Scott pins the blame for these grotesque man-made disasters on centralised political authority (ie, the absence of dissent) and "totalistic" ideologies that sought to impose uniformity and order in the name of some dubious pseudo-scientific blueprint. This isn't really a book about international relations, but it's a fascinating exploration of the origins of great human follies (like Prussian "scientific forestry" or Stalinist collectivised agriculture).
James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (The essays found in Schelling's Strategy of Conflict are more technical but equally insightful). Robert Pape's Bombing to Win and Wallace Thies's When Governments Collide) but more than anyone else, Schelling taught us all to think about military affairs in a genuinely strategic fashion. Some of Schelling's ideas do not seem to have worked well in practice (cf. He's a Nobel Prize winner now, so one expects a lot of smart ideas. Combines biology and macro-history in a compelling fashion, explaining why small differences in climate, population, agronomy and the like turned out to have far-reaching effects on the evolution of human societies and the long-term balance of power.
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