The United States and the end of the cold war Book

A very useful set of essays about the Cold War by my favorite historian. Some of these I would consider assigning to an undergraduate course, particularly the one on "tectonic forces" in the Cold War. In this essay, Gaddis says that during the Cold War the tectonic forces of history shifted underneath the feet of the superpowers in 3 major ways. First was the emergence of broader criteria for evaluating great powers. The clear connection throughout history between economic strength and military power faded in this time period, in large part due to the nuclear weapons power paradox: the superpowers' gaining the ultimate weapons engendered greater caution in their foreign policies because of the risk of escalating from small conflicts into nuclear war. Second was the declining utility of brutality, both as a means of internal control and international politics. In a sense, he's talking about the greater role that morality played in regulating international affairs than in more amoral periods. Third was the collapse of alternatives to liberalism and capitalism, particularly as the Soviets found that a command economy could get you through industrialization but could not adapt to more advanced, information/technology based economics. Once this system sputtered and fell behind in every way, the ends no longer justified the means in communist societies and they collapsed from within. Together, these tectonic forces all worked in favor of the US, providing a deep structural explanation for the outcome of the Cold War.

There's another great essay on "the Long Peace" that explains how the Cold War itself may have become a structure in itself for international politics that had some moderating and restraining effects on the global system. His somewhat revisionist essays on Dulles and Reagan suggest that they had more subtle and flexible approaches to foreign policy than has long been suggested. Reagan, for instance, may not have grasped all the particulars of foreign policy issues, but he and his team created a central concept for foreign policy that was tremendously successful. Lastly, "The Objectives of Containment" was maybe the most useful essay I have read for my dissertation. It prompted me to write a 9 page concept paper because the clarity of conceptual thinking was so striking.

Graduate students of the Cold War would really benefit from this book because it has all kinds of suggestions about how to think about the Cold War or how to design good research questions. More general readers would probably get more out of his "The Cold War: A New History." I'll definitely raid this book from time to time for ideas for lectures and research. The book isn't perfect; as usual Gaddis is stronger on the great power relationship than on how the rest of the world fits in. For instance, his chapters on Dulles and Reagan didn't even discuss their destructive third world interventions, which seriously challenge their ability to separate core and peripheral interests and support the idea that they saw communism as monolithic. Still, I always find that Gaddis brings fresh ideas and clear conceptual thinking to topics I've read about over and over. He's a great writer, and he seems to lack many of the biases and the stiffness of most academics.