Arts of Power: Statecraft and Diplomacy

This is a powerful book. It is a concise guide to diplomacy, even for the non-diplomat such as myself. This book gives me a very useful and alternative angle on customer service and communicating.

Although this book contains only 140 pages of text, Freeman has managed to pack a lot of useful information into it. Its focus is on the practical application of statecraft. To quote Freeman, "statecraft is concerned with the application of the power of the state to other states and peoples. Diplomacy applies this power by persuasive appeals short of war." In other words, diplomacy is but one tool of statecraft. What makes this book rare is that the author is a career foreign service officer, in a bureau where the preservation of peace at any cost is often paramount. It is unusual at best to hear anyone from the Department of State to discuss the usefulness of the application of force or intelligence to international relations. Arts of Power falls somewhere between the books of international theory and those social psychology books which are full of common-sense, yet contradictory aphorisms-- and it succeeds where the others fail. With a few exceptions, no decent practical guide to the application of statecraft has been written in centuries. Freeman has corrected this error, and in spades.