Peacemaker: U Thant and the Forgotten Quest for a Just World,
by Thant Myint-U,
Published by W.W. Norton & Company (2025)
Rating: *****
History as Lives Lived
History, at its best, arrives not through timelines but through lives. In my primary and middle school, we were taught the 1960s through Indira Gandhi’s steely gaze or the grainy footage of moon landings; the United Nations appeared, if at all, as a backdrop to superpower posturing. Thant Myint-U’s Peacemaker upends that frame, placing U Thant – a Burmese schoolteacher turned Secretary-General – at the centre of the decade’s defining crises. What results is a narrative so compelling it reads like a novel, yet so rigorously archival that it reconfigures our understanding of the Cold War’s shadow lines.
The book’s genius lies in this biographical method: history as the choices and constraints of one man, watched in real time. Congo’s descent into chaos, the Cuban Missile Crisis’ 13 feverish days, Vietnam’s deepening quagmire, the Six-Day War’s sudden violence – these are not abstract events but episodes in which U Thant, often alone, cables presidents, dispatches envoys, and drafts memoranda that might – just might – avert catastrophe. Myint-U’s prose is crisp, almost cinematic; the archival work (thousands of footnotes attest to it) feels effortless, letting the documents speak while guiding the reader through their implications.
From Model UN to the East River
As someone who cut their teeth on Model United Nations – drafting resolutions on non-proliferation in airless school auditoriums, learning to parse the difference between General Assembly grandstanding and Security Council realpolitik – this book lands with particular force. The UN of MUN is a game of procedure; Thant Myint-U shows what it looked like when the gavel mattered. U Thant inherits the office in 1961 after Dag Hammarskjöld’s mysterious death in a plane crash, and immediately faces a world fracturing along post-colonial fault lines: newly independent African states demanding dignity, Asian nations pressing economic justice claims, and great powers treating the organisation as a useful irritant.
The Cuban Missile Crisis chapter alone justifies the book. While Kennedy and Khrushchev trade ultimatums, Thant – calm, insistent, invoking Burmese non-alignment – proposes face-saving off-ramps that both sides, grudgingly, accept. It’s a reminder of multilateralism not as lofty ideal but as crisis management: the Secretary-General as the one figure neither superpower can fully dismiss. For those of us who have watched more recent UN processes, whether that is climate negotiations, advisory opinions, biodiversity summits, the contrast is stark. Thant’s UN had agency while the one we engage with can often seem like a spectator.
The Third World’s Brief Ascendancy
What elevates Peacemaker beyond crisis chronicle is its excavation of a forgotten internationalism. U Thant arrives as the first non-Western Secretary-General at the high-water mark of “Third World” ambition: Bandung’s afterglow, the Non-Aligned Movement’s birth, demands for a New International Economic Order. Myint-U shows his grandfather championing these causes: decrying apartheid as a threat to peace, proposing environmental safeguards decades early, insisting that decolonisation includes economic sovereignty. This is history as contested terrain, where the global South briefly set terms.
Yet the erasure was swift and deliberate. Western capitals, comfortable with Thant during Cuba, bridled when he criticised Vietnam or equated Israeli actions with settler colonialism. The press followed suit; a Nobel Peace Prize was dangled, then withdrawn. Myint-U’s account of this airbrushing – US politicians belittling the “schoolmaster from Burma,” Israel’s complaints about his even-handedness – lands as a sobering lesson in whose stories endure. For a scholar of international environmental law, where similar dynamics play out today (loss and damage funds haggled over like Congo reparations), the parallels are inescapable.
Hagiography or Measured Tribute?
Does all this amount to hagiography? The question hangs over any grandson’s biography, and Peacemaker invites it. Myint-U is candid about U Thant’s flaws: excessive reserve, overfaith in the UN’s machinery, a certain naivety about power’s brute realities. But the portrait remains warm, the judgments gentle. Readers expecting dispassionate critique might cavil; those who see the book as history through biography will find it exemplary.
This is how I learned history: not as ledger of dates, but as human endeavour – Nehru navigating non-alignment, Gandhi wrestling moral absolutism against wartime necessity. Myint-U revives that method for a global stage, teaching us the 1960s through one man’s principled, often lonely, quest. It’s educational in the deepest sense: not mere facts, but a vision of what multilateralism briefly promised.
Lessons for a Fractured Present
Peacemaker arrives when the UN is widely mocked – Security Council paralysis, endless General Assembly speeches, credibility eroded by decades of selective enforcement. Yet Thant Myint-U insists on another reading: a reminder that individuals from the margins have, before, bent history’s arc. U Thant did not secure a just world; no one could have. But his decade in office proves the organisation can be more than theatre when led by someone who believes in it.
For those of us working in international law’s long defeats – climate finance battles, ocean governance deadlocks – the book offers bracing perspective. Multilateralism endures not because it’s perfect, but because alternatives are worse. In an era of Trumpian unilateralism and rising protectionisms, recovering U Thant’s story feels urgent. This is not nostalgia; it’s equipment for the fights ahead.
Five stars without reservation: archival rigour, narrative verve, intellectual heft. If biography can teach history, Peacemaker proves it can also rekindle possibility.
Tejas Rao 