Diplomacy

Good diplomats rarely write well about diplomacy. Ambassadorial memoirs include some of the worst books ever published. Castlereagh, Talleyrand, and Metternich, the three men who created the 1814-15 Vienna settlement, rightly praised by Henry Kissinger as one of the most durable works of peacemaking in history, left nothing apart from their voluminous papers, and for their views on their craft we are dependent on a few bons mots. By contrast, John Quincy Adams produced twelve volumes of Memoirs, and Chateaubriand's Mémoires d'outre-tombe is another Leviathan. But both are composed more of venom, spleen, hurt pride, and vindictive narrative than diplomatic adages - and, if truth be told, neither man was a negotiator of world class. In modern times, the writings of John Foster Dulles and Anthony Eden are unilluminating, George Kennan's books uneven, and the one outstanding memoir is Dean Acheson's Present at the Creation. But even that tells you what, where, and when, rather than how. That leaves us with two authors - Harold Nicolson and Henry Kissinger. Both engaged in diplomacy with a passion for the art and with a view to writing about it later. Both studied carefully that perennial sourcebook of diplomacy, the Vienna Congress: Nicolson's The Congress of Vienna (1946) and Kissinger's A World Restored (1957) are the two best short accounts of it. Nicolson was brought up to the job. His father was head of the Foreign Office and as a lad he personally delivered the British ultimatum to the German ambassador in July 1914; later he served under the last of the old-world Foreign Ministers, the Marquess Curzon. His writings on diplomacy are notable for their clarity and sense.

"A Touchstone book."

1. The New World Order -- 2. The Hinge: Theodore Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson -- 3. From Universality to Equilibrium: Richelieu, William of Orange, and Pitt -- 4. The Concert of Europe: Great Britain, Austria, and Russia -- 5. Two Revolutionaries: Napoleon III and Bismarck -- 6. Realpolitik Turns on Itself -- 7. A Political Doomsday Machine: European Diplomacy Before the First World War -- 8. Into the Vortex: The Military Doomsday Machine -- 9. The New Face of Diplomacy: Wilson and the Treaty of Versailles -- 10. The Dilemmas of the Victors -- 11. Stresemann and the Re-emergence of the Vanquished -- 12. The End of Illusion: Hitler and the Destruction of Versailles -- 13. Stalin's Bazaar -- 14. The Nazi-Soviet Pact -- 15. America Re-enters the Arena: Franklin Delano Roosevelt -- 16. Three Approaches to Peace: Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill in World War II -- 17. The Beginning of the Cold War -- 18. The Success and the Pain of Containment -- 19. The Dilemma of Containment: The Korean War -- 20. Negotiating with the Communists: Adenauer, Churchill, and Eisenhower -- 21. Leapfrogging Containment: The Suez Crisis -- 22. Hungary: Upheaval in the Empire -- 23. Krushchev's Ultimatum: The…