In The International Ambitions of Mao and Nehru: National Efficacy Beliefs and the Making of Foreign Policy, Andrew Kennedy crafts a superb account of the decision-making beliefs and styles of two of the most consequential leaders of the twentieth century, Mao Zedong and Jawaharlal Nehru. Kennedy makes a twofold contribution. First, his book is an important addition to the emerging historical scholarship on Indian and Chinese foreign policy behavior during the Cold War. Second, he offers a fresh theoretical perspective by observing and comparing the foreign policies of Mao and Nehru through the prism of cognitive-psychological variables.
Kennedy's book is part of a new historical scholarship that has concentrated on the neglected “Cold War on the periphery,” as Robert J. McMahon termed it in his Cold War on the Periphery: The United States, India, and Pakistan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). Building on newly accessible documents and original...