Henry Kissinger - Diplomacy

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Diplomacy by Henry Kissinger (DjVu File)

From Publishers Weekly
Former National Security Advisor and Secretary of State Kissinger discusses the art of diplomacy and the American approach to foreign affairs.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
After nearly a dozen books and service as secretary of state for presidents Nixon and Ford, Kissinger has established himself as a major thinker, writer, and actor on the world's diplomatic stage. His newest work is a remarkable survey of the craft of international relations from the early 17th century to the present era. Beginning with the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, Kissinger summarizes three centuries of Western diplomacy, giving special attenton to the influence of Wilsonian idealism on 20th-century American foreign policy. He is not shy about describing his own contributions to Nixon's foreign gambits, nor is he reticient about offering his own advice to the current administration on how to handle Russia, China, or the rest of the world. From Kissinger we learn that there is really little new about the New World Order. This is an important contribution to the theoretical literature on foreign affairs and will also serve quite ably as a one-volume synthesis of modern diplomatic history. All libraries should have this impressive book. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 12/93.
- Ed Goedeken, Iowa State Univ. Lib., Ames
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist
Neither time nor the strong reactions his person and Nixon-era actions evoke has dampened Kissinger's talent for cogent distillation of international complexity. If anything, this closely argued work, spaciously peppered with anecdotes and personal observations, is his best yet. It is not, be mindful, a diplomatic history per se, but instead a reminder of the geopolitical constraints on America's endeavor--the third this century--to fashion a new world order. Naturally, Kissinger's approach is historical, beginning with Cardinal Richelieu's policy in the Thirty Years' War, but his arguments are conceptual dissections of the principles on which the statesman of the moment operated. Whether discussing the Cardinal's raison d'{‚}etat, Metternich's (and then Palmerston's) balance-of-power, Bismarck's naked Realpolitik, Wilson's rejection of the above in favor of a vaporous collective security, the aggressive ideologies of expansion that issued from World War I, or the more solid collective security embodied in NATO, Kissinger is implicitly showing America's present (and near future) administrators the analogous choices on their post-Cold War menu. Referring often to John Quincy Adams' famed 1821 admonition that "America should not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy," Kissinger cautions against the exceptional American temptation, regardless of party, to compel a democratic transformation of the world. He would prefer the revival of a balance-of-power outlook, which America has never practiced, but through which, among other outcomes, Russia becomes reconciled to its reduced, though still vast, territory. Authorial fame and powerful prose will secure Kissinger's new book a slot atop the sales lists. Gilbert Taylor --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Kirkus Reviews
The Nobel laureate and former national security advisor and secretary of state (Years of Upheaval, 1982, etc.) presents an engrossing and monumental (in every sense) historical survey of diplomacy from the 17th century to the present. Kissinger begins his narrative after the Peace of Westphalia (1648), when militarily ascendant France strove for dominance on the continent, preventing the fragmented German states from coalescing into a major power. Thereafter Britain, its own internal turbulence quelled and its monarchy restored, sought to check France by creating alliances of weaker European states. Kissinger shows how wily statesmen like Richelieu, Britain's William III, Metternich, and Bismarck frankly pursued their own nation-state's interests without regard for the idealistic concepts of collective security that have motivated American policy since the Wilson administration: only Britain, because of its unique geographical position, actively pursued a policy of promoting equilibrium on the continent. Kissinger extensively discusses the unraveling of the post-Napoleonic arrangements in the decades leading up to WW I, Soviet and German consolidation and French and British demoralization in the years after the Versailles treaty, and the dominance of the Soviet-American rivalry in world politics after World War II. Kissinger draws fascinatingly on his own experiences as President Nixon's chief diplomat to illustrate his arguments about diplomacy. Finally, he argues that the ideal of collective security that American policy has promoted since Wilson's presidency and throughout the Cold War, while sometimes effective, is often weak because it is not strongly grounded in national interests. Buttressing his argument with a sweeping historical survey, Kissinger persuasively contends that leaders of the western democracies, particularly the US, should leaven their idealism in the turbulent post-Cold War era with the realistic pursuit of concrete national interests. Profound and important. (Book-of-the- Month main selection for April; History Book Club main selection) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.