War Diplomacy

Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill were the greatest leaders of “the Greatest Generation.” In Franklin and Winston, Jon Meacham explores the fascinating relationship between the two men who piloted the free world to victory in World War II.

From the New York Times best-selling author of The Revenge of Geography comes a sweeping yet intimate story of the most influential humanitarian you’ve never heard of - Bob Gersony, who spent four decades in crisis zones around the world.

The American war in Vietnam was concluded in 1973 after eight years of fighting, bloodshed, and loss. Yet the terms of the truce that ended the war were effectively identical to what had been offered to the Nixon administration four years earlier. Those four years cost America and Vietnam thousands of lives and billions of dollars, and they were the direct result of the supposed master plan of the most important voice in American foreign policy: Henry Kissinger.

In 1905 President Teddy Roosevelt dispatched Secretary of War William Howard Taft on the largest U.S. diplomatic mission in history to Hawaii, Japan, the Philippines, China, and Korea. Roosevelt's glamorous 21 year old daughter Alice served as mistress of the cruise, which included senators and congressmen. On this trip, Taft concluded secret agreements in Roosevelt's name.

On September 17, 1961, Dag Hammarskjöld boarded a Douglas DC6 propeller plane on the sweltering tarmac of the airport in Leopoldville, the capital of the Congo. Hours later, he would be found dead in an African jungle with an ace of spades playing card placed on his body. Hammarskjöld had been the head of the United Nations for nine years. He was legendary for his dedication to peace on Earth.

To understand the significance of the parts played by Mikhail Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher in East-West relations in the second half of the 1980s, Brown addresses several specific questions: What were the values and assumptions of these leaders, and how did their perceptions evolve? What were the major influences on them? To what extent were they reflecting the views of their own political establishment or challenging them? How important for ending the East-West standoff were their interrelations?

Combining impeccable scholarship and literary elegance, David Wetzel depicts the drama of machinations and passions that exploded in a war that forever changed the face of European history.

The Hopkins Touch offers the first portrait in over two decades of the most powerful man in Roosevelt's administration. David Roll shows how Harry Hopkins, an Iowa-born social worker who had been an integral part of the New Deal's implementation, became the linchpin in FDR's - and America's - relationships with Churchill and Stalin, and spoke with an authority second only to the president's.

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the United States Army became the principal agent of American foreign policy. The army designed, implemented, and administered the occupations of the defeated Axis powers Germany and Japan, as well as many other nations. Generals such as Lucius Clay in Germany, Douglas MacArthur in Japan, Mark Clark in Austria, and John Hodge in Korea presided over these territories as proconsuls.

On March 21, 1968, Yasir Arafat and his guerrillas made the fateful decision to break with conventional guerrilla tactics, choosing to stand and fight an Israeli attack on the al-Karama refugee camp in Jordan. They suffered terrible casualties, but they won a stunning symbolic victory that transformed Arafat into an Arab hero and allowed him to launch a worldwide campaign, one that would reshape Cold War diplomacy and revolutionary movements everywhere. In The Global Offensive, historian Paul Thomas Chamberlin offers new insights into the rise of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

On April 15th, 1783, the Articles of Peace between the United States and Great Britain went into effect proclaiming that "His Britannic Majesty acknowledges the United States . . . to be free Sovereign and independent States." That recognition represented a monumental achievement for the new American nation. It also, as Samuel Flagg Bemis shows us, marked the end of a world war.

Dean Acheson was one of the most influential Secretaries of State in U.S. history, presiding over American foreign policy during a pivotal era - the decade after World War II when the American Century slipped into high gear. During his vastly influential career, Acheson spearheaded the greatest foreign policy achievements in modern times, ranging from the Marshall Plan to the establishment of NATO. In this acclaimed biography, Robert L. Beisner paints an indelible portrait of one of the key figures of the last half-century.

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.

In the winter of 1952, at the height of the Korean War, the CIA flew a covert mission into China to pick up an agent. Trained on a remote Pacific island, the agent belonged to an obscure anti-communist group known as the Third Force based out of Hong Kong. The exfiltration would fail disastrously, and one of the Americans on the mission ended up a prisoner of Mao Zedong's government for the next twenty years. Unraveling the truth behind decades of Cold War intrigue, John Delury documents the damage that this hidden foreign policy did to American political life.

For the better part of the last half century, the United States has been the world's police, claiming to defend ideologies, allies, and our national security through brute force. But is military action always the most appropriate response? Drawing on his vast experience, retired four-star general Tony Zinni argues that we have a lot of work to do to make the process of going to war-or not-more clear-eyed and ultimately successful.

Coming of age in America in the 1970s and 80s, Joe Weisberg was a Cold Warrior. After briefly studying Russian in Leningrad, he joined the CIA in 1990 - just in time to watch the Soviet Union collapse. But less than a decade after the first Cold War ended, a new one broke out. Russia changed in many of the ways that America hoped it might - more capitalist, more religious, more open to Western ideas. But US sanctions have crippled Russia's economy; and Russia's interventions have exacerbated political problems in America.

In this examination of Union and Confederate foreign relations during the Civil War, from both European and American perspectives, Howard Jones demonstrates that the consequences of the conflict between North and South reached far beyond American soil.

The tide of soldiers washed over the Legion shields. Buried, the ranks of Legionaries sagged. "Push!" the Legion NCO yelled. Welcome to 264 B.C. Over the grunts and cries of men struggling against the mass of bodies pressing down on them, the Optio bellowed again, "Push!" And the Legion shields rose, rolling back the tide. The higher the shields, the more soldiers slid off, and the straighter the Legionaries stood. One shield tilted back, and a mercenary soldier tumbled behind the ranks. An infantryman stepped back and drove his blade between the soldier's ribs.

When war broke out in Europe in 1914, political leaders in the United States were swayed by popular opinion to remain neutral; yet less than three years later, the nation declared war on Germany. In Nothing Less Than War: A New History of America's Entry into World War I, Justus D. Doenecke examines the clash of opinions over the war during this transformative period and offers a fresh perspective on America's decision to enter World War I.

Лето 1917 года. Жаркое время. Император Михаил II возглавил революцию. Россия готова перейти в наступление на фронтах. Германия готовится нанести свой удар. Равновесие вот-вот обрушится, окончательно изменив привычный нам мир 1917 года. А пока император-попаданец готовится заключить династический брак. Принцесса Иоланда Савойская, следуя государственным интересам Италии, должна отправиться в Россию. Какие страшные тайны скрываются за кулисами мировой политики? Тысячелетние "старые семьи" и "молодые выскочки", капиталам которых "всего лишь" пара сотен лет. Великие дома и монархи. Сложное переплетение денег и реальной власти.