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The purpose of this research is to examine Diplomacy by Henry A. Kissinger. The plan of the research will be to set forth the theme of and pattern of ideas in the book and then to discuss the style, emphasis, sources, organization, bias of the author, and other features that comprise the means by which the theme is elaborated, as well as Kissinger's career--all with a view toward providing an evaluation of the contributions it makes to an understanding of the subjects it undertakes.

The theme of Diplomacy has a double perspective, one historical and the other critical. From one point of view, it is a historical survey of some three hundred years worth of international relations in and among the nation-states of Europe and the United States. The survey seems partly meant to show that certain problems now being faced by the West have roots as far back as the beginning of nation-state development, which followed the era of the medieval world view and feudal social structures, intersected with the period of divine-right monarchy, and ran parallel with the end of tension between religious hegemony and religious warfare in Europe. But Diplomacy does not begin the historical account, starting with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which ended the Thirty Years War (i.e., the last great religious war), until the third chapter. That is because of the second perspective of the book, which is to give an account and critique of transformations of modern (i.e., twentieth-century) American foreign policy from the time that the U.S. assumed a place in the leadership of international relations. Indeed, the book takes particular note of the role of Wilsonian idealism, which emerged at Versailles, on the entire structure of U.S. foreign-policy leadership: "For whenever American has faced the task of constructing a new world order, it has returned in one way or another to Woodrow Wilson's precepts." The heart of the book develops around Americ...