Like everything Anderson writes, American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers deserves careful reading. He's one of the world's great historians, unrivalled in his ability to master and synthesize vast historical literatures (often drawing on many languages).
Jeet Heer
The New Republic
The most interesting implication of Anderson's argument is that the long catalog of US foreign policy ... Read moredisasters-the overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961, the twin quagmires of Vietnam and Iraq-were more than just errors of presidential judgement. They were the price America recurrently pays for the hubristic embrace of a messianic foreign policy, one that never disciplined its priorities according to rationally defined national interests.
New York Review of Books
His writing is sharp and erudite and even those who do not share his politics will learn from his book.
Gideon Rachman (picked for Summer Books 2015)
Financial Times
Revives memories of the early-1960s vintage, anti-Wilsonian idealism classic, William Appleman Williams's The Tragedy of American Diplomacy.
Joe P. Dunn
Choice
Anderson is among the most insightful and policy-relevant analysts of modern Europe.
Andrew Moravcsik
Foreign Affairs
One of the best political, historical and literary essayists of the age.
Times Literary Supplement
A powerful and lucid intelligence.
Eric Hobsbawm The most profound essayist wielding a pen.
Christopher Hitchens The most polymathic, and the most profound, essayist currently wielding a pen.
Atlantic Monthly
One of the acutest and most unsparing analysts of twentieth-century social and political thought.
Stefan Collini Show Less