Re: Michael Howard, " The World According to Henry: From Metternich to Me ", Foreign Affairs May/June 1994.
Following up on the Chalabi comment, I happened to look at Sir Michael Howard's review of Kissinger's Diplomacy yesterday; had never read it.
I love Sir Michael Howard's way of framing things.
It was a more illuminating review of Diplomacy,
and more importantly, a nice gloss on Western political history,
(admittedly not Kissinger's Memoirs, ie not biography; so I compare to some extent apples to oranges here),
than, say, Kissinger's review of Gaddis' biography of Kennan.
Kissinger approves of Gaddis' castigation of Kennan for not
' understanding ' 'politics',
ie the diplomatic, and political, weaknesses,
of weak liberal democracies.
They all, of course, understood this very well.
The difference was that Kennan was willing to talk about it,
a diplomatic faux pas.
I will talk more about this, and Lewis anon.
Howard strove for an interdisciplinary approach, which was not so favorably imitated over here, for various reasons,
and it shows in various huge, dropped, grand strategic balls, over many decades,
the giving over to the USSR of Eastern Europe in 1945 being only the hugest ball dropped.
As Howard also bemoans, neither Britain nor the US was able to give diplomacy a free enough hand while being always in the grips of liberal democratic politics.
(I would just add, military power was similarly hamstrung in this way, particularly Patton's perspective vis a vis the Soviets in 1945.)
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