The Anatomy of Foreign Policy Crises

Reviewed edition: H. Kissinger. "Crisis". Moscow: AST, 2023. 512 p. The book presents a retrospective analysis of the international situation and the specifics of the political decision-making process in the context of escalating military-political tensions. The publication includes declassified transcripts of telephone conversations of US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger during two crises – the 1973 Arab-Israeli War (the Yom Kippur War) and the final US withdrawal from Vietnam in 1975. A distinctive feature of the collection is its documentary-memoir character, combining the memories of a direct participant in the events described by H. Kissinger, a documentary account of what happened, illustrating the vicissitudes of two crises and an expert political assessment of the international situation and actions of the parties to the conflicts under consideration. This comprehensive approach is particularly interesting due to the fact that the author considers the events of the Arab-Israeli and Vietnamese crises in the broad context of domestic and foreign policy circumstances, as well as in the context of the global geopolitical confrontation between the United States and the USSR.

Henry Kissinger, political crisis decision-making, US foreign policy, the Arab-Israeli war (the Yom Kippur War), the Vietnam War