New Books in Diplomatic History
Arts:Books
Today I talked to Traian Sandu about his book Ceausescu: Le dictateur ambigu (Perrin, 2023).
Born in January 1918, Nicolae Ceauşescu began his apprenticeship in Bucharest and discovered the social struggle and its repression at the age of fifteen within the Romanian Communist Party. In 1948, the Stalinist Gheorghiu-Dej, his mentor, having taken power, he took the opportunity to quickly climb the ranks of the party and the state. Installed in power in March 1965, Ceauşescu inherited the policy of his predecessor: avoiding de-Stalinization by playing the nationalist card. Its beginnings were popular thanks to a certain cultural liberalization, the beginning of a consumer society and an opening towards the West. However, the oil shocks and the détente between the United States and the Soviet Union in the mid-1970s deprived him of the resources needed to pursue his policy.
His role as a bridge between East and West, his industrialization policy based on Western capital and technologies and his popularity within Romanian society collapsed at the turn of the 1980s. The beginning of social and political opposition (strikes and dissidence), the decision to repay the debt to Western institutions (IMF and World Bank) which led to cruel shortages and the end of the Cold War with the arrival of Gorbachev sounded the death knell for his regime which collapsed in three days in December 1989. The one who called himself the "genius of the Carpathians", or even the "Danube of thought", was executed with his wife, Elena, at the end of a particularly hasty trial, ending a strange revolution in which many saw the hand of the Soviet "big brother". Between autocratic drift and reformist desires, nationalism and submission to the USSR, growing paranoia and all-consuming megalomania, the man remained a mystery.
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Gary J. Bass, "Judgement at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia" (Knopf, 2023)
Vanessa Walker, "Principles in Power: Latin America and the Politics of U.S. Human Rights Diplomacy" (Cornell UP, 2020)
Seyed Ali Alavi, "Iran and Palestine: Past, Present, and Future" (Routledge, 2019)
Mark Moyar, "Triumph Regained: The Vietnam War, 1965-1968" (Encounter, 2023)
Robert Lyman, "A War of Empires: Japan, India, Burma, and Britain: 1941–45" (Osprey, 2021)
Stuart A. Reid, "The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination" (Knopf, 2023)
Anna Brinkman, "Balancing Strategy: Sea Power, Neutrality, and Prize Law in the Seven Years' War" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
Elizabeth O’Brien Ingleson, "Made in China: When US-China Interests Converged to Transform Global Trade" (Harvard UP, 2024)
Lisa Langdon Koch, "Nuclear Decisions: Changing the Course of Nuclear Weapons Programs" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Lisa Bhungalia, "Elastic Empire: Refashioning War Through Aid in Palestine" (Stanford UP, 2023)
Christopher Tounsel, "Bounds of Blackness: African Americans, Sudan, and the Politics of Solidarity" (Cornell UP, 2024)
Jeremy Garlick, "Advantage China: Agent of Change in an Era of Global Disruption" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
David Tal, "The Making of an Alliance: The Origins and Development of the US-Israel Relationship" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, "Soviet Adventures in the Land of the Capitalists: Ilf and Petrov's American Road Trip" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
Donald Stoker, "Why America Loses Wars: Limited War and US Strategy from the Korean War to the Present" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
Mateo Jarquín, "The Sandinista Revolution: A Global Latin American History" (UNC Press, 2024)
Mukund Padmanabhan, "The Great Flap of 1942: How the Raj Panicked over a Japanese Non-invasion (Vintage Books, 2024)
On the History and Evolution of Zionism
Robert D. Kaplan, "The Loom of Time: Between Empire and Anarchy, from the Mediterranean to China" (Random House, 2023)
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