****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
Stephen Sestanovich (Columbia University) provides an inside, expert survey of American foreign policy and use of power since World War II. I highly recommend coupling this survey with Robert L. Beisner‘s magisterial biography of Dean Acheson during the Cold War. Mr. Sestanovich is highly expert in his field and provides a reliable road map of continuity and disruption in our foreign policy for over 70 years. Mr. Sestanovich provides a few very shocking details. For example, who would have imagined, when America tried to lean on Leonid Brezhnev to increase Jewish emigration from Russia to Israel, that Henry Kissinger would make the shocking utterance to President Nixon, that it would be a strictly Russian internal matter, if Brezhnev were to send Jews to gas chambers (Kissinger himself having been a refugee from Hitler)?! That utterance stopped my breath. Even for Kissinger that utterance seemed inconceivable, but there it was! Mr. Sestanovich is highly expert, having served from 1997 - 2001 as Ambassador-at-Large to the former Soviet Union for the State Department. I give this volume a very high recommendation, but an even higher recommendation goes to Beisner‘s work on Dean Acheson, which comprehensively narrates the great statesman‘s dynamic with Robert Schuman, Anthony Eden, Ernest Bevin, George Marshall, Dean Rusk, George Kennan and a bevy of statesmen in founding the Franco-German coal and steel union, NATO, the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine. Sestanovich‘s Maximalism and Beisner‘s Dean Acheson go optimally together.
