The Foreign Service Journal, November 2012

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | NOVEMBER 2012 29 David T. Jones, who served as special assistant to the INF Treaty negotiator and as State Department deputy for the INF Senate Ratification Task Force, among many other assignments, has compiled a unique, behind-the-scenes look at the process of negotiating and ratifying the treaty in 1988. Jones skillfully brings the period to life through essays con- tributed by key participants in the negotiations leading to the completion of the INF Treaty and the epic struggle to secure its ratification by the U.S. Senate. The book, a volume in the ADST-DACOR Diplomats and Diplomacy Series, balances the assessments of senior negotiators; the nuts-and-bolts observa- tions of those in the trenches on specific elements; the twists that required the keenest of legal minds to untangle; and the political maneuvers that brought the treaty safely through the process. It also includes 18 black-and-white photos of U.S. and Soviet mis- siles covered by the treaty. David T. Jones, a frequent contributor to the The Foreign Service Journal , spent 30 years as a State Department diplomat, focusing mainly on politico-military affairs and arms control. He is the co-author of Uneasy Neighbo(u)rs: Canada , the USA and the Dynamics of State, Industry and Culture (Wiley, 2007). With his wife, Teresa Chin Jones, he published a memoir on life in the Foreign Service, Forever Tande m (see p. 39). Mao, Stalin and the Korean War: Trilateral Communist Relations in the 1950s Shen Zhihua (Translated by Neil Silver), Routledge, 2012, $135/hardcover, 249 pages; $108/Kindle Edition. After retiring from the Foreign Service, Neil Silver stumbled upon the original version of this book at a local Chinese book fair. He decided the rest of the world could benefit from its insights into Chinese and Soviet diplomatic and political maneuvering during the Korean War. It also illuminates the way the Chinese write about topics that have long been too sensitive to criticize publicly. Shen Zihua’s best-selling Chinese-language book broke the Mainland Chinese taboo on publishing non-heroic accounts of the Korean War. The account relies on Soviet-era documents released after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Chinese mem- oirs, official documents and scholarly monographs to present a non-ideological account of the relations, motivations and actions among Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong and Kim Il-Sung. Among other things, it sheds light on the origins of the Sino-Soviet split and relations between China and North Korea. Shen Zhihua is a history professor at East China Normal University and the author of several Chinese-language books on the Cold War. Retired FSO Neil Silver worked “in, on and around” China, serving in Beijing, Tokyo and Moscow. The Indonesian Turning Point, 1965-66 Robert Martens, Sydney University, 2012, free/PDF. Robert Martens, a first secretary in the political section of Embassy Jakarta from 1963 to 1966, spent decades putting together this in-depth look at the consequences of President Sukarno’s declaration in early 1965 that Indonesia was now beginning its entry into the “socialist stage” of the revolution. The “communist coup,” as Sukarno’s identification with the Indonesian Communist Party came to be known, eventually led to the murder of the Army leadership during the night of Sept. 30-Oct. 1, 1965—part of a mounting wave of intimidation and violence against non-communists, both civilian and military. Martens supplements declassified embassy reporting (for which he and his colleagues received Superior Honor Awards) and other U.S. government documents with contemporary Indonesian-language newspaper coverage and other open- source materials, to good effect. His analysis makes a compelling argument that the events of that fateful year were a catalyst for an astounding period of change throughout Southeast Asia—not least in China, which began to come to terms with the inability of communism to live up to its billing as the inevitable wave of the future. Though never published, the manuscript of The Indonesian Turning Point is available on the Web site of the University of Sydney’s e-Scholarship Repository (http://ses.library.usyd.edu. au/handle/2123/8145), wh ere anyone can download it at no cost. Martens’ goal in writing the book is to promote greater understanding of what happened in Indonesia during that fate- ful period and facilitate the process of assessing its long-term impact. Robert Martens retired from the Foreign Service in 1982 after a long, varied career that included a tour as deputy chief of mission and chargé d’affaires (for a year) in Bucharest. Following retire- ment, he continued to work for the State Department in many different When Actually Employed positions.