The Foreign Service Journal, November 2020

professional career coach and founded Futurity, a business that provides career transition advice and HR consulting services. Modern Diplomacy in Practice Robert Hutchings and Jeremi Suri, eds., Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, $29.99/ paperback, e-book available, 268 pages. This textbook, the first-ever comparative study of its subject, surveys and compares the world’s 10 largest diplomatic services: those of Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Japan, Russia, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States. Chapters cover the distinctive histories and cultures of the services, and their preparations for the new challenges of the 21st century. Robert Hutchings is a professor and former dean of the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. A former special adviser to the Secretary of State, with the rank of ambassador, he is the author and editor of six books. Jeremi Suri holds the Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author and editor of nine books and hosts a weekly podcast, “This is Democracy.” Exercise of Power: American Failures, Successes, and a New Path Forward in the Post–Cold War World Robert M. Gates, Alfred A. Knopf, 2020, $29.95/hardcover, e-book available, 464 pages. In 1991 the Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the United States stood at the apex of global power. More than a quarter century later, though still the most powerful country militarily and economically, the United States is challenged at every level on every front. How did we get here, and what do we do now? In this book, a quintessential national security insider assesses critical post–Cold War foreign policy decisions in 15 places and draws out the lessons for the future. Robert M. Gates, Secretary of Defense to George W. Bush and Barack Obama, served eight presidents of both political parties at Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Council. He is the author of Duty (2014) and A Passion for Leadership (2017). The Nuclear Spies: America’s Atomic Intelligence Operation against Hitler and Stalin Vince Houghton, Cornell University Press, 2019, $27.95/hardcover, e-book available, 248 pages. How did the Truman administration com- pletely miss Moscow’s rapid development of nuclear capabilities following World War II? After all, the Manhattan Project’s intelligence team had penetrated the Third Reich and knew every detail of the Nazis’ plan for an atomic bomb. As Houghton documents, the Central Intelligence Agency did its best to assess the Soviet Union’s scientists and laboratories. But scientific intelligence was extremely difficult to do well, and when the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb in 1949, no one at the CIA saw it coming. Vince Houghton is curator of the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C., and host and creative director of its podcast, SpyCast. He is also the author of Nuking the Moon and Other Intelligence Schemes and Military Plots Left on the Drawing Board (Penguin, 2019). On Distant Service: The Life of the First U.S. Foreign Service Officer to Be Assassinated Susan M. Stein, Potomac Books, 2020, $34.95/hardcover, e-book available, 360 pages. On July 18, 1924, a mob in Tehran killed U.S. Foreign Service Officer Robert Whit- ney Imbrie at the age of 41. Nearly a cen- tury later, Susan Stein tells the fascinating story of this forgotten figure. Assigned to Russia for his first posting, Imbrie witnessed the October Revolution of 1917, fled ahead of a Bolshevik arrest order and continued to track communist activity in Turkey even as the country’s war of independence unfolded around him. His murder in Tehran set off political repercussions that cloud relations between the United States and Iran to this day. Susan M. Stein spent 35 years teaching, including pedagogical collaborations in Ukraine and Uganda. A columnist and feature writer for the Omaha World-Herald ’s Sunday magazine for 15 years, she is an editor of fiction and nonfiction publications. 46 NOVEMBER 2020 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL