In this controversial book Henry Kissinger illuminates just what diplomacy is. Moving from a sweeping overview of his own interpretation of history to personal accounts of his negotiations with world leaders, Kissinger describes the ways in which the art of diplomacy and the balance of power have created the world we live in, and shows how Americans, protected by the size and isolation of their country, as well as by their own idealism and mistrust of the Old World, have sought to conduct a unique kind of foreign policy based on the way they wanted the world to be, as opposed to the way it really is.

USMC Commandant's Professional Reading List 2021 -- CWO5, COL, GEN. Originally published: New York : Simon & Schuster, Ã1994.

The new world order -- The hinge : Theodore Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson -- From universality to equilibrium : Richelieu, William of Orange, and Pitt -- The concert of Europe : Great Britain, Austria, and Russia -- Two revolutionaries : Napoleon III and Bismarck -- Realpolitik turns on itself -- A political doomsday machine : European diplomacy before the First World War -- Into the vortex : the military doomsday machine -- The new face of diplomacy : Wilson and the Treaty of Versailles -- The dilemmas of the victors -- Stresemann and the re-emergence of the vanquished -- The end of illusion : Hitler and the destruction of Versailles -- Stalin's bazaar -- The Nazi-Soviet pact -- America re-enters the arena : Franklin Delano Roosevelt -- Three approaches to peace : Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill in World War II -- The beginning of the Cold War -- The success and the pain of containment -- The dilemma of containment : the Korean War -- Negotiating with the Communists : Adenauer, Churchill, and Eisenhower -- Leapfrogging containment : the Suez crisis -- Hungary : upheaval in the Empire -- Khrushchev's ultimatum : the Berlin crisis 1958-63 -- Concepts of Western unity : Macmillan, de Gaulle, Eisenhower, and Kennedy -- Vietnam : entry into the morass; Truman and Eisenhower -- Vietnam : on the road to despair; Kennedy and Johnson -- Vietnam : the extrication; Nixon -- Foreign policy as geopolitics : Nixon's triangular diplomacy -- Detente and its discontents -- The end of the Cold War : Reagan and Gorbachev -- The new world order reconsidered.