The new world order -- The hinge : Theodore Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson -- From universality to equilibrium : Richelieu, William of Orange, and Pitt -- The concert of Europe : Great Britain, Austria, and Russia -- Two revolutionaries : Napoleon III and Bismarck -- Realpolitik turns on itself -- A political doomsday machine : European diplomacy before the First World War -- Into the vortex : the military doomsday machine -- The new face of diplomacy : Wilson and the Treaty of Versailles -- The dilemmas of the victors -- Stresemann and the re-emergence of the vanquished -- The end of illusion : Hitler and the destruction of Versailles -- Stalin's bazaar -- The Nazi-Soviet pact -- America re-enters the arena : Franklin Delano Roosevelt -- Three approaches to peace : Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill in World War II -- The beginning of the Cold War -- The success and the pain of containment -- The dilemma of containment : the Korean War -- Negotiating with the Communists : Adenauer, Churchill, and Eisenhower -- Leapfrogging containment : the Suez crisis -- Hungary : upheaval in the Empire -- Khrushchev's ultimatum : the Berlin crisis 1958-63 -- Concepts of Western unity : Macmillan, de Gaulle, Eisenhower, and Kennedy -- Vietnam : entry into the morass; Truman and Eisenhower -- Vietnam : on the road to despair; Kennedy and Johnson -- Vietnam : the extrication; Nixon -- Foreign policy as geopolitics : Nixon's triangular diplomacy -- Detente and its discontents -- The end of the Cold War : Reagan and Gorbachev -- The new world order reconsidered