The Foreign Service Journal, November 2020

Revisiting the Roots of the Cold War Michael G. Carew, Lexington Books, 2020, $95/hardcover, e-book available, 282 pages. This book documents the emergence of the Cold War between 1944 and 1948, emphasizing recently available Soviet scholarship and information from other archives. Unlike prior works on the origins of the Cold War by James Gaddis, George Kennan and Ernest May in the 1980s, Carew analyzes the effects of American demo- bilization following World War II and the major restructuring of the State and Defense departments to present a more realistic appraisal of the formulation of U.S. policy. Michael G. Carew is a lecturer–assistant professor at Baruch College. He is the author of several books on World War II, including Becoming the Arsenal: The American Industrial Mobilization for World War II, 1938-1942 and The Power to Persuade: FDR, the News Magazines, and Going to War, 1939-1941 . Russia’s Public Diplomacy: Evolution and Practice Anna Velikaya and Greg Simons, eds., Palgrave MacMillan, 2020, $119.99/ hardcover, e-book available, 285 pages. Although some articles and book chap- ters exist, there are almost no books devoted to Russian public diplomacy. That makes this anthology an invaluable contribution to the field, with chapters by prominent scholars, most of them Russians, who discuss best practices. But the book’s “real value,” according to Vivian Walker in her FSJ review (October), lies “in its illuminating insights into Russia’s unique public diplomacy challenges.” Anna Velikaya is a research fellow at the Primakov National Research Institute of World Economy and International Relations, part of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Greg Simons is an associate professor at the Institute of Russian and Eurasian Studies, part of Uppsala University, and a lecturer in communication science at Turiba University in Riga. Rogue Diplomats: The Proud Tradition of Disobedience in American Foreign Policy Seth Jacobs, Cambridge University Press, 2020, $34.99/hardcover, e-book available, 406 pages. This highly readable book, a volume in the Cambridge Studies in U.S. Foreign Rela- tions series, presents a heretofore neglected aspect of American foreign policy, namely a pattern of insubordination. It turns out that many milestones in the history of U.S. foreign affairs, such as the acquisition of Louisiana territory in 1803 and preservation of the Anglo-American “special relationship” duringWorldWar I, were largely the result of ambas- sadors, ministers and envoys refusing to heed their instructions. While also examining the failures, Jacobs argues that the disobedi- ence frequently produced improvements for the nation. Seth Jacobs is a professor at Boston College. A political and cultural historian of 20th-century America, he is the author of The Universe Unraveling: American Foreign Policy in Cold War Laos (2012), two books on Ngo Dinh Diem and numerous articles on aspects of the VietnamWar. Window Seat on the World: My Travels with the Secretary of State Glen Johnson, Disruption Books, 2019, $25/paperback, e-book available, 300 pages. Reporter Glen Johnson was happily covering politics for The Boston Globe in 2012 when he was selected to be deputy assistant secretary of State for strategic communications. For the next four years, 2013-2017, he accom- panied John Kerry as he became the most traveled Secretary of State in history. In his quest to create the most complete photo archive possible, Johnson shot more than 100,000 photographs of Secretary Kerry all over the world, some of which are featured in the book. This volume documents the dedication of a longtime public servant and his team to the practice of diplomacy. Glen Johnson covered five presidential elections over three decades of reporting for The Boston Globe , the Associated Press, a string of local newspapers and the historic City News Bureau of Chicago. He is now a writer, consultant and teacher living outside Boston. THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | NOVEMBER 2020 47