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Socialist Yugoslavia consistently punched above its weight and played a crucial role in Cold War diplomacy. Drawing on a very wide collection of archival documents, Milorad Lazić provides a fascinating survey of Yugoslavia’s diplomatic policies and initiatives and how these by turns beguiled, challenged and frustrated the Soviet Union, the United States and Yugoslavia’s fellow members in the Non-Aligned Movement. The book both informs and entertains with new perspectives on international relations during the Cold War.

Christian Axboe Nielsen, Aarhus University

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Christian Axboe Nielsen, Aarhus University

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Harnessing exhaustive archival research, Milorad Lazic provides a vivid, incisive account of Yugoslav diplomacy during Josip Broz Tito’s final years. Unmaking Détente offers a rich window into the challenges and opportunities confronting a small, yet influential state during the 1970s, as Yugoslavia sought security in Europe and influence abroad. His account compellingly conveys the elderly Tito’s ambitions and anxieties, while providing a unique window into the changing politics of nonalignment in the late Cold War. Unmaking Détente is essential reading for anyone interested in the Third World project, Yugoslav foreign policy, or the challenges of middle power diplomacy.

Robert Rakove, author of Kennedy, Johnson, and the Nonaligned World (Stanford University

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Robert Rakove, Stanford University

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Based on outstanding research in formerly Yugoslav, British, and American archives, Milorad Lazic demonstrates how Tito’s Yugoslavia was pivotal in disrupting Soviet-American détente in the 1970s. Fearful of domestic fragmentation and international decline, Tito worked had to re-establish Yugoslavia’s independent role in international relations in the wake of the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia and the American engagement in Vietnam. In the process, he undermined superpower cooperation by skillfully maneuvering through a myriad of crises—the October War, the Cyprus Crisis, the CSCE process, the radicalization of the Non-Aligned Movement, the Angola War, Sino-American rapprochement, the Third Indochina Conflict, and the Afghanistan War. Lazic’s fascinating and important book restores a central but often neglected aspect to our understanding of the Cold War—the immense role of smaller actors in shaping, but also undercutting great power relations.

Lorenz Lüthi, author of Cold Wars: Asia, the Middle East, Europe (McGill University)

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Douglas Craig