
Master of the Game
Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy
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Narrated by:
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Simon Vance
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By:
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Martin Indyk
About this listen
A perceptive and provocative history of Henry Kissinger's diplomatic negotiations in the Middle East that illuminates the unique challenges and barriers Kissinger and his successors have faced in their attempts to broker peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors.
“A wealth of lessons for today, not only about the challenges in that region but also about the art of diplomacy.... The drama, dazzling maneuvers, and grand strategic vision.” (Walter Isaacson, author of The Code Breaker)
More than 20 years have elapsed since the United States last brokered a peace agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians. In that time, three presidents have tried and failed. Martin Indyk - a former United States ambassador to Israel and special envoy for the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in 2013 - has experienced these political frustrations and disappointments firsthand.
Now, in an attempt to understand the arc of American diplomatic influence in the Middle East, he returns to the origins of American-led peace efforts and to the man who created the Middle East peace process - Henry Kissinger. Based on newly available documents from American and Israeli archives, extensive interviews with Kissinger, and Indyk's own interactions with some of the main players, the author takes listeners inside the negotiations. Here is a roster of larger-than-life characters - Anwar Sadat, Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan, Yitzhak Rabin, Hafez al-Assad, and Kissinger himself.
Indyk's account is both that of a historian poring over the records of these events, as well as an inside player seeking to glean lessons for Middle East peacemaking. He makes clear that understanding Kissinger's design for Middle East peacemaking is key to comprehending how to - and how not to - make peace.
©2021 Martin Indyk (P)2021 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“A gripping history of how the United States used peacemaking to supplant the Soviet Union as the dominant foreign power in the region.” (Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times)
“When Indyk analyzes the obstacles that Kissinger overcame, he knows of what he speaks. Decades after Kissinger left the State Department, the author dealt with similar issues as U.S. ambassador to Israel and special presidential envoy. His book draws on his experiences as well as extensive research in American and Israeli archives. Most of all, Indyk captures the unique intensity of diplomacy in this region, where every gesture is treated with suspicion, and every concession is a matter of life or death.... Indyk’s book is a brilliant account of how the mastery of personal diplomacy can depart from the diplomat’s true mission of peace.” (Jeremi Suri, The New York Times Book Review)
“Martin Indyk’s lucidly conceived and compellingly written Master of the Game: Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy is much more than a tale of long-ago diplomatic tussles in a faraway place. The issues surrounding Mr. Kissinger’s approach to foreign policy remain current, and Mr. Indyk brings to the task of examining them his years of diplomatic experience in the Clinton and Obama administrations. His book deserves careful attention.” (Walter Russell Mead, The Wall Street Journal)
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Story
Spanning the years of transition, 1944 to 1948, Ascent to Power illuminates Truman’s struggles to emerge as president in his own right. Yet, from a relatively unknown Missouri senator to the most powerful man on Earth, Truman’s legacy transcends. With his come-from-behind campaign in the fall of 1948, his courageous civil rights advocacy, and his role in liberating millions from militarist governments and brutal occupations, Truman’s decisions during these pivotal years changed the course of the world in ways so significant we live with them today.
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Truman defeated Republican use of Dark Psychology
- By sunao mind☯️ heart ❤️ on 01-30-25
By: David L. Roll
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Believer
- My Forty Years in Politics
- By: David Axelrod
- Narrated by: David Axelrod
- Length: 19 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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The man behind some of the greatest political changes of the last decade, David Axelrod has devoted a lifetime to questioning political certainties and daring to bring fresh thinking into the political landscape. Whether as a child hearing John F. Kennedy stump in New York or as a strategist guiding the first African American to the White House, Axelrod shows in Believer how his own life stands at the center of the tumultuous American century.
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Love letter to Obama
- By DaWoolf on 03-15-15
By: David Axelrod
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There Will Be Fire
- Margaret Thatcher, the IRA, and Two Minutes That Changed History
- By: Rory Carroll
- Narrated by: John Keating
- Length: 14 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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A bomb planted by the Irish Republican Army exploded at 2:54 a.m. on October 12, 1984. It was the last day of the Conservative Party Conference at the Grand Hotel in the coastal town of Brighton, England. Rooms were obliterated, dozens of people wounded, five killed. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was in her suite when the explosion occurred; had she been just a few feet in another direction, flying tiles and masonry would have sliced her to ribbons. As it was, she survived—and history changed.
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A Very British Point of View
- By CaitB on 07-25-23
By: Rory Carroll
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Reading the Glass
- A Captain's View of Weather, Water, and Life on Ships
- By: Elliot Rappaport
- Narrated by: Greg Tremblay
- Length: 9 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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What’s in a cloud? Did you know that water vapor is invisible and actually lighter than dry air? What separates a tropical storm from a winter blizzard? And what exactly is El Niño? Elliot Rappaport, a professional captain of traditional sailing ships, has spent three decades at sea, where understanding weather is crucial to the safety of vessels and their crews. In Reading the Glass, he offers a sailor’s-eye view of the moving parts of our atmosphere and unveils the larger patterns it holds: global winds, storms, air masses, jet streams, and the longer arc of our climate.
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Weather and Sailing!
- By T. Adams on 01-20-24
By: Elliot Rappaport
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Raven
- The Untold Story of the Rev. Jim Jones and His People
- By: Tim Reiterman
- Narrated by: Mitch Horowitz
- Length: 29 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Tim Reiterman's Raven provides the seminal history of the Rev. Jim Jones, the Peoples Temple, and the murderous ordeal at Jonestown in 1978. This PEN Award-winning work explores the ideals gone wrong, the intrigue, and the grim realities behind the Peoples Temple and its implosion in the jungle of South America.
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What a very thoroughly written book!
- By Traci P. on 04-22-17
By: Tim Reiterman
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The Square and the Tower
- Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook
- By: Niall Ferguson
- Narrated by: Elliot Hill
- Length: 17 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Most history is hierarchical: it's about emperors, presidents, prime ministers, and field marshals. It's about states, armies, and corporations. It's about orders from on high. Even history "from below" is often about trade unions and workers' parties. But what if that's simply because hierarchical institutions create the archives that historians rely on? What if we are missing the informal, less well documented social networks that are the true sources of power and drivers of change?
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Not his best by a long chalk: Read Steven Pinker.
- By David on 02-05-18
By: Niall Ferguson
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Alice
- Alice Roosevelt Longworth, from White House Princess to Washington Power Broker
- By: Stacy A. Cordery
- Narrated by: Alex Picard
- Length: 19 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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From the moment Teddy Roosevelt's outrageous and charming teenage daughter strode into the White House—carrying a snake and dangling a cigarette—the outspoken Alice began to put her imprint on the whole of the twentieth-century political scene. Her barbed tongue was as infamous as her scandalous personal life, but whenever she talked, powerful people listened, and she reigned for eight decades as the social doyenne in a town where socializing was state business.
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Interesting but sometimes infuriating
- By Info Seeker on 05-16-23
By: Stacy A. Cordery
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Klan War
- Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction
- By: Fergus M. Bordewich
- Narrated by: Landon Woodson
- Length: 16 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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The Ku Klux Klan, which celebrated historian Fergus Bordewich defines as “the first organized terrorist movement in American history,” rose from the ashes of the Civil War. At its peak in the early 1870s, the Klan boasted many tens of thousands of members, no small number of them landowners, lawmen, doctors, journalists, and churchmen, as well as future governors and congressmen. And their mission was to obliterate the muscular democratic power of newly emancipated Black Americans and their white allies, often by the most horrifying means imaginable.
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a great but depressing book
- By D. Littman on 12-12-23
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Spies
- The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West
- By: Calder Walton
- Narrated by: Dugald Bruce-Lockhart
- Length: 20 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Spies is the history of the secret war that Russia and the West have been waging for a century. Espionage, sabotage, and subversion were the Kremlin’s means to equalize the imbalance of resources between the East and West before, during, and after the Cold War. There was nothing “unprecedented” about Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential election. It was simply business as usual, new means used for old ends.
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A detailed history, inexcusably marred by politics
- By Thomas Randolph on 08-12-23
By: Calder Walton
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Vulgar Favors
- The Assassination of Gianni Versace
- By: Maureen Orth
- Narrated by: Dan Woren, Maureen Orth
- Length: 18 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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On July 15, 1997, Gianni Versace was shot and killed on the steps of his Miami Beach mansion by serial killer Andrew Cunanan. But months before Versace’s murder, award-winning journalist Maureen Orth was already investigating a major story on Cunanan for Vanity Fair. Culled from interviews with more than four hundred people and insights gleaned from thousands of pages of police reports, Vulgar Favors tells the complete story of Andrew Cunanan, his unwitting victims, and the moneyed world in which they lived . . . and died.
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ONE OF THE BEST TRUE CRIME BOOKS IN MY LIBRARY!
- By Steve on 10-29-17
By: Maureen Orth
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Hoover
- An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times
- By: Kenneth Whyte
- Narrated by: Richard Ferrone
- Length: 27 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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The definitive biography of Herbert Hoover, one of the most remarkable Americans of the 20th century - a revisionist account that will forever change the way Americans understand the man, his presidency, and his battle against the Great Depression. A poor orphan who built a fortune, a great humanitarian, a president elected in a landslide and then routed in the next election, arguably the father of both New Deal liberalism and modern conservatism - Herbert Hoover is also one of our least understood presidents.
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What a fascinating story!
- By Dan Ryan on 11-18-17
By: Kenneth Whyte
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The Buried
- An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution
- By: Peter Hessler
- Narrated by: Peter Hessler
- Length: 16 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Drawn by a fascination with Egypt's rich history and culture, Peter Hessler moved with his wife and twin daughters to Cairo in 2011. He wanted to learn Arabic, explore Cairo's neighborhoods, and visit the legendary archaeological digs of Upper Egypt. After his years of covering China for The New Yorker, friends warned him Egypt would be a much quieter place. But not long before he arrived, the Egyptian Arab Spring had begun, and now the country was in chaos.
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A Fascinating, Funny, and Moving Account of Egypt
- By Jefferson on 07-23-19
By: Peter Hessler
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The Lumumba Plot
- The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination
- By: Stuart A. Reid
- Narrated by: Michael Boatman
- Length: 18 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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It was supposed to be a moment of great optimism, a cause for jubilation. The Congo was at last being set free from Belgium—one of seventeen countries to gain independence in 1960 from ruling European powers. At the helm as prime minister was charismatic nationalist Patrice Lumumba. Just days after the handover, however, the Congo’s new army mutinied, Belgian forces intervened, and Lumumba turned to the United Nations for help in saving his newborn nation from what the press was already calling “the Congo crisis.”
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Somewhere between a bio and a hatchet job
- By Buretto on 12-27-23
By: Stuart A. Reid
Great insight but a little too long
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A very good book on history, diplomacy and negotiation
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Insights into all of the major players involved were intriguing with perhaps the most interesting being Anwar Sadat, the outstanding hero of the whole story, and Syria's President Assad.
The Israeli players during this Kissinger period come across as very able people, strongly committed to sheer survival of a still-weak nation in the 1970s, often rigid and then showing surprising flexibility at times.
Kissinger's commitment to Israel is apparent even as he used the circumstances to make the US the dominant player in the region, taking over from the USSR. In other words, he had more than one agenda in play at the same time and, on his terms, he was successful in each of them
Kissinger comes across as a master of manipulation and, at times, a victim of his own attempts to over-control the process. But, love or dislike him, it's difficult to deny that he was a major contributor to Middle East stability - which was his intent.
However, his disinterest in the Palestinians comes over very strongly and one wonders how much has been lost for them and, in the process, a more peaceful Israel. Looking at it now, that's a festering sore for which no healing seems possible and one wonders throughout the story whether it might have been different.
This is a book well worth listening to.
Fascinating insights into Middle East diplomacy
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Fantastic covers the 73 war and aftermath better then any other book I have read
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Indyk’s theses is the book is that Kissinger never thought an attempt to solve the Israeli-Arab conflict in one shot could work. Kissinger felt a step by step process was the only successful path to peace. Indyk seems to agree with Kissinger that gradualism is the better approach and admits that when he was Ambassador and part of the negotiating teams he took the opposite approach and repeatedly tried for a a comprehensive peace deal. He seems to admit his own mistake and says gradualism is the better approach.
As much as I enjoyed this book I was frustrated at Indyk’s refusal to perceive that the failed attempts at peace by American diplomats, Arab and Israeli leaders weren’t because of poor process, missed opportunities, bad timing or leaders who refused to compromise, but because the foundation at all attempts at solving the Israeli-Arab-Palestinian conflict have been based on an impossible end – two states for two people – that neither side wants nor thinks possible. Indyk and his State Department colleagues (those before and after him) have always assumed what the end looked like, and then tried to pressure, cajole, encourage both sides to get there. Instead of an open ended process where both sides negotiate a final outcome, the push has been to get to a place no one wants to go and get frustrated when they can’t get there.
It’s obvious to any non-biased observer that the two-state solution, a compromise where both Israel and the Palestinians get some of what they want, but not all of what they want, makes sense in the abstract, but when applied practically to the two sides is completely unrealistic and impossible. Yet diplomats like Indyk still insist on trying to make it work. They criticize anyone who refuses to go along with their process, not realizing that attempting the same failed process over and over is always going to result in failure.
The book’s ultimate failure lies in Indyk’s refusal to see that creative attempts like the Trump team’s novel approach are the only way the conflict is going to end. Indyk wrote that President Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and his refusal to recognize Jerusalem as a Palestinian capital, his planned approval of 30% of settlements in the West Bank along with its 133 settlements, only tarnished America’s role as a mediator in the conflict. He claims John Kerry made the last serious effort to solve the conflict. He discounts Trump’s attempts because they didn’t follow the two state solution’s failed script.
Indyk claims the only way forward to solving the conflict is that Israel must recognize it will become safer by withdrawing from land in Area C. The first step in a gradual process ala Kissinger must be Israel withdrawing from certain areas in area C. Once Israel begins withdrawing from more of area C, then both the United States and Israel could recognize a Palestinian state with undefined borders. Indyk outlines three steps to gradual peace making.
The first step is Israel recognizing a Palestinian state with borders to be recognized later. The second step is for Palestinians to gradually gain more control over the West Bank. The third step is for Israel to stop expanding and building settlements.
I was curious about Indyk’s three steps. They all focus on Israeli steps. The Palestinians in Indyk’s eyes have nothing to do to end the conflict, it’s all on Israel’s shoulders. The absurdity of thinking the Palestinians have nothing to do, and the end of the conflict is only being held up by Israel demonstrates why Indyk himself failed at his life’s mission. Although he hopes men like Kissinger and himself, who have toiled for decades with no results, have planted the seeds of an eventual peace deal, the truth is Indyk’s refusal to admit his own mistakes has brought failure and will never produce any success.
It’s sad and pathetic, and those are the feelings the book leaves its reader.
Sad in its lack of creativity
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