I just finished reading
Amazon.com: The Ugly American: Books: William J. Lederer,Eugene Burdick a few days ago and found it to be a great book that I'd recommend to others out there.
It was written in 1958 by a pair of foreign service officers who had seen their fair share of blunders in our approach to SE Asia in the effort to counter the communist tide. While there is always a danger is historical analogy, I found it strikingly familiar to much of what we face today: an inept information operations apparatus that when it is in action doesn't have its message reach the appropriate target audience, a lack of language skills, a lack of depth in reading about the ideological threat that we face and the playbook that they will use, and an ethnocentric approach based on American exceptionalism. It even appealed to the economist in me with its vignettes on development policy.
My thanks to Brigadier Ray for recommending this book to me and others many moons ago.