“Confirming Team Trump: Tillerson and Mattis Face Changing Global Dangers” No president, says the author, has faced the welter of challenges awaiting Donald Trump on January 20: “the simultaneous unraveling of the U.S.-led world order; loss of confidence among … Continued

Maggie Pearson, Contributing Editor          Failure to Adjust by Edward Alden Ike’s Gamble by Michael Doran Morning in South Africa by John Campbell The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom by John Pomfret The Terror Years by Lawrence Wright … Continued

Warrior Diplomat: Vietnam, 1965-70 Chapter 3 of Global Adventures on Less-Traveled Roads: A Foreign Service Memoir by James R. Bullington The Vietnam War was a life-changing experience: It set the trajectory of my career toward service in unfamiliar, remote, sometimes … Continued

Essay by Jon Dorschner “India at War” (The Subcontinent and the Second World War) by Yasmin Khan, Oxford University Press, Oxford, United Kingdom, 2015, ISBN 978-0-19-975349-9, 416 pp., $29.95 (Hardcover). India’s War (World War II and the Making of Modern … Continued

by Renee Earle Murrow’s Cold War: Public Diplomacy for the Kennedy Administration (2016) by Gregory M. Tomlin. University of Nebraska Press: Potomac Books. ISBN 978-1-61234-771-4. 400 pp 12 illustrations. Hardcover, 34.95. For many Public Diplomacy practitioners, the three years that … Continued

by Norma Brown Alexander Solzhenitsyn as Gulag inmate The title is totally misleading and not at all misleading. First, my apologies to all those who actually lived under communism, because I only lived for in the USSR for a little … Continued

by June Kunsman Consular officers at posts abroad face a range of difficult duties including informing relatives of a death abroad, counseling and helping victims of crime (do NOT go into Moscow’s underground street crossings late at night), visiting citizens … Continued

by John Coyne On this last day of 2016, I thought I might try and chart the impulses in America that brought about the creation of the Peace Corps–something positive to think about as we wait for 2017–and before all … Continued

by Robert Baker In 1976, I requested from NASA a special collection of three moon rocks. NASA had offered to send them to U.S. Embassies for public exhibition for one month in each foreign country. I hand carried them all … Continued

by Allen Keiswetter I knew Vietnam would be my first tour when I joined the US Foreign Service fifty years ago this coming June at age 23.  I served there for 18 months (April 1968 to October 1969) as part … Continued

by Peter Bridges After five good years in our Rome embassy, my family and I were transferred in late 1971 to the American embassy in Prague. This was three years after the Soviet army had crushed Alexander Dubček’s “socialism with … Continued

ON GEOPOLITICS The National Security Debate and Classical Geopolitics by Francis P. Sempa There is an important debate among foreign policy theorists and practitioners regarding the most effective way to protect and promote U.S. national security interests in the 21st … Continued

And Why This One Will Be Like No Other by Michael W. Cotter The sub-title is not quite accurate, since each administration transfer happens a bit differently. But not this different. At least in living memory there has not been … Continued

Nikita Khrushchev’s Memoirs: Part I

by Margo Berends Although Aleppo is now under the control of forces supporting the Syrian government and the city has been evacuated, it is but one city and the Syrian crisis is far from over. Millions have been displaced by … Continued

by Abdallah Al Dardari Aleppo is a landmark in the Syrian conflict and has become the strongest signal of the failure of the western approach to diplomacy and other means of influence to end the conflict. This failure calls for … Continued

The inauguration of Washington April 30th 1789 at the Old City Hall, New York (Currier & Ives)