The Limits of Influence, the 36th volume in the ADST-DACOR Diplomats and Diplomacy Series, is the first systematic study of U.S. efforts to help forge a settlement between India and Pakistan on the sixty-year-old “Kashmir question.” Veteran diplomat Howard B. Schaffer, a former U.S. ambassador to Bangladesh, draws on interviews...
In this, his fifteenth, book, he offers a lively narrative of his experiences as a witness to the end of the colonial era and a frontline practitioner of public diplomacy during the Cold War.
After World War II, American statesman and scholar Lincoln Gordon emerged as a key player in the reconstruction of Europe. He was one of the supporting cast of less well-known wise men and women whose work made possible the accomplishments of the more renowned “Wise Men” of the twentieth century....
Some of the finest political analysis in the world –– the classified reporting cables sent from U.S. embassies to Washington––never reaches the public eye. Now Ray Smith has filled this gap in the literature on diplomacy with The Craft of Political Analysis for Diplomats (Potomac Books, 2011). Smith explains how to write...
If the twentieth century was the American Century, James Spain was its classic product. From Chicago in 1926 to Sri Lanka in 1998, he has blazed a trail of high adventure and highly intelligent public service. Along the way he published several books on the Pathans of the Khyber, one...
Gifted Greek is a reflection on twentieth-century Greek history and politics, as well as a character study of its first socialist prime minister, Andreas Papandreou. Monteagle Stearns witnessed the transformation of Papandreou from an affable American economist to a stormy, anti-American Greek, over Stearns’s three diplomatic assignments to Athens, the...
Bushels and Bales: A Food Soldier in the Cold War covers Howard Steele’s encounters with the people, problems, and opportunities in forty-three countries and a variety of U.S. government programs. Along the way, he survived gun-toting Bolivian revolutionaries, Viet Cong artillery fire, deadly anarchy in Sri Lanka, a shakedown by...
In emergency medicine “the golden hour” is the first hour after injury during which treatment greatly increases survivability. In post-conflict transition terminology, it is the first year after hostilities end. Without steadily improving conditions then, popular support declines and chances for economic, political, and social transformation begin to evaporate. James...
In The Anguish of Surrender, Ulrich Straus recounts the painful dilemma that intensely indoctrinated Japanese soldiers and sailors faced when forced to confront the reality of becoming captives, something forbidden by Japan’s no-surrender policy. He examines in depth how Japanese POWs dealt with this dilemma in extremis – between life and...
AFRICAN WARS: A DEFENSE INTELLIGENCE PERSPECTIVE by William G. Thom, former senior Africa specialist in the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, provides a concise summary of four decades of warfare in sub-Saharan Africa. An experienced, highly respected senior U.S. intelligence officer, Thom also offers a primer on how the intelligence business...