FDR’s Ambassadors and the Diplomacy of Crisis: From the rise of Hitler to the end of World War II
Author: David Mayers
Date: 2013
What effect did personality and circumstance have on US foreign policy during World War II? This incisive account of US envoys residing in the major belligerent countries – Japan, Germany, Italy, China, France, Great Britain, USSR – highlights the fascinating role played by such diplomats as Joseph Grew, William Dodd, William Bullitt, Joseph Kennedy and W. Averell Harriman. Between Hitler's 1933 ascent to power and the 1945 bombing of Nagasaki, US ambassadors sculpted formal policy – occasionally deliberately, other times inadvertently – giving shape and meaning not always intended by Franklin D. Roosevelt or predicted by his principal advisors. From appeasement to the Holocaust and the onset of the Cold War, David Mayers examines the complicated interaction between policy, as conceived in Washington, and implementation on the ground in Europe and Asia. By so doing, he also sheds needed light on the fragility, ambiguities and enduring urgency of diplomacy and its crucial function in international politics.
Related resources
Post Cold War diplomatic training
19 Apr, 2006
The Responsibility to Protect
09 Aug, 2001
The Embassy: A story of war and diplomacy
19 Aug, 2016
Managing Global Chaos
15 Aug, 1996
Embassies in Armed Conflict
16 Aug, 2012
Education and Conflict: Complexity and Chaos
08 Aug, 2003
United Nations, Divided World, 2nd ed
09 Aug, 2001
Weapons Overview
13 Aug, 2010
The Search for Peace
07 Aug, 1997
Mediation in International Relations
05 Aug, 1994
Track 2 diplomacy and Pakistan
08 Aug, 2003
Regional water cooperation in the Arab – Israeli Conflict: A case study of the West Bank
16 Aug, 2014
The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate
16 Aug, 2013
Cyprus: the search for a solution
05 Aug, 2005
Embassies under Siege
25 Aug, 1995
Strengthening of the Coordination of Emergency Humanitarian Assistance of the United Nations
14 Aug, 2009
A kind of diplomatic incantation: Exchanging British and Japanese diplomats in the Second World War
02 Feb, 2012
Diplomacy Before and After Conflict
06 Aug, 2010