Russia under Vladimir Putin has proved a prickly partner for the West, a far cry from the democratic ally many hoped for when the Soviet Union collapsed. Abroad, he has used Russia's energy might as a foreign policy weapon, while at home he has cracked down on opponents, adamant that only he has the right vision for his country's future. Former BBC Moscow correspondent Angus Roxburgh charts the dramatic fight for Russia's future under Vladimir Putin - how the former KGB man changed from reformer to autocrat, how he sought the West's respect but earned its fear, how he cracked down on his rivals at home and burnished a flamboyant personality cult, one day saving snow leopards or horse-back riding bare-chested, the next tongue-lashing Western audiences. Drawing on dozens of exclusive interviews in Russia, where he worked for a time as a Kremlin insider advising Putin on press relations, as well as in the US and Europe, Roxburgh also argues that the West threw away chances to bring Russia in from the cold, by failing to understand its fears and aspirations following the collapse of communism.

Ronald P. Toby argues that this isolationism was by no means so complete as traditionally supposed. He demonstrates that the Tokugawa shoguns conducted a foreign policy that established the shogunate's legitimacy, preserved Japan's security in an unstable environment, and buttressed her ideological pretensions to centrality in an East Asian order independent of the Chinese world order" more familiar to historians.

During the past ten years, few issues have mattered more to America’s vital interests or to the shape of the twenty-first century than Russia’s fate. To cheer the fall of a bankrupt totalitarian regime is one thing; to build on its ruins a stable democratic state is quite another. The challenge of helping to steer post-Soviet Russia-with its thousands of nuclear weapons and seething ethnic tensions-between the Scylla of a communist restoration and the Charybdis of anarchy fell to the former governor of a poor, landlocked Southern state who had won national election by focusing on domestic issues. No one could have predicted that by the end of Bill Clinton’s second term he would meet with his Kremlin counterparts more often than had all of his predecessors from Harry Truman to George Bush combined, or that his presidency and his legacy would be so determined by his need to be his own Russia hand.
With Bill Clinton at every step was Strobe Talbott, the deputy secretary of state whose expertise was the former Soviet Union. Talbott was Clinton’s old friend, one of his most trusted advisers, a frequent envoy on the most sensitive of diplomatic missions and, as this book shows, a sharp-eyed observer. The Russia Hand is without question among the most candid, intimate and illuminating foreign-policy memoirs ever written in the long history of such books. It offers unparalleled insight into the inner workings of policymaking and diplomacy alike. With the scope of nearly a decade, it reveals the hidden play of personalities and the closed-door meetings that shaped the most crucial events of our time, from NATO expansion, missile defense and the Balkan wars to coping with Russia’s near-meltdown in the wake of the Asian financial crisis. The book is dominated by two gifted, charismatic and flawed men, Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin, who quickly formed one of the most intense and consequential bonds in the annals of statecraft. It also sheds new light on Vladimir Putin, as well as the altered landscape after September 11, 2001.
The Russia Hand is the first great memoir about war and peace in the post-cold war world.
From the Hardcover edition.

Based on the author's seminal article in Foreign Affairs, Samuel P. Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order is a provocative and prescient analysis of the state of world politics after the fall of communism. In this incisive work, the renowned political scientist explains how "civilizations" have replaced nations and ideologies as the driving force in global politics today and offers a brilliant analysis of the current climate and future possibilities of our world's volatile political culture.

This incisive study of the evolving world order argues that seven countries have changed the world during the twentieth century and predicts their continued centrality in the twenty-first. Will the world of the twenty-first century be dominated by global companies, ethnic strife, or rogue tyrants with weapons of mass destruction? This definitive volume argues convincingly that the answer depends on the actions of the world's great powers, who will continue to set the rules affecting globalization, culture, and pariah regimes. Will the world of the twenty-first century be dominated by global companies, ethnic strife, or rogue tyrants? This definitive volume argues convincingly that the answer depends on the actions of the world's great powers, which will continue to set the rules affecting globalization, culture, and pariah regimes. In A Century's Journey, seven influential scholars trace the global strategies of the world's most powerful countries during the past 100 years. Through authoritative chapters on each great power, readers will learn how these countries redefined their interests in response to momentous changes and reshaped the world so that it bears only slight resemblance to the world of 1900. The scholars and their areas of expertise are Professors Robert A. Pastor (United States), Stanley Hoffman of Harvard University (France), Josef Joffe, Editor of Suddeutsche Zeitung (Germany), Robert Legvold of Columbia University (Soviet Union/Russia), Robert J. Lieber of Georgetown University (Great Britain), Michael Oksenberg of Stanford University (China), and Kenneth Pyle of the University of Washington (Japan).