in 2005, earning the Gold Medal for Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (Penguin Press).

“Steve Coll has done it again, applying his trademark painstaking research and cool intelligence to unpack the genealogy of American intervention in Iraq,” said Gideon Rose, CFR adjunct senior fellow and chair of the award jury. “The scariest part of the story turns out to be how utterly clueless leaders on both sides were as they stumbled into the abyss.”

The jury awarded the Silver Medal to Jonathan Blitzer for Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis (Penguin Press). Blitzer is a staff writer at the New Yorker.

The Bronze Medal was awarded to Sergey Radchenko for To Run the World: The Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power (Cambridge University Press). Radchenko is the Wilson E. Schmidt distinguished professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).

Additional shortlisted nominees include:

• Independent journalist Atossa Araxia Abrahamian for The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World (Riverhead Books)
• Professor of Political Science and Director of the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University and Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution Elizabeth N. Saunders for The Insiders’ Game: How Elites Make War and Peace (Princeton University Press)
• Staff writer at the Atlantic Simon Shuster for The Showman: Inside the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky (William Morrow)
• National security reporter at the Wall Street Journal Alexander Ward for The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore American Foreign Policy After Trump (Portfolio)

Endowed by the late Arthur Ross in 2001, this award recognizes nonfiction books that make an outstanding contribution to the understanding of international relations; it is among the most prestigious prizes for books related to international and foreign policy issues.

View a list of previous winners.

This year’s awardees will be honored at a CFR event this January.