Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents : The new world order -- The hinge: Theodore Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson -- From University to equilibrium : Richelieu, William of Orange and Pitt -- The concert of Europe : Great Britain, Austria, and Russia -- Two revolutionaries : Napoleon III and Bismarck -- Realpolitik turns on itself -- A political doomsday machine : European diplomacy before the first world war -- Into the vortex : the military doomsday machine -- The new face of diplomacy : Wilson and the treaty of versailles -- The dilemmas of the victors -- Stresemann and the re-emergence of the vanquished -- The end of illusion : Hitler and the destruction of versailles -- Stalin's bazaar -- The Nazi-Soviet pact -- America re-enters the arena : Franklin Delano Roosevelt -- Three approaches to peace : Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchhill in world war II -- The beginning of the cold war -- The success and the pain of containment -- The dilemma of containment : the Korean war -- Negotiating with the Communists : Adenauer, Churchhill, and Eisenhower -- Leapfrogging containment -- the Suez crisis -- Hungary : upheaval in the empire -- Khrushchev"s ultimatum : the Berlin crisis 1958-63 -- Concepts of western unity : Macmillan, de Gaulle, Eisenhower, and Kennedy -- Vietnam : entry into the morass; Truman and Eisenhower -- Vietnam : on the road to despair ; Kennedy and Johnson -- Vietnam : the extrication ; Nixton -- Foreign policy as geopolitics : Nixton's triangular diplomacy -- Detente and its discontents -- The end of cold war : Reagan and Gorbachev -- The new world order reconsidered.