A Choice of Enemies

Foreign Affairs, July, August
“Provocative new book”Economist, July, 24, 2008
“Sir Lawrence’s subtle narrative is a marvel of concision, even over more than 500 pages. By the end it cannot but make the reader wonder how realistic it is to advocate… an “integrated grand strategy” capable of being sustained for decades in such a violent and unpredictable part of the world.”

 Survival: Journal of the International Institute of Strategic Studies
“Magesterial…[Freedman] is decidedly level-headed, undogmatic, widely informed about things outside his discipline, and alive to the ways in which governments actually work….Freedman is a great archival historian in part because his grasp of the way decision-makers and bureaucracies interact with each other, their domestic political environment and the wider world enables him to read the fragmentary and self-serving sources more astutely than most scholars. He is also a writer who prefers to work in a jargon-free zone. A Choice of Enemies displays all these virtues.”