Michael Mandelbaum

In his 2015 study of Joseph Stalin, historian Stephen Kotkin suggested that the Bolshevik revolution could have been stopped by just two bullets: one aimed at Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, hiding across the border in Finland but pressing the Bolshevik Party to seize power; a second bullet for Leon Trotsky, on the ground in Petrograd as a determined band of Red Guards, sailors, and soldiers stormed the Winter Palace.

Michael Mandelbaum’s book The Four Ages of American Foreign Policy is intended as another instalment, the author argues (quoting Pieter Geyl), in history’s ‘argument without end’. Historians of US foreign policy have long been engaged in their own particular argument – mostly, a competition over naming rights. In the most prestigious instalments – and Mandelbaum’s contribution is certainly one of those – the argument is not so much over the substance of history, but over its categorisation.