Military Diplomacy

In 1968, a small, dilapidated American spy ship set out on a dangerous mission to pinpoint military radar stations along the coast of North Korea. Packed with advanced surveillance equipment and classified intelligence documents, the USS Pueblo was poorly armed and lacked backup by air or sea. Its crew, led by a charismatic, hard-drinking, ex-submarine officer named Pete Bucher, was made up mostly of untested sailors in their teens and twenties.

The justification for the atomic bomb was simple: it would defeat Hitler and end the Second World War faster, saving lives. The reality was different. Fallout dismantles the conventional story of why the atom bomb was built. Peter Watson has found new documents showing that long before the...

In Kremlin Winter, Robert Service, acclaimed biographer of Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky and one of the finest historians of modern Russia, brings his deep understanding of that country to bear on the man who leads it. 'One of our most accomplished, erudite and prolific historians of modern Russia'...

Charles Stewart Henry Vane-Tempest-Stewart, the 7th Marquess of Londonderry, was born to power and command. But history has not been kind to "Charley", as the king called him, because, in his own words, he "backed the wrong horse", and a very dark horse indeed: Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party. Londonderry was hardly the only British aristocrat to do so, but he was the only Cabinet member to do so, and it ruined him. Author Ian Kershaw is not out to rehabilitate Lord Londonderry but to understand him and to expose why he was made a scapegoat.

The revelatory true story of the long-forgotten POW camps for German soldiers erected in hundreds of small U.S. towns during World War II, and the secret Nazi killings that ensnared fifteen brave American POWs in a high-stakes showdown. “In the pantheon of American history, it’s very hard to...

LA Times Book Award winner and expert on the past and present Japan, Ian Buruma examines the transformation of a country. Following Japan's history from its opening to the West in 1853 to its hosting of the 1964 Olympics, Buruma focuses on how figures such as Commodore Matthew Perry, Douglas MacArthur, and Emperor Mitsushito helped shape this complex country.

From the former New York Times Asia correspondent and author of China's Second Continent, an incisive investigation of China's ideological development as it becomes an ever more aggressive player in regional and global diplomacy. For many years after its reform and opening in 1978, China...

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the United States Army became the principal agent of American foreign policy. The army designed, implemented, and administered the occupations of the defeated Axis powers Germany and Japan, as well as many other nations. Generals such as Lucius Clay in Germany, Douglas MacArthur in Japan, Mark Clark in Austria, and John Hodge in Korea presided over these territories as proconsuls.

When a ruthless commander takes over the moon, he has it out for Carter Ash. The commander sends him to a tiny settlement to defend it with the worst soldiers for the job. Carter’s only support comes from an unexpected place: an enticing alien diplomat. That’s not all, however—the meager soldiers he has are being hunted and killed by something outside the colony.

In this examination of Union and Confederate foreign relations during the Civil War, from both European and American perspectives, Howard Jones demonstrates that the consequences of the conflict between North and South reached far beyond American soil.

The tide of soldiers washed over the Legion shields. Buried, the ranks of Legionaries sagged. "Push!" the Legion NCO yelled. Welcome to 264 B.C. Over the grunts and cries of men struggling against the mass of bodies pressing down on them, the Optio bellowed again, "Push!" And the Legion shields rose, rolling back the tide. The higher the shields, the more soldiers slid off, and the straighter the Legionaries stood. One shield tilted back, and a mercenary soldier tumbled behind the ranks. An infantryman stepped back and drove his blade between the soldier's ribs.

In the fall of 1943, during some of the Pacific theater's bloodiest battles, the United States and Japan pulled off a diplomatic coup—the exchange of civilians caught on the wrong side of the battlefield after Pearl Harbor. Nearly fifteen hundred Allied civilians trapped in Asia, mostly Americans, sailed through dangerous waters to an Indian port city where they were traded for an equivalent number of Japanese immigrants and their families sent from the Americas. The fate of the more than ten thousand Americans left behind rested on the success of this endeavor.

Alex Marlow and Ripple Creek Security's best personal security detail return to action. This time, they really don't like their principal, World Bureau of State Minister Joy Herman Highland–a highly-placed bureaucrat with aspirations to elected office. Even worse, Highland’s assistant wants to publicize every movement and action for her boss’s pending campaign, which is anathema to good security. With a person of this status, it's not a case of someone wanting her dead. The only question is how many people want her dead, and what are they bringing to the fight?

Special Forces operator Matt Whitaker survived the Oniki War—but only just. Now the war is over, and a tenuous peace has been struck. When weapons plans are stolen from an Oniki shipyard and all evidence points to human involvement, tensions flare, threatening that hard-won peace. Whitaker is the only person with the knowledge and experience to uncover the truth. Still recovering from his injuries, he is forced to face his demons, and charge back into the fray.

The war against the AIs is won, but the fight for humanity has only just begun. With the xenophobic Clans rampaging though the Rebel Empire, Princess Kelsey Bandar must convince the skeptical resistance to help them to establish a base of operations to fight back. To do that, Kelsey needs every ally she can get, and a whole lot of luck. Instead, she finds herself trapped in an alien universe while her mother tries to save the day. Even if she does get free, can she turn the situation around in her own universe before everything comes apart in their faces?

In 1905 President Teddy Roosevelt dispatched Secretary of War William Howard Taft on the largest U.S. diplomatic mission in history to Hawaii, Japan, the Philippines, China, and Korea. Roosevelt's glamorous twenty-one year old daughter Alice served as mistress of the cruise, which included...

A groundbreaking new study of Anglo-American relations during the Cold War, Diplomacy at the Brink argues for a reevaluation of Dwight D. Eisenhower's foreign policy toward allies and enemies alike. Contrary to his reputation as a level-headed moderate, the Eisenhower who emerges is a conservative ideologue, a leader whose aggressively anti-Communist and anticolonialist foreign policies represented a major shift away from the containment policy of the Truman presidency.

'Indispensable – brilliantly grounded in first-hand experience and telling detail. Compelling' - Rory Stewart From top defence analyst Jack Watling, Statecraft reveals how states collaborate, compete and fight in this era of global turmoil. Why did Russia struggle in the early months of its...

In 1967, a retired army major and self-made millionaire named Paddy Roy Bates cemented his family’s place in history when he inaugurated himself ruler of the Principality of Sealand, a tiny dominion of the high seas. And so began the peculiar story of the world’s most stubborn micronation on a World War II anti-aircraft-gun platform off the British coast. Incorporating original interviews with surviving Sealand royals, Dylan Taylor-Lehman recounts the battles and schemes as Roy and his crew engaged with diplomats and even thwarted an attempted coup.

Rethinking American Grand Strategy assembles a roster of leading historians to examine America's place in the world. Its innovative chapters reexamine familiar figures, such as John Quincy Adams, George Kennan, and Henry Kissinger, while also revealing the forgotten episodes and hidden voices of American grand strategy. They expand the scope of diplomatic and military history by placing the grand strategies of public health, race, gender, humanitarianism, and the law alongside military and diplomatic affairs to reveal hidden strategists as well as strategies.