Structure and Personality

The immediate reaction when seeing Asaf Siniver's recent book was skepticism and surprise—yet another book on Nixon and Kissinger! And the next step was to ask what could there possibly be more to say about Nixon's and Kissinger's acclaimed, or disdained, foreign policy. However, one simply needs to note the subtitle—The Machinery of Crisis—to start realizing that this book is, in reality, very different from the other numerous accounts on the period. Siniver, in fact, makes a very specific and innovative contribution to the voluminous literature on the architects of U.S.-Soviet detente. His study focuses on the functioning of the Washington Special Action Group (WSAG), an interdepartmental group within the National Security Council (NSC) created by Nixon in order to monitor and more effectively manage international crises. Created in May 1969 and institutionalized with NSDM-19 two months later, the WSAG became the forum for crisis management during the Nixon administration. Between July 1969 and November 1973, the group met nearly two hundred times and addressed an ample range of issues, from the crises in the Middle East to the developments in the Vietnam War (p. 69). Siniver for the first time comprehensively analyzes the previously classified records of these meetings. His findings constitute the founding stones of his book. Then, on the basis of his expert analysis of the workings of the WSAG, Siniver's broader objective is to “offer fresh analysis about the linkage between structure and process in US foreign policy making” (p. 3)

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