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I'm smarter than the level of discourse of this book, and I'm guessing you are too. It made me feel like taking my Yale degrees off the wall.To be fair, it seems that he wrote this book for first year undergraduates who need simple stories told to them, preferably without footnotes. I'm too young to remember nearly all of the events presented in the book and am not particularly fascinated by cold war topics, but, frankly, I found very little historical material that wasn't general knowledge in the book. If you want to read a comic book version of the cold war (complete with hyperbolized superhero characters) and are prepared to believe analytical points with the thinnest of evidence, then this book is for you. At one point, I was particularly annoyed with the writing of the book (how, exactly, does a supposed expert in the field who is trying to write a history justify the term 'Russian' in so many places where the term 'Soviet' is actually meant. I picked up "The Cold War: a New History" on my way to an airport and read it over several days and several flights.
The story of Cold War as presented is overall competent but unnuanced. However, to then foist this upon the general reading public as a 'history of the cold war' is disingenuous. As I tend to do, immediately after purchasing it I put a privacy cover over the book such that I couldn't myself see the title or the author's name or his biography or other stuff printed on the cover. How out of touch does one have to be to still be using the politically, linguistically, and historically incorrect term 'The Ukraine')., thinking to myself wondering when the hack would stoop to quoting Clausewitz, only to find him doing so on the next page.I was therefore shocked, shocked to later find that this was a book by a pre-eminent Yale historian. Otherwise, avoid. I figured it was more or less a standard historical potboiler and indeed to those expectations the book was marginally passable as something to pass the time.
The analysis presented is mundane and the writing at times is something that I'd expect from those historic but not particularly intellectual pocket books on tanks and battles.
The author asserts that the Cold War was a necessary conflict to settle fundamental issues that arose during the first half of the century.The root cause of the Cold War was the differing ideologies of communism and capitalism. Now resources had to shift from economic development to military security. He jettisoned detente and boldly stated the communism was failing and a transient phenomenon. John Lewis Gaddis does an excellent job providing a readable overview of a very complicated period in modern history. Communism's failure compared to Capitalism was clear (but previously unspoken) with the dramatic recovery of Western Europe's economy under the Marshall Plan, the stark contrast of Eastern Europe's continued plight, and Deng's successful market reforms. The US had been content to have a relatively smaller military with the advantage of the bomb. Gorbachev refused to use military might to support the failing ideals and allowed the Polish Solidarity movement and the dissolution of physical containment in Hungary and ultimately the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War itself.
The US completed its renunciation of its erstwhile isolationist tendencies with the ambitious Marshall Plan to assist in Europe's recovery and preclude its fall to communism. Other countries such as China, Egypt, Yugoslavia, and some African colonies took advantage of these reactionary strategies and and achieved successes leveraging the superpowers against each other.Ronald Reagan lead a troupe of pivotal actors including Pope John Paul II, Lech Walesa, Margaret Thatcher, Deng Xioping, and Mikhail Gorbachev propounding a radical vision that there could be an end to the Cold War. The results lead to the Korean and Vietnam Wars as well as the Soviet invasions of Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan. Stalin, the only battle tested world leader with the passing of FDR and Churchill's defeat, sought reparations for the disproportional losses faced by Russia during the war and wanted to extend his influence. Both sides followed relatively reactive strategies with the US seeking to contain Communism in its current boundaries and the Soviets seeking to support any potential revolutionaries.
This book is equally enlightening for those of us who grew up under the persistent threat of nuclear warfare and younger readers for whom the Cold War might as well have been the Peloponnesian War. After nuclear brinkmanship during the Cuban Missile conflict and the Offshore Islands crisis and further rhetoric, the concept of detente took hold leading to a stagnant and entrenched stalemate. The Soviets expeditious development of an atomic bomb was a radical paradigm shift. At the end of World War II, economically ruined Europe took center stage of the nascent conflict. He actively undermined the Marshall Plan by delaying the proceedings and escalated the contention with the formation of the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Blockade.
But for the rest, a solid read. Professor Gaddis gives his full support to the myth of "honest" Harry Truman, Truman the Good. When Ronald Reagan sent Stinger missiles to the Afghan rebels, I was very concerned that we might try something like that with them in order to stick it to the Soviets. But the reader will note that it sustains my predilection.2.He seems to think that the Cold War taught our leaders to lie in a way they had not done before. Item by item, the article authenticated that the former were consistently second rate and the latter first rate, firm grounding for the the Vietnamese's belief that the Soviet Union was concerned to assist them only enough to keep them and the Americans engaged, but not to win. Failing to find any evidence to that effect, I was consciously glib in my speculation that since no Communist regime had ever been permanently overthrown, the administration might not know how to calibrate the flow of Stingers for such an effect. foreign policy by the democratic socialist historian, William Appleman Williams and Walter LaFeber of Cornell. John Lewis Gaddis has written a comprehensive general history of the Cold War that fulfills his stated purpose of acquainting a post-Cold War generation with the history of that era.
Sheer glibness, I knew and I had to accept the administration's innocence.Though refusing to be ruled by my predilection, I retained it. I specifically remember that sometime between 1993-1996, network news hastily reported for one night only that President Clinton had agreed to accede to a Freedom of Information Act request by authorizing the release of documents proving that President Truman okayed experiments exposing American citizens, specifically pregnant women, to nuclear radiation without their knowledge and consent. A more respectful difference I have with Professor Gaddis stems from my adherence to the Leninist theory of capitalist imperialism as applied to U.S. In this regard, this fine historian allowed himself to be outclassed by the old X-Files series' very rare Ivy League best.3. Then after 9/11, I found out about the interview in the domestic edition of Le Nouvel Observateur for the second week of January, 1998 with Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's foreign policy adviser (see Brzezinski / Afghanistan / Le Nouvel Observateur). It also allows the longtime history buff a comprehensive perspective with which to assess his own conclusions to date. For my part, I have few differences to register. Kennan's 1948 memorandum on the internet).
Not a small point when we recall that he led a progressive political party in the fight against fascists whose atrocities included fiendish medical experiments on Jews, Chinese and Koreans. Not surprisingly the network newscast did not identify, much less interview the party making the request but it must have been Eileen Welsome who would win a Pulitzer Prize for her book on the subject, THE PLUTONIUM FILES. Professor Gaddis sees the invasion as Soviet retaliation for checks suffered in Europe, as I recall. No mention of them.
presidents, key senators and recognized architects of our foreign policy -- and natural resources (See the Asian section in George F. Powerful. We've been in the eastern Pacific Ocean for about a century-and-a-half and we've always found some reason to be there, all of which boil down to markets -- the need for them acknowledged in public statements (ALL of them vintage Leninism) by a virtually unbroken succession of U.S. Let me mention three of them:1) In the early 70s, when the Christian Science Monitor was a major newspaper, I found an article detailing the quality of the arms being sent by the Russians to the North Vietnamese in contrast to those being sent to the Egyptians under Anwar Sadat.
This in turn suggests a deeper and broader perspective that Professor Gaddis might have brought to the work, particularly as he entered his conclusion: the Cold War's belligerents were part of the larger horror of sinister tendancies paralleled THROUGHOUT the fabric of secretive, bureaucratic technological society no doubt EVERYWHERE. No indication that he is even aware of the Brzezinski interview. My predilections run that way. He said that contrary to CW, our aid to anti-Communist rebels began six months BEFORE the Soviet invasion and was given in the hope of luring them into Afghanistan as a Vietnam quagmire of their own.
Gaddis's best achievement with this book is that it allows the reader to integrate personal memories of the events described in order to see how they fit into the larger context of the movement of history of the era. Perhaps Mr. John Gaddis has written an excellent and accessible history of the Cold War. His descriptions and comments about the Cold War through the mid-1960s were thoroughly enjoyable, though I have to agree with the Washington Post Review that his description of the latter period of the Cold War felt too abreviated - a necessary restriction for such a condensed work.Many people have experienced some or all of the events described in this book.
It is a simplified retelling from a decidedly American perspective of a period of time in history where the world hung by a nuclear thread. America has a long history of immoral and violent acts including the stealing of the land from the native people and their virtual imprisonment in desolate areas (read Dee Brown's book, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee for the truth here), the enslavement of an entire race of people which was ended only by a violent Civil War, the wars of aggression against Mexico and Spain, etc. But this book is not a college text despite the plethora of references. In fact with chapter five (The Recovery of Equity) he implies that America was a moral country that just temporarily went wrong (for good reason) and then after Nixon recovered its moral compass. John Lewis Gaddis presents an establishment view of The Cold War in this abbreviated book.
At the beginning Lenin seemed to be winning, Gaddis states, but in the end Wilsonian principles prevailed. He also claims that the Cold War can be symbolized by the ideological differences between Wilson and Lenin. This, of course, is nonsense. There is ample evidence at this time that the Japanese had largely agreed to the eventual surrender terms prior to this heinous act. The viewpoint is clearly American and thus this work lacks the objectivity that would be provided by a more neutral observer. He also whitewashes President Truman for his decision to drop atomic bombs on two Japanese cities. It does provide a few insights and some esoteric information, but there are no startling revelations. Gaddis fails to understand that history is a continuum and by focusing on one short period of American history he fails to portray the country in an accurate light.
Gaddis states that he wrote the book because his students at Yale were beginning to see this period as ancient history. For a more critical (and accurate) view of American history read A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn. We have only to look at the rise of China and the current financial crisis in the democratic west to see how wrong this perspective is.In sum, for most people reading this book will be a waste of time for anyone but the most ignorant, pro-America readers. For those of us who were alive during this period the book is mostly old hat. Gaddis largely glosses over the immoral acts committed by the American side.
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