Diplomacy History

On the night of September 11, 2012, the American diplomatic mission at Benghazi, Libya, came under ferocious attack by a heavily armed group of Islamic terrorists. The prolonged firefight, and the attack hours later on a nearby CIA outpost, resulted in the deaths of four Americans, including the American ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, the Information Officer, Sean Smith, and two former Navy SEALs, Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty, working for the Central Intelligence Agency.

In this dramatic first-person narrative, Greg Mortenson picks up where Three Cups of Tea left off in 2003, recounting his relentless, ongoing efforts to establish schools for girls in Afghanistan; his extensive work in Azad Kashmir and Pakistan after a massive earthquake hit the region in 2005; and the unique ways he has built relationships with Islamic clerics, militia commanders, and tribal leaders. He shares for the first time his broader vision to promote peace through education and literacy.

Most Americans consider détente, the reduction of tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, to be among the Nixon administration's most significant foreign policy successes. The diplomatic back channel that national security advisor Henry Kissinger established with Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, became the most important method of achieving this thaw in the Cold War. Kissinger praised back channels for preventing leaks.

In The Peacemakers, author Bruce Jentleson shows how key figures in the previous century rewrote the zero-sum and transactional scripts they were handed and successfully prevented conflict, advanced human rights, and promoted global sustainability. Covering a broad range of historical examples, from Yitzhak Rabin's efforts for Arab-Israeli peace to Dag Hammarskjöld's effectiveness as secretary-general of the United Nations and Mahatma Gandhi's pioneering use of nonviolence as a political tool, Jentleson argues that individuals can shape policy.

In its formative years, America, birthplace of a revolution, wrestled with a volatile dilemma. John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and many other founding fathers clashed. What was to be the new republic's strategy toward a revolution roiling just off its shores? From 1790 to 1810, the disagreement reverberated far beyond Caribbean waters and American coastal ports. War between France and Britain, the great powers of the time, raged on the seas and in Europe.

What can the United States do to help realize its dream of a peaceful, democratic Middle East? Stephen Kinzer offers a surprising answer in this paradigm-shifting book. Two countries in the region, he argues, are America's logical partners in the 21st century: Turkey and Iran.

The unlikely man at the roiling center of this intrigue was Robert Bunch, an American-born Englishman who had maneuvered his way to the position of British consul in Charleston, South Carolina, and grew to loathe slavery and the righteousness of its practitioners. Bunch used his unique perch and boundless ambition to become a key player, sending reams of dispatches to the home government and eventually becoming the Crown's best secret source on the Confederacy.

Michael Fullilove’s work on global affairs has appeared in major publications such as the New York Times. In Rendezvous with Destiny, Fullilove examines the exceptional men at the heart of America’s transformation into a global power.

Two of America's leading scholar-diplomats, Philip Zelikow and Condoleezza Rice, have combed sources in several languages, interviewed leading figures, and drawn on their own firsthand experience to bring to life the choices that molded the contemporary world. Zeroing in on the key moments of decision, the might-have-beens, and the human beings working through them, they explore both what happened and what could have happened, to show how one world ended and another took form.

A groundbreaking new study of Anglo-American relations during the Cold War, Diplomacy at the Brink argues for a reevaluation of Dwight D. Eisenhower's foreign policy toward allies and enemies alike. Contrary to his reputation as a level-headed moderate, the Eisenhower who emerges is a conservative ideologue, a leader whose aggressively anti-Communist and anticolonialist foreign policies represented a major shift away from the containment policy of the Truman presidency.

Schmitz illuminates how the policies FDR pursued in response to the crises of the 1930s transformed Americans' thinking about their place in the world. He shows how the president developed an interlocking set of ideas that prompted a debate between isolationism and preparedness, guided the United States into World War II, and mobilized support for the war while establishing a sense of responsibility for the postwar world.

America in Retreat identifies a profound crisis on the global horizon. As Americans seek to withdraw from the world to tend to domestic problems, America’s adversaries spy opportunity. Vladimir Putin's ambitions to restore the glory of the czarist empire go effectively unchecked, as do China's attempts to expand its maritime claims in the South China Sea, as do Iran's efforts to develop nuclear capabilities.

Al Qaeda’s 9/11 attack was just a small part of its long-term plan. Osama Bin Laden knew the assault would provoke the U.S. to invade Afghanistan and re-stoke his jihad. Bin Laden has built a large following by perverting the teachings of Islam to justify the mass murder of innocent people. By fighting him with bullets and bombs we have bolstered Bin Laden’s recruiting efforts abroad, undermined civil liberties and economic security at home and tarnished America’s reputation internationally.

A fly-on-the-wall narrative of the Oval Office in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, using JFK’s secret White House tapes. On October 28, 1962, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev agreed to remove nuclear missiles from Cuba. Popular history has marked that day as the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis, a seminal moment in American history. As President Kennedy’s secretly recorded White House tapes now reveal, the reality was not so simple.

This is the true story of an unknown American politician who played a critical role in ending centuries of conflict in Northern Ireland. Without the president's permission, and breaking every conventional rule about how to deal with terrorists, former congressman Bruce Morrison helped end a conflict that most observers thought would continue indefinitely.

When you work in foreign environments, it can seem like the principles for getting things done are blown out of the water. How do you accomplish your mission? And get home safe? Save Your Ammo is a practical guide to working with people from other cultures.

Throughout his presidency, Ronald Reagan sought "peace through strength" during an era of historic change. In the decades since, pundits and scholars have argued over the president's legacy: some consider Reagan a charismatic and consummate leader, who renewed American strength and defeated communism. To others he was an ambitious and dangerous warmonger, whose presidency was plagued with mismanagement, misconduct, and foreign policy failures.

Presidents George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush both led the United States through watershed events in foreign relations: the end of the Cold War and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In The Gulf, Michael F. Cairo reveals how, despite many similarities, father and son pursued very different international strategies. He explores how the personality, beliefs, and leadership style of each man influenced contemporary US foreign policy.

Since 2001, the US Department of State has been sending hip hop artists abroad to perform and teach as goodwill ambassadors. There are good reasons for this: Hip hop is known and loved across the globe, acknowledged and appreciated as a product of American culture. Hip hop has from its beginning been a means of creating community through artistic collaboration, fostering what hip hop artists call building.

An Independent Empire shows how foreign policy and diplomacy constitute a truly national story, necessary for understanding the history of the United States. In this lively and well-written book, episodes in American history - such as the writing and ratification of the Constitution, Henry Clay's advocacy of an American System, Pinckney's Treaty with Spain, and the visionary but absurd Congress of Panama - are recast as elemental aspects of United States foreign and security policy.