The Foreign Service Journal, November 2018

54 NOVEMBER 2018 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL four presidents of the United States, Bruce Riedel served in the Central Intelligence Agency and at the National Security Council, and is now a senior fellow in the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. On Grand Strategy John Lewis Gaddis, Penguin Press, 2018, $26/hardcover, $18/paperback, $12.99/Kindle, 384 pages. For almost two decades, Yale students have competed for admission each year to the “Studies in Grand Strategy” semi- nar taught by John Lewis Gaddis, Paul Kennedy and Charles Hill. Its purpose has been to prepare future leaders for responsibilities they will face, through lessons drawn from his- tory and the classics. Now Gaddis has distilled that teaching into a succinct, sharp and potentially transformational book, survey- ing statecraft from the ancient Greeks to Franklin D. Roosevelt and beyond. A guide to the art of leadership, On Grand Strategy is, in every way, its own master class. John Lewis Gaddis is the Robert A. Lovett Professor of History at Yale University, and was the founding director of the Brady- Johnson Program in Grand Strategy. The author of many award- winning books, he received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Biography for George F. Kennan: An American Life . Twilight of the Titans: Great Power Decline and Retrenchment Paul K. MacDonald and Joseph M. Parent, Cornell University Press, 2018, $42.95/hardcover, $31.78/Kindle, 260 pages. In this bold new perspective on United States–China relations, Paul K. Mac- Donald and Joseph M. Parent examine all great power transitions since 1870. They find that declining and rising powers both have strong incentives to moderate their behavior at moments when the international hierarchy is shift- ing. Tough talk, intimidation, provocation and preventive war, they write, are not the only alternatives to defeat; retrenchment is the most productive response. Perhaps surprisingly, they find that retrenchment tends not to make declining states tempting prey for others; nor does it promote domestic dysfunction. What it does encourage is resur- rection. Only states that retrench have recovered their former position. Paul K. MacDonald is an associate professor of political sci- ence at Wellesley College, and Joseph M. Parent is an associate professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame. Asian Waters: The Struggle Over the South China Sea and the Strategy of Chinese Expansion Humphrey Hawksley, Overlook Press, 2018, $29.95/hardcover, $14.16/Kindle, 304 pages BBC foreign correspondent Humphrey Hawksley has been reporting on Asia and the Pacific for many years, and has witnessed China’s transformation into one of the world’s most wealthy and militarized countries. In Asian Waters , he gives readers a compelling narrative of this most volatile region. Can the United States and China handle the changing balance of power peacefully? Do Japan, the Philip- pines, South Korea and Taiwan share enough common purpose to create a NATO-esque multilateral alliance? Does China think it can even become a superpower without making an enemy of America? If so, how does it plan to achieve it? Humphrey Hawksley is a BBC foreign correspondent whose face and voice are known to millions. He is the author of numer- ous books and articles. From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin’s Russia Michael McFaul, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018, $30/hardcover, $14.99/Kindle, 528 pages. As President Barack Obama’s ambas- sador to Moscow from 2012 to 2014, Michael McFaul had a front-row seat when hopes for an enduring “reset” to Russian-American relations crumbled with Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency. The Kremlin actively sought to discredit and undermine McFaul, dispatching protesters to harass him wherever he went, slandering him on state media and tightly surveilling him, his staff and his family. This riveting inside account tells the full story of U.S.-Russia relations from the fall of the Soviet Union to the rise of Russian President Vladimir Putin