The Foreign Service Journal, October 2019

50 OCTOBER 2019 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century George Packer, Knopf, 2019, $30/hardcover, 608 pages. Drawn from his diaries and papers, Our Man provides an intimate portrait of a legendary diplomat possessed by dogged determination and unshakable faith in American ideals who brokered the Dayton Accords that ended the wars in the Balkans in the after- math of Yugoslavia’s breakup, and served as the Obama admin- istration’s special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. But Holbrooke’s swaggering personality and headstrong approach often rubbed some the wrong way. As FSO Matthew Asada wrote in his review of Our Man in the July-August FSJ , “Without the drama there was no Holbrooke, and without Holbrooke there would have been no action.” George Packer is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (2014) and The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq , a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize. Quest for Status: Chinese and Russian Foreign Policy Deborah Welch Larson and Alexei Shevchenko, Yale University Press, 2019, $40/hardcover, $27.95/Kindle, 352 pages. To explain current Russian and Chinese foreign policy, Deborah Welch Larson and Alexei Shevchenko adopt social identity theory to show how both countries “used various modes of emulation, competition and creativity to gain recognition from other countries and thus validate their respective identities.” Larson and Shevchenko argue that Chinese and Russian foreign policies are formulated based on the countries’ individual desires to become key play- ers throughout the world, whether it is policy to participate in multinational organizations or to grow military strength, among other things. Deborah Welch Lawson is a political science professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Alexei Shevchenko is a professor of political science at California State University, Fullerton. Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century James Loeffler, Yale University Press, 2018, $32.50/hardcover, 384 pages. 2018 marked the anniversaries of two historic worldwide events: the birth of the state of Israel and the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. By examining several Jewish founders of international human rights groups throughout history, James Loeffler explores the relationship between Zionism and the origins of international human rights. Loeffler’s book challenges the assumptions about the history of human rights and introduces a new angle on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. James Loeffler is a professor of Jewish history at the Univer- sity of Virginia. He is the author of The Law of Strangers: Jewish Lawyers and International Law in the Twentieth Century (2019) and The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire (2013). Russia Dmitri Trenin, Polity Press, 2019, $14.95/paperback, 200 pages. Focusing on 1900 to the present, Dmitri Trenin takes readers through Russia’s revolutionary upheaval, the rise of the Soviet Union, World War II and its dev- astating aftermath, mature socialism and its stagnation, democratic upheaval of the perestroika era and Putin’s stabilization of post-communist Russia. Today, Trenin cautions, Russia stands at a critical juncture. Following all the turbulent events of the past century, it will take decades for the country to “rehabilitate itself, develop organi- cally, build trust and stimulate cooperation among its own people.” Jack Matlock, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia, calls Russia “a brilliant, concise interpretation of 120 years of Russian history, plus an insightful look at the future. Essential reading for all who are concerned about the dangerous—and unnecessary— revival of Cold War tensions.” Dmitri Trenin has been director of the Carnegie Moscow Center since 2008.