Betrayal by Rulers

Prince Michel Sturdza served as Foreign Minister of the Kingdom of Romania. He watched, from inside the chancelleries, as Western diplomacy delivered half a continent into Soviet hands. He died in exile in Madrid in 1980, having spent the second half of his long life trying to explain to a complacent Free World what had been done to the peoples of Eastern Europe in their name.

Betrayal by Rulers is the testament he left behind.

This is not a book of speculation. Sturdza names the diplomats, traces the conferences, quotes the cables, and reconstructs the decisions that handed Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Yugoslavia, and the Baltic states to a tyranny that murdered tens of millions. He shows how the same patterns of elite accommodation that sold out Mihailović in Yugoslavia and Chiang Kai-shek in China would later be turned against Allende’s opponents in Chile and the captive nations behind the Iron Curtain. He names Kissinger. He names the foundations. He names the men in suits who treated the suffering of nations as the price of detente.

Sturdza wrote with the moral authority of a man who had nothing left to lose and everything left to say. He had seen his own country devoured. He understood, as few Western writers ever have, that the betrayal of one nation is the practice run for the betrayal of all.

If you want to understand how the post-war world was actually built, and by whom, this book is indispensable. It is also a warning. The hands that engineered the betrayals of the twentieth century are still at work. (2026ed, 268pp, pb)