Margaret MacMillan's engaging narrative history shows how Nixon's trip to visit Mao helped end the Cold War. But neither leader anticipated how fast China would rise or how that rise would force the U.S.-Chinese relationship to evolve.
Bruce Cumings' maverick thinking on Korea is now practically mainstream. This administration, which seems to have absorbed it, just might achieve what none of its predecessors could: the reunification of Korea.
Newly released records show that L.B.J., for all his political canniness and cunning, never managed U.S. foreign policy well-even excluding the Vietnam War.
From John Quincy Adams' conception of America as "the champion and vindicator only of her own liberty" to Woodrow Wilson's idealism, the splendid new Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations shows the extent to which foreign policy debates in America have really concerned the definition of the nation.
