Diplomacy
In this controversial and monumental book - arguably his most important - Henry Kissinger illuminates just what diplomacy is. Moving from a sweeping overview of his own interpretation of history to personal accounts of his negotiations with world leaders, Kissinger describes the ways in which the art of diplomacy and the balance of power have created the world we live in, and shows how Americans, protected by the size and isolation of their country, as well as by their own idealism and mistrust of the Old World, have sought to conduct a unique kind of foreign policy based on the way they wanted the world to be, as opposed to the way it really is.
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6recommend
17mentions
15people
2010–2026years
47% recommend53% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Not youtube videos but I would recommend Henry Kissinger's book Diplomacy which talks about this to some extent (although that is not the primary focus of the book).
- Kissinger's book "Diplomacy”(1994) is incredibly good and well-written Must read for anyone interested in international politics.
To understand Kissinger, you must understand his worldview. He had an acute sense of tragedy, and understanding that things can go wrong in an instant. For him the job of foreign policy was very modest: to keep the most horrible disasters away by using power against power. By preventing the worst from happening, others had the opportunity to better the humanity. Cynical realpolitik was necessary to prevent everything from going to hell.
In the last 30 years Kissinger was not very consistent or well thought in his opinions in public. He just wanted to get included and consulted in the highest level, so his opinions were often grafted to be accepted. For example, the plan to invade Iraq was fundamentally against Kissinger's realpolitik world view. Neoconservative foreign policy is idealistic (spread democracy trough military strength) but Kissinger rationalized the invasion for neocons.
- Thanks for pointing this out, his book title Diplomacy was very enlightening.
One thing of note in the spew of bile aimed at Kissinger in the HN comment thread is that it appears to emanate from people who were children or not even born during the cold war, and who seem to base their opinion on the comments of rock n' roll stars, cooks, leftist journalists/activists (sometimes turned neocon in their later life, surprise!).
I lament the decline of comment quality on HN whenever a somewhat controversial figure is brought up. It's almost as bad as Ars Technica in those cases, and closely resembles the what comes out of the comment section of the worst right wing news cloaca.
I'll order biography by Niall Ferguson in the meantime.
- Here's a reply[0] to a question that asked about directory structure.
Ignore the programming/technology part.
Military books (such as "One Bullet Away" by Nathaniel Fick or "Generation Kill" by Evan Wright which was turned into a mini-series on HBO). Field manuals can be interesting and you can learn a lot from them.
Knot books.
"Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War" by Robert Gates is interesting.
"The Art of Intelligence", by Henry Crumpton.
"Diplomacy" by Henry Kissinger is an interesting read. It starts with the balance of power in Europe, raison d'état, Richelieu, "U.S. exceptionalism". It is well written.
- >I suppose I never thought deeply enough to conclude the torture and murder of Jamal Khashoggi is a manifestation of a systematic problem.
Even for something that has received such a wide coverage as that, what do we actually know for a fact about it? You hear pundits and journalists claiming things for fact, but what are the sources, and what is the actual evidence. The only evidence is "everybody knows", or the U.S. intelligence community being "certain" of his fate. They were "certain" of a lot of things. If something that has received as wide a coverage as that event has had, imagine all the things we'll never hear about.
>If nation states (even democratic in some instances) are willing to kill those who share the truth, is this something we should accept?
It's amusing that I'm writing these lines near a street named "Richelieu" in Algiers. We'll have to go back to Cardinal de Richelieu for whom the "raison d'État"[0] was a cornerstone.
I'd recommend the book "Diplomacy" by Henry Kissinger.
- In no particular order and probably not remembering all:
The signal and the noise - Nate Silver;
Black Swan - Nassim Nicholas Taleb;
Antifragile - Nassim Nicholas Taleb;
1984 - Orwell;
Man's search for meaning - Viktor Frankl;
Diplomacy - Henry Kissinger (not only international politics but also deep-thinking strategy that can be used anywhere);
Meditations - Marcus Aurelius;
Superforecasting - Philip Tetlock;
Propaganda - Edward Bernays;
Pitch anything - Oren Klaff;
Guns, Germs and Steel - Jared Diamond;
How to win friends and influence people& Stop worrying (both by Dale Carnegie);
The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins;
Trust - Francis Fukuyama;
