The Ambassadors: Thinking about Diplomacy from Machiavelli to Modern Times

History does not run in straight lines. Instead of inevitable progress, what we get is more often false starts, blind alleys, random events, good intentions that go wrong. Robert Cooper’s incisive and elegant book is therefore not a continuous diplomatic history. Richelieu and Mazarin inhabited a 16th-century world we can hardly imagine today, but it is from their time that we can begin to see the outline of today’s Europe. The Ambassadors includes a brilliant analysis of the people who built the Western side of the Cold War. Henry Kissinger is a pivotal figure in the post-war world, and his story is in some ways typical: he failed in his most important aims and succeeded in ways he never expected. Robert Cooper’s pieces together history and considers the illuminating fragments it leaves behind. --

Sir Robert Francis Cooper is a British diplomat and adviser currently serving as a Special Advisor at the European Commission with regard to Myanmar. He is also a member of the European Council on Foreign Relations and is an acclaimed writer on international relations. His publications, apart from a number of articles in Prospect and elsewhere, include: The Post-Modern State and the World Order and The Breaking of Nations, which won the Orwell Prize for Political Writing.