Strobe Talbott titled his memoir of eight years serving in the State Department under Bill Clinton The Russia Hand; the Russia hand being not Talbott, first as Ambassador-at-Large for the Newly Independent States and then as Deputy Secretary of State, but rather the president himself. While it is never a bad idea to give one’s boss the lion’s share of the credit, Stephan Kieninger’s timely and excellent account of US diplomacy towards Europe during the 1990s shows that Talbott’s title was a conceit—he was a critical player in that fateful decade (222).

Bill Clinton and his advisers defined the forty-second president as a post–Cold War leader. Indeed, an attempted coup in the Soviet Union in August 1991 scared the Clinton campaign, who feared it might mean that the Cold War was back on. “If it is,” Talbott concluded in his diary, “[Clinton’s] chances of being president are zilch” (xxvi). Fortunately for his electoral prospects and the world, they failed.

In an engaging, readable narrative, Kieninger traces the “architectural” diplomacy of Talbott and the entire Clinton administration; working to secure peace in a Europe that had changed enormously and rapidly with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR; to facilitate profound economic and political transitions; and to keep the United States a player on the continent (4). To tell this story, Kieninger makes use of an impressive range of sources, including newly accessible archival materials from the US as well as the European Union, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Where declassification has yet to make the documentary record accessible, Kieninger incorporates an array of interviews—he conducted over seventy interviews on both sides of the Atlantic—that offer fresh insights on the period. What sets Securing Peace in Europe apart, however, is Kieninger’s access to and deft use of Talbott’s diaries: they are a wealth of novel information on US foreign policy during this critical decade and Kieninger leverages them to give the reader deep insight into how policy was made and the cast of characters who made it.

Kieninger is laudatory but not hagiographical, yet it is impossible not to be reminded of today’s realities: an autocratic, aggressive Russia waging a depraved war against its neighbor Ukraine, and an administration in the White House today that seems to think the worst decision in all of this was not Russia’s to invade, but Ukraine’s to resist. How did it all go so wrong?

When Clinton declared shortly before his 1993 inauguration that he would be happy to keep democratic Russia under Yeltsin “a going concern of [ten] or so years,” for example, one cannot help but note how that timeline coincides with Vladimir Putin’s rise to power (xiv). Indeed, Kieninger reveals how time and again, the Clinton administration took costly steps “to try to keep Yeltsin going” or to “beef up Yeltsin” because of the worse actors—a motley crew of communists and ultra-nationalists—waiting in the wings (11, 13). Meetings between the two presidents were choreographed to focus on areas of mutual agreement and, accordingly, sidestepped topics about which they disagreed. This kid-glove approach to Yeltsin became an end in and of itself over the course of the 1990s, as the Clinton administration, and Talbott in particular, advocated “strategic patience” in the face of Russian intransigence (136, 157).

Perhaps the United States’ real error vis-à-vis Russia during the 1990s was not, as Putin has since alleged, preying on Russian weakness, but rather having been too indulgent: failing to make Russian leaders actually come to terms with having lost the Cold War. Talbott recalls, for example, that those whose introduction to Russia was through literature like himself were predisposed to give the benefit of the doubt (25). Those like Madeleine Albright, Clinton’s second Secretary of State, whose introduction to Moscow’s foreign policy as the daughter of Czech émigrés had been a Soviet-sponsored coup in 1948 and a Soviet-led invasion in 1968, rather than culture, tended to see things differently (137). The Clinton administration “avoided theological debates about how Russia and Ukraine fit into Europe,” according to Talbott (29). Today, those debates are being settled on the battlefield.