The Foreign Service Journal, November 2021

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | NOVEMBER 2021 41 the Tenleytown–American University Park area of Northwest Washington, D.C. For seven weeks, he posted daily narratives on Facebook about those excursions, and friends encouraged him to compile and publish those postings as a book. Fitzpatrick notes that Tenleytown has many more places of local interest worthy of narration, but in general, he sought to tell stories that also would appeal to larger audiences. He revised many of the original tales and added a score more for publication. Part IV, “Diplomacy and Espionage,” will likely be of particular interest for Foreign Service readers, for it is full of the spies and bombs the book’s title promises. But the whole collection of historical vignettes is worth reading. Fitzpatrick says: “As a concerned citizen, I am keen to understand the roots of disparities and racial cleavages in our society. The national awakening to Black Lives Matter took place while I was writing my stories … [and is also] reflected in my selection of sites to write about.” During 26 years of service as an American diplomat, Mark Fitzpatrick served in Seoul, Tokyo, Wellington, Vienna and Washington, D.C. After retiring from the Foreign Service, he joined the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, producing 10 books about nuclear dangers and appearing frequently on international media outlets. POLICYAND ISSUES History Shock: When History Collides with Foreign Relations John Dickson, University Press of Kansas, 2021, $34.95/hardcover, e-book available, 256 pages. Although John Dickson never quotes William Faulkner, the novelist’s rueful observation that “The past is never dead; it’s not even past” suffuses History Shock: When History Collides with Foreign Relations . (His title is a riff on Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock , which addresses the opposite challenge: helping humanity prepare for profound change as it unfolds.) Drawing on a quarter-century of experience as a public diplomacy officer, principally in Latin America and Africa, Dickson cites chapter and verse on how important historical events can be viewed differently in the United States and in other countries. As Dickson admits, part of the problem is that until they take up their postings, even highly educated, cosmopolitan Foreign Service personnel sometimes have not heard of historic events that continue to shape, or warp, other nations decades and centuries later. As a result, they have no capacity to assess their impact on relations with the United States, let alone offer helpful recommendations to Washington policymakers on taking them into account in bilateral and multilateral diplomacy. Dickson does not mince words in urging the Foreign Service to improve its training, by producing a playbook or operating manual with systematic case studies for its officers. History Shock not only offers a model for such case studies, but sets forth an interpretive framework for remedying this information deficit, including recommendations for strengthening historical literacy within the Foreign Service. John Dickson was a public diplomacy officer with the U.S. Information Agency (1984-1999) and Department of State (1999-2010), whose postings included Mexico, Cuba, Canada, Nigeria and South Africa. He lives in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Power on the Precipice: The Six Choices America Faces in a Turbulent World Andrew Imbrie, Yale University Press, 2020, $27.50/hardcover, e-book available, 272 pages. Andrew Imbrie poses a series of existential questions about America’s identity and future in this thought- ful book. He begins with the premise that U.S. power and influence are in decline, for reasons that are structural as much as they are con- tingent on any particular administration or set of policies. That, in turn, means this discouraging trend could reverse itself later in the century if, for instance, demographic pressures, debt and diminishing resources constrain China’s economic growth and ability to assert its will globally. Whatever the future holds, however, Imbrie emphasizes that national decline is not an abstract phenomenon: It is something lived and felt by people who make real choices every day. To frame the stakes and bring them to life, he introduces