Movie Review: “Making the Rubble Bounce”
A House of Dynamite directed by Kathryn Bigelow, available on Netflix Nuclear weapons were at the heart of the Cold War. Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union ever sought to attack each other directly because each wanted to avoid triggering a nuclear cataclysm. Instead, they waged a proxy war in the Third World […]
The Vietnam War in Retrospect
LBJ and McNamara: The Vietnam Partnership Destined to Failby Peter L.W. Osnos, Rivertowns Books, 2024 McNamara at War: A New Historyby Philip Taubman and William Taubman, W.W. Norton & Company, 2025 Fifty years after it ended, the American war in Vietnam remains controversial. That is because it turned out very differently than had been anticipated […]
Russia and the West: The Economic Dimension
Perfect Storm: Russia’s Failed Economic Opening, the Hurricane of War and Sanctions, and the Uncertain Future, by Thane Gustafson, Oxford University Press, 2025 In the final decade of the last century, the end of communism in Europe and the collapse of the Soviet Union left three developments in their wake. Together the three promised to […]
A Hero For Our Time
Books Reviewed: Moshe Dayan, the Making of a Strategist by Eitan Shamir, Cambridge University Press, 2025Moshe Dayan, Israel’s Controversial Hero by Mordechai Bar-On, Yale University Press, 2012A New Map – Different Relations by Moshe Dayan, Maariv Library, 1969 [in Hebrew] Moshe Dayan died 44 years ago and is remembered today mainly for his military exploits. But […]
Tribute to an American Golden Age
Eminent Jews: Bernstein, Brooks, Friedan, Mailer by David Denby, Henry Holt and Co., 2025.
The Wolf’s Lair in German Memory
Before the Downfall, Hitler’s Years in the Wolf’s Lair by Felix Bohr, Suhrkamp, 2025 [in German]
The Best American Diplomatic Memoir of the Cold War
Foreign Service, Five Decades on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy by James F. Dobbins, RAND Corporation, 2017
Israel’s Forgotten Founding Father and His Continuing Relevance
Israel’s Declaration of Independence, The History and Political Theory of the Nation’s Founding Moment
What the United States Should and Should Not Do in the Middle East
The End of Ambition: America’s Past, Present and Future in the Middle East by Steven Cook, Oxford University Press, 2024
A Case for Annexing the West Bank
One Jewish State, The Last, Best Hope to Resolve the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, by David Friedman. Humanix Books, 2024. In late October of 1948, the young state of Israel launched an offensive against the seven Arab armies that had invaded it five months earlier. The Israelis attacked the Egyptian army (including Sudanese, Saudi and Muslim Brotherhood […]
The Rise and Fall of America’s Diplomats
The Voice of the Foreign Service: A History of the American Foreign Service Association at 100
by Harry W. Kopp
The Voice of the Foreign Service: A History of the American Foreign Service Association at 100
by Harry W. Kopp
In his short story “Mosby’s Memoirs,” which was based on the life of the conservative scholar and former State Department official Willmoore Kendall, Saul Bellow expressed his disdain for foreign policy mandarins: “…the Foreign Service is staffed by rejects of the power structure. Young gentlemen from good Eastern colleges who couldn’t make it as Wall […]
