Reviews for The United States and the end of the cold war

The average rating for The United States and the end of the cold war based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-07-12 00:00:00 Josefina Barria During the 2017 UK general election the question of trident came up. The Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, gave some embarrassing interviews when he was asked simple questions about whether he would use nuclear weapons to defend the country, in a life or death situation, but he proved to be completely unable to give a straight answer and decided to say, in a rather garbled manner, that he thinks the use of nuclear weapons is immoral, that the concept of mutually assured destruction fuels tension and that there is no guarantee that he would not get rid of this weapon system in the defence review. While Corbyn’s response highlights his flaws, it was the response that came from the media and the Conservative Party that is more interesting: they responded by saying that the idea that one would want to get rid of nuclear weapons is idiotic and dangerous because the concept of Mutual Assured Destruction, which has the unfortunate – and, to some, quite telling – acronym MAD, has protected this country during the Cold War and is needed to protect us from the contemporary threat posed by Russia. Underlying this argument is the assumption – which is never challenged in public discourse – that nuclear weapons kept the Cold War “cold” and that they have a deterrent effect. But is this a valid assumption? As pointed out by John Lewis Gaddis, in one of his essays in “The United States and the End of the Cold War: Implications, Reconsiderations, Provocations”, the answer to this question is of the upmost importance; “For if it should turn out that nuclear weapons did prevent World War III, then we would have good reason to want to keep them around as insurance against the outbreak of future wars. But if nuclear weapons had nothing to do with preserving the peace – if Cold War history would have been much the same if they had never been developed – then we are wasting money and running unnecessary risks in continuing to build them. It is difficult to think of an area in which the judgement of historians could have greater importance for future policy”. In his 1989 book “Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War” – a book that Gaddis brings up and provides an excellent critique of – John Mueller argued that the long “peace” (i.e. the lack of major war) that we have experienced is due to the concept of war in “western” modern nations has gone the same way as duelling and slavery – it is regarded as an antiquated practice because it is ineffective, economically inefficient and leads to lots of human suffering – and this belief will and has spread to less developed nations. In support of his thesis, Muller points to the changing social evaluation of war. He notes that prior to World War One, only a minority of people challenged the concept of war, while after the war – especially after World War Two – anti-war agitation became more pronounced and it began to dominate societies. He also states that such an outlook also became dominate in more authoritarian societies; he notes that the Soviet Union had never held major war as a sensible tactic and that they should restrain from undertaking such an action. He explains why this commitment to avoiding major war with an analogy: to paraphrase, to jump from the top of the Tokyo Skytree will be more destructive than a jump from a 6th story apartment, but anybody that wants to live will avoid both. Mueller’s book did make for a good read but its argument is extremely flawed. In one of his essays in “The United States and the End of the Cold War” Gaddis provides one of the best and most original critiques that I have seen of Mueller’s work while, moreover, he assesses the problems that historians have when assessing the impact that these weapons have had upon state interactions and provides a well-thought-out argument that nuclear weapons were “‘relevant’ to the stability of the international system in much the same redundant way.” This essay (“The Essential Relevance of Nuclear Weapons”) is one out of eleven excellent essays. Two of the essays within this book provide a revisionist interpretation of the actions and beliefs of two important Cold War individuals, John Foster Dulles and Ronald Regan, and suggests that they actually had a much deeper understanding of, and had adopted more of a subtle approach to, foreign policy than what most accounts suggest. In addition to this, and this is one of the most valuable aspects of the book, is his discussion upon the differing objectives of containment. “Containing the Soviet Union, together with the ambitious ideology it created, has been the most durable foreign policy priority of the United States in the twentieth century. Each presidential administration since Woodrow Wilson’s has devoted itself in one way or another to this task”, notes Gaddis. While most students of Cold War history will find this revelation to be rather banal, Gaddis reminds us that containment was “never intended as an end in itself”: “[Containment] was supposed to lead to a new kind of relationship with the Soviet Union that would remove, or at least render irrelevant, the reasons for having embarked on that task in the first place.” Gaddis has identified five conceivable objectives for a strategy of containment: “(I) overthrowing the Soviet regime altogether; (2) confining Soviet influence within the boundaries of the U.S.S.R.; (3) competing selectively within a framework of overall coexistence; (4) cooperating generally within a framework of shared interests; and (5) producing a fundamental change in the Soviet Union’s internal structure.” Following from this, Gaddis compares these alternatives against the historical record and identifies “which of them were seriously pursued, by whom, for how long, and with what results.” The clarity of Gaddis’ conceptual thinking is amazing and makes this chapter a must read for anyone who wants to develop an advanced understanding of the Cold War and the strategies one can employ in international politics. If you have a good understanding of the Cold War this book is for you; if you are a general reader or just beginning your studies on the Cold War this book is not for you, because it focuses upon the finer details, and it would be better if you were to procure Richard Crockatt’s “The Fifty Years War” and/or Walter LaFeber’s “America, Russia and the Cold War”.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-12-04 00:00:00 James Hamilton 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.