SOURCE: “No Diplomat,” in National Review, Vol. 46, No. 11, June 13, 1994, pp. 63–65.

In the following review of Diplomacy, Powell positively assesses Kissinger's ability to connect the evolution of American foreign policy throughout modern history to America's future as a world power while questioning several of Kissinger's conclusions about the future of Europe.

[Diplomacy] is a magnificent book. It makes one yearn for the days when the United States had a foreign policy in place of the present mixture of wishful thinking, woolly platitudes, and obsession with tomorrow's newspaper headlines.

Despite its title, the book is not actually about diplomacy, an activity practiced by indisputably superior beings but ultimately on a par with Japanese flower-arranging and Scrabble. Or to put it more kindly, diplomacy is essentially tactics, whereas this book is about foreign-policy-making, grand strategy, and statecraft, all of them arts in which Henry Kissinger is an acknowledged black-belt.

Indeed I...