It’s a reminder to us that to decision makers of the past, the future was merely a set of possibilities.” As the author explains, his narrative is “full of alternative political choices, major and minor, considered and taken, reconsidered and altered, in Paris and Saigon, in Washington and Beijing, and in the Viet Minh’s headquarters in the jungles of Tonkin. Historical outcomes, Logevall demonstrates, are driven not only by global political and strategic forces but also by the passion, frailty and determination of individual leaders. And it leverages a consistently potent analytical perspective. It is lucidly and comprehensively composed. Like his previous work, “Embers of War” is a product of formidable international research. One is the French struggle to hold its colonial empire in Asia the other is the progressive American entanglement in the war, first as a patron of the French and then as their successor in the effort to suppress the communist and nationalist Viet Minh insurgency.

In “Embers of War,” Logevall has conceived a prequel to his past work, examining two powerful, interdependent historical dramas. foreign relations and the author of, among other works, “Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam,” a seminal exercise in historical scholarship that persuasively refutes the thesis that the massive intervention engineered by President Lyndon Johnson and his advisers beginning in 1965 was a preordained inevitability of the Cold War and domestic politics.

Knight professor of international studies at Cornell University, is a specialist in U.S.

This is the subject of Logevall’s voluminous, penetrating and cautionary new study, “Embers of War.” Over the centuries, strategic overextension by great powers acting on the periphery of their national interests has hobbled ancient empires and modern states alike, in past decades consuming both France and the United States in a dual narrative of disaster in Southeast Asia. Why do the most thoughtful national security strategists and policymakers perpetually grapple with the lessons of history? Because there are few truly original problems in world politics that have not been confronted before, as scholar Fredrik Logevall’s superb new work reminds us.

Embers of war logevall