The American dilemma Book

This is the best account of US foreign policy during the Cold War that I know of. It is also one of the best books about strategy I've ever read. Gaddis argues that USFP consistently and, ultimately, successfully pursued a policy of containment towards the USSR during the Cold War. However, there was a broad range of options and emphases within containment in terms of how to see and address the Soviet threat. Most of the books is devoted to explaining these shifts.

Gaddis mainly argues that the US oscillated back and forth until the 1980's between asymmetrical and symmetrical containment. In asymmetrical containment (Kennan, New Look, Detente) the US tried to avoid playing to Soviet strengths (conventional arms, for instance) and defined American interests more narrowly, usually by focusing on threats that combined hostility, capability, and a vital area of the world. Rather, the US sought to compensate for Soviet strengths by working with other areas in which the US was stronger (economic power, appeal to allies, nuclear deterrence) and making stricter divisions between core and peripheral interests. Under symmetrical containment (NSC-68, flexible response, Reagan's early years), the US sought to meet Soviet strengths at all levels of conflict (nuclear weapons, conventional arms, unconventional warfare) and defined American interests very broadly under the basis of domino effect and credibility arguments. Gaddis seems to prefer asymmetrical containment, but he does a great job across the board in explaining how these different strategists saw the geopolity, US goals, US capabilities, and designed strategies.

Unlike many if not most historians, Gaddis has a great sense of the weight and responsibility of national leadership. He realizes that these actors were trying to balance a number of priorities and achieve the means-ends balance that is so crucial in good strategy. He is, in short, a fair and mostly impartial judge of historical actors. These points especially come through in his discussion of Reagan, whom most academics and policy makers considered a neanderthal of strategy. I have long been perturbed by Reagan's moral Manicheanism, or his willingness to tolerate the most horrible abuses by American allies or proxies while calling out other states for their crimes. Nevertheless, Gaddis shows that Reagan's defense buildup and intense rhetoric pushed the already crisis-ridden and declining USSR to abandon geopolitical competition and embrace both domestic reform and . Reagan didn't cause the Soviet reorientation of policy, but he pushed it along at just the right time, and then adjusted towards a policy of cooperation with Gorbachev. It's hard to deny that for all of his faults, Reagan's overall strategy worked very well in bringing about a victorious and peaceful conclusion to the Cold War. Gaddis adds that Reagan's crucial insight was that in his consideration of the expenditure of resources, he focused more on the Soviet system than the American one because he understood that the US could set such a high bar that the Soviets would break their system in trying to reach it or just give in without trying.

"Strategy" is one of the most overused words in our modern lexicon. People tend to throw it into sentences as a way of making them sound more focused or goal-oriented, but they would often have trouble clearly defining the word. Instead of reading an abstract text, I recommend that anyone interested in strategy check out Gaddis for an exploration of how historical actors in different contexts developed and deployed strategies. The historical lens is probably the most rewarding and nuanced way of approaching the defining and evaluation of strategies. This book is much more complicated than what I can get across in this review, but let me just end by saying that anyone who studies US foreign policy has to read it.