Download or read book The Last American Diplomat written by George W. Liebmann and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2012-01-27 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can John D. Negroponte be described as 'The Last American Diplomat'? In a career spanning 50 years of unprecedented American global power, he was the last of a dying breed of patrician diplomats - devoted to public service, a self-effacing and ultimate insider, whose prime duty was to advise, guide and warn - a bulwark of traditional diplomatic realism against ideologue excess. Negroponte served as US ambassador to Honduras, Mexico, the Philippines and Iraq; he was US Permanent Representative to the UN, Director of National Intelligence and Deputy Secretary of State to George W. Bush. His was a high-flying and seemingly conventional career but one full of surprises. Negroponte opposed Kissinger in Vietnam, supported a 'proxy war' but opposed direct American military action against Marxists in Central America - facing bitter Congress opposition in the process. He swam against the floodtide of George W. Bush's neocon-dominated administration, warning against the Iraq war as a possible new 'Vietnam' and criticising aspects of Bush's 'War on Terror'. He disconcerted the administration by arguing that the re-establishment of Iraq would take as long as five years. And he was influential in international social and economic policy - working for the successful re-settlement of millions of refugees in Southeast Asia following the Vietnam War, issuing early warnings about the scourge of AIDS in Africa and successfully launching the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). George W. Liebmann's incisive account is based on personal and shared experience but it is no hagiography; beyond the author's discussions with Negroponte, this book is deeply researched in US state papers and includes interviews with leading actors. It will provide fascinating reading for anyone interested in the inside-story of American diplomacy, showing personal and policy struggles, and the underlying fissures present even in the world's last remaining superpower.
Download or read book The last ambassador written by Tina Tamman and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2011-03-29 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Estonian ambassador August Torma had a protracted and unconventional relationship with the British Foreign Office. Appointed to the Court of St James’s in 1934, Torma lost his government in 1940 when the Soviet Union overran his country, but continued to live at the legation in London and visit the Foreign Office. Gradually, however, his diplomatic standing was eroded because of Soviet demands. For Torma there was the very real fear that Britain might recognise the Soviet occupation of his homeland and he continued to reiterate his faith in international law in the hope that Estonia’s stolen independence would be restored one day. He died in 1971, twenty years before the country regained its lost freedom. This book is a biography of Torma who had a remarkable life: he assisted in the creation of the Estonian state in 1918–20, worked for it during the inter-war period and struggled to keep its cause alive during and after the Second World War; it is also a study of the awkward relationship between the ambassador and the Foreign Office that lasted for more than three decades.
Download or read book The Back Channel written by William Joseph Burns and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a distinguished and admired American diplomat of the last half century, Burns has played a central role in the most consequential diplomatic episodes of his time: from the bloodless end of the Cold War and post-Cold War relations with Putin's Russia to the secret nuclear talks with Iran. Here he recounts some of the seminal moments of his career, drawing on newly declassified cables and memos to give readers a rare, inside look at American diplomacy in action, and of the people who worked with him. The result is an powerful reminder of the enduring importance of diplomacy. -- adapted from jacket
Download or read book The Last Diplomat written by Adam Entous and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2019-04-09 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In October 2016, every poll gave Hillary Clinton a commanding lead in the upcoming presidential election. Then, a single, unprecedented intervention changed the course of American political history, dooming Clinton's chances and ushering in the era of Donald Trump. This is the up-close, inside story of how that happened, who was responsible, and why America may never recover from it. The decisive act came from James Comey, director of the FBI, when he publically repoened an investigation into Hillary Clinton's handling of emails only eleven days before the election. The FBI had always guarded its reputation for political neutrality but, in October, Comey steered the Bureau into the center of a political maelstrom. The FBI's actions in 2016 would have far-reaching consequences, leading directly to the Mueller investigation and the impeachment trial of Donald Trump, but more importantly they set the state for a ceaseless battle for political control of the Justice Department. October Surprise reveals how long-building tensions sent two of the most important parts of the government, the FBI and the Justice Department, into a self-desctructive spiral that continues to this day" -- from publisher.
Download or read book Last Best Hope written by George Packer and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2021-06-15 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of The New York Times's 100 notable books of 2021 "[George Packer's] account of America’s decline into destructive tribalism is always illuminating and often dazzling." —William Galston, The Washington Post Acclaimed National Book Award-winning author George Packer diagnoses America’s descent into a failed state, and envisions a path toward overcoming our injustices, paralyses, and divides In the year 2020, Americans suffered one rude blow after another to their health, livelihoods, and collective self-esteem. A ruthless pandemic, an inept and malign government response, polarizing protests, and an election marred by conspiracy theories left many citizens in despair about their country and its democratic experiment. With pitiless precision, the year exposed the nation’s underlying conditions—discredited elites, weakened institutions, blatant inequalities—and how difficult they are to remedy. In Last Best Hope, George Packer traces the shocks back to their sources. He explores the four narratives that now dominate American life: Free America, which imagines a nation of separate individuals and serves the interests of corporations and the wealthy; Smart America, the world view of Silicon Valley and the professional elite; Real America, the white Christian nationalism of the heartland; and Just America, which sees citizens as members of identity groups that inflict or suffer oppression. In lively and biting prose, Packer shows that none of these narratives can sustain a democracy. To point a more hopeful way forward, he looks for a common American identity and finds it in the passion for equality—the “hidden code”—that Americans of diverse persuasions have held for centuries. Today, we are challenged again to fight for equality and renew what Alexis de Tocqueville called “the art” of self-government. In its strong voice and trenchant analysis, Last Best Hope is an essential contribution to the literature of national renewal.
Download or read book The Last Diplomat written by Don Marrs and published by Don F. Marrs. This book was released on 2012-12 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In the spring of 2031 terrorists detonate nuclear bombs in nine American and European cities. They are not the small ""suitcase" bombs intelligence agencies had anticipated, but large strategic weapons, smuggled to their targets on trucks and aboard ships. Millions die in the firestorms. In the months that follow, thousands more are lost to radiation sickness, starvation and the lawless gangs terrorizing the countryside. The global financial system collapses. The military labors to establish order but is forced to commit nearly all its resources to the cities, which have become massive refugee camps. In the rural outland there is anarchy. The Chinese offer aid, but demand an impossible concession: the dissolution of the United States and creation of a new Sino-American continental state. They are refused. Can the U.S. hope to rebuild without aid? Its wounds are deep, the damage severe. The struggle continues, the days grind on, but the leaders know they are making almost no progress. In July they receive news so terrible that at first they cannot believe it. In five locations at once, Chinese troops are landing on American beaches. For the first time in over 200 years the United States is being invaded by a foreign power!"--Amazon blurb.
Download or read book The Last American Diplomat written by George W. Liebmann and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early years -- Hong Kong -- Vietnam -- Standford interlude -- Kissinger and the National Security Council -- Ecuador -- Thessaloniki -- Deputy Assistant Secretary for Fisheries -- Deputy Assistant Secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs -- Honduras -- Assistant Secretary for Oceans, Environmental and Scientific Affairs -- Deputy National Security Advisor -- Mexico -- The Philippines -- Panama -- McGraw-Hill -- United Nations Iraq -- Director of National Intelligence -- Deputy Secretary of State -- Conclusion.
Download or read book Ever the Diplomat written by Sherard Cowper-Coles and published by HarperCollins Publishers. This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "First published in Great Britain by Harper Press in 2012"--Colophon.
Download or read book The Ambassadors written by Paul Richter and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2020-10-27 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Veteran diplomatic correspondent Paul Richter goes behind the battles and the headlines to show how American ambassadors are the unconventional warriors in the Muslim world—running local government, directing drone strikes, building nations, and risking their lives on the front lines. The tale’s heroes are a small circle of top career diplomats who have been an unheralded but crucial line of national defense in the past two decades of wars in the greater Middle East. In The Ambassadors, Paul Richter shares the astonishing, true-life stories of four expeditionary diplomats who “do the hardest things in the hardest places.” The book describes how Ryan Crocker helped rebuild a shattered Afghan government after the fall of the Taliban and secretly negotiated with the shadowy Iranian mastermind General Qassim Suleimani to wage war in Afghanistan and choose new leaders for post-invasion Iraq. Robert Ford, assigned to be a one-man occupation government for an Iraqi province, struggled to restart a collapsed economy and to deal with spiraling sectarian violence—and was taken hostage by a militia. In Syria at the eruption of the civil war, he is chased by government thugs for defying the country’s ruler. J. Christopher Stevens is smuggled into Libya as US Envoy to the rebels during its bloody civil war, then returns as ambassador only to be killed during a terror attach in Benghazi. War-zone veteran Anne Patterson is sent to Pakistan, considered the world’s most dangerous country, to broker deals that prevent a government collapse and to help guide the secret war on jihadists. “An important and illuminating read” (The Washington Post) and the winner of the prestigious Douglas Dillon Book Award from the American Academy of Diplomacy, The Ambassadors is a candid examination of the career diplomatic corps, America’s first point of contact with the outside world, and a critical piece of modern-day history.
Download or read book An American Diplomat in Franco Spain written by Michael Aaron Rockland and published by Hansen Publishing Group LLC. This book was released on 2012 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An American Diplomat in Franco Spain is filled with Michael Aaron Rockland's experiences as a cultural attache at the United States embassy in Madrid, Spain in the 1960s. He captures episodes of historical and cultural significance as he goes about doing his country's business. Some of his stories are quite poignant while others are quite amusing. He shares with his readers how he avoided shaking Francisco Franco's hand, how he spent a day with Martin Luther King in Madrid, how his son was selected to be in the movie Dr. Zhivago, how he came to know several Kennedys, including Senator Edward Kennedy, Pat Lawford Kennedy, and Jackie Kennedy, and how the U.S. accidentally dropped four unarmed hydrogen bombs on Spain. Throughout these stories, Rockland explains Spanish culture, past and present, with his experiences involving bull fighting, being a Jew in a very Catholic Spain, his love affair with Spanish food, and what is lost in translation.
Download or read book Lessons from a Diplomatic Life written by Marshall P. Adair and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2012-12-23 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his new book, Lessons from a Diplomatic Life: Watching Flowers from Horseback, retired State Department official and career diplomat Marshall P. Adair recounts and reflects on his time in the US Foreign Service. The story of his assignments throughout the world reveals important details about significant foreign policy issues and historic events, including Bosnia, American policy toward Tibet, the 1988 Burmese uprising, and the foundations of the current US-China relationship. It provides the reader with an inside look at the history of the US State Department, US diplomacy, and US foreign policy of recent decades, during what was often an unstable and uncertain time. This first-hand, detailed account of the author’s work with foreign governments and populations provides a unique outlook on US relations around the world that has critical policy implications for the situations we face today. Through this retelling, Adair illuminates how the depth and accuracy needed of diplomats and Foreign Service agents requires a close and intimate understanding of the cultures and governments they work with.
Download or read book Not Quite the Diplomat written by Chris Patten and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2006-06 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes what has been happening in Britain, Europe and the world since 1997. This book explores the questions: will the British still be trying to work out who we are and what we want to be as the world moves on? Does the Western alliance still have the time and the will to shape the world before the rise of India and China? And more.
Download or read book What Diplomats Do written by Brian Barder and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text describes all aspects of the life of a diplomat through various stages of a typical career. Though following a fictional diplomat, each chapter contains case studies based on the author's thirty years of experience as a diplomat, ambassador, and high commissioner tha...
Download or read book Our Man written by George Packer and published by Random House. This book was released on 2019-05-09 with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of America’s greatest non-fiction writers, an epic saga of the rise and fall of American power, from Vietnam to Afghanistan, told through the life of one man. **WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BIOGRAPHY PRIZE 2019** **FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS 2020** Richard Holbrooke was one of the most legendary and complicated figures in recent American history. Brilliant, utterly self-absorbed, and possessed of almost inhuman energy and appetites, he was both admired and detested. From his days as a young adviser in Vietnam to his last efforts to end the war in Afghanistan, Holbrooke embodied the postwar American impulse to take the lead on the global stage. He was the force behind the Dayton Accords that ended the Balkan wars, America's greatest diplomatic achievement in the post-Cold War era. His power lay in an utter belief in himself and his idea of a muscular, generous foreign policy. But his sharp elbows and tireless self-promotion ensured that he never rose to the highest levels in government that he so desperately coveted. Holbrooke’s story is the story of the rise and fall of America during its era of supremacy: its strength, drive, and sense of possibility, as well as its penchant for overreach and heedless self-confidence. Drawing on Holbrooke’s diaries and papers, George Packer’s narrative is both intimate and epic in its revelatory portrait of this extraordinary and deeply flawed man, and the elite spheres of society and government he inhabited. A GUARDIAN, FINANCIAL TIMES, SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR
Download or read book Madam Ambassador written by Eleni Kounalakis and published by New Press, The. This book was released on 2015-05-05 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A helicopter ride to visit troops in the Afghanistan war zone, a tense meeting with the newly elected Prime Minister, and…a wild boar hunt! Eleni Kounalakis was forty-three and a land developer in Sacramento, California, when she was tapped by President Barack Obama to serve as the U.S. ambassador to Hungary under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. During her tenure, from 2010 to 2013, Hungary was a key ally in the U.S. military surge, held elections in which a center-right candidate gained a two-thirds supermajority and rewrote the country's constitution, and grappled with the rise of Hungarian nationalism and anti-semitism. The first Greek-American woman ever to serve as a U.S. ambassador, Kounalakis recounts her training at the State Department's “charm school” and her three years of diplomatic life in Budapest—from protocols about seating, salutations, and embassy security to what to do when the deposed King of Greece hands you a small chocolate crown (eat it, of course!). A cross between a foreign policy memoir and an inspiring personal family story—her immigrant Greek father went from agricultural day laborer to land developer and major Democratic party activist—Madam Ambassador draws back the curtain on what it is like to represent the U.S. government abroad as well as how American embassies around the world function.
Download or read book Thomas Barclay 1728 1793 written by Priscilla H. Roberts and published by Associated University Presse. This book was released on 2008 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is the first-ever biography of Thomas Barclay, the first American consul to serve the United States abroad and the man who, in 1786, successfully negotiated our first treaty with an Arab, African, or Muslim nation. It is the story of an Ulster-born immigrant building his fortune as a Philadelphia merchant in international trade, then losing it as he gives priority to his adopted country's fight to gain and build on independence. It tells how, after emigrating to Philadelphia in the 1760s, Barclay became a leading member of the Irish community, a successful merchant/ship owner, and political activist. This biography follows his move to France with his wife and three small children when the Continental Congress named him consul in 1781. There, before an American consular service existed, before Congress knew a consul from a consul general, Thomas Barclay did whatever was needed, wherever it was needed. To shipping, naval, and other tasks, Congress added an audit of American public expenditures in Europe since 1776. Then Jefferson and Adams added diplomacy in Barbary, where Barclay negotiated a rare tribute-free treaty of commerce and amity with the Sultan of Morocco. His personal relationships with Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson reveal as much about them as about him. On assignment for President Washington in 1793, he became the first American diplomat to die in a foreign country in the service of the United States."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Diplomat Among Warriors written by Robert Murphy and published by Plunkett Lake Press. This book was released on 2022-06-19 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[E]ver until the end — he retired in 1959 — a ‘diplomat among warriors’... this was Bob Murphy’s very special role. I doubt if any other diplomat has ever had an equivalent one. A normal Ambassador is assigned to prevent war or make peace. Much of his diplomacy was the diplomacy of war itself. He was a devoted, first-class public servant, a worthy companion to the great soldiers he accompanied. His memoirs, which include a great deal of fascinating, new historical material, should be widely read.” — C.L. Sulzberger, The New York Times “This important diplomatic memoir provides a wealth of rewarding insights and information about recent events in American foreign relations... Murphy’s lucid and well-written volume will be of great aid to the scholar and of absorbing interest to the general reader.” — Daniel M. Smith, The Journal of Modern History “[Robert Murphy’s] autobiography is more than a personal memoir; it is, in fact, a vivid history of our Foreign Service from an understaffed and inefficient bureau to ‘the finest diplomatic instrument in the world’... It is an important book, consistently readable, and thoroughly deserving to be every bit as long as it is.” — Kirkus “Diplomat Among Warriors gives a substantial account of the author’s participation in the execution of American foreign policy over a period of four eventful decades, 1917-1958... The narrative is interesting, sometimes exciting, and it contains many insights, much soul-searching, and even a few revelations, particularly for the period after 1940. The incisive characterization of actions, actors, and the author’s experiences is more dramatic and revealing than a systematic history could be... Murphy is an unassuming man. But modesty cannot disguise the key role he played in some dramatic events of contemporary history. Diplomat Among Warriors is a warm human story, written with great charm, compassion, and lucidity. It is a useful source for historians and the narrative is fascinating to the general reader.” — Stephen D. Kertesz, The Review of Politics
