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Plans Unraveled: The Foreign Policy of the Carter Administration. By Scott Kaufman. (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2008. x, 298 pp. $38.00, ISBN 978-0-87580390-6.)
Scott Kaufman has written a first-rate scholarly study of the foreign policy of President Jimmy Carter. This is a work of original synthesis and reinterpretation, rather than of revelatory archival discovery. Kaufman draws on a wide range of secondary academic literature, as well as on conscientious research in the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and elsewhere. The story he tells - of human rights commitments being compromised, of hopes for an end to Cold War oversimplifications being superseded by the death of detente, of mounting misery regarding Iran - is, in many respects, a familiar one. However, Kaufman...