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  • Cited by 3
  • Volume 4: Challenges to American Primacy, 1945 to the Present
  • Warren I. Cohen, University of Maryland, Baltimore
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
June 2013
Print publication year:
2013
Online ISBN:
9781139032513

Book description

Since their first publication, the four volumes of the Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations have served as the definitive source for the topic, from the colonial period to the Cold War. The fourth volume of the updated edition explores the conditions in the international system at the end of World War II, the American determination to provide leadership, and the security dilemma each superpower posed for the other. This revised and expanded edition incorporates recent scholarship and revelations, carrying the narrative through the years following the end of the Cold War into the administration of Barack Obama. The character of the American political system is explored, including the separation of political powers and the role of interest groups that prompted American leaders to exaggerate dangers abroad to enhance their domestic power. This new edition examines the conditions in the international system from the end of World War II to the present, focusing on the American determination to provide world leadership.

Reviews

‘Warren I. Cohen qualifies as the dean of America’s diplomatic historians. In this brilliant new volume, he brings to bear all his experience, perspective, and extraordinary insight to describe America’s struggles for primacy in the world over the past seven decades. This book is a remarkable achievement.’

James Mann - The Johns Hopkins University

‘Few historians can match Warren I. Cohen’s masterful ability to synthesize and analyze the complex trajectory of American international history. In this revised and updated history of American foreign relations since 1945, he deftly shows how U.S. policy makers dealt with an array of challenges from Stalin to bin Laden. We see how vision and ambition intersected with threat perception and domestic politics to shape America’s role in the international arena. This is a terrific book to consider for our classes.’

Melvyn Leffler - University of Virginia

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Contents

  • 6 - America’s Longest War
    pp 141-173
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The late 1940s marked the origin of what the journalist and political philosopher Walter Lippmann called, in 1947, the Cold War, denoting the emerging confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. The term remained in use as a shorthand description of Soviet-American relations and an explanation of most of American foreign policy until 1989 or 1990. World War II ended in the summer of 1945, and the Korean War began in the summer of 1950. The United States and the Soviet Union spent much of the intervening five years defining their postwar relationship. Each nation pursued its vision of world order, exploring the possibilities of cooperation in achieving its goals, and testing the limits of the other's tolerance in pursuit of unshared goals. Each exploited the extraordinary opportunity to extend its influence in the vacuum created by the defeat of Germany and Japan and the decline of British power.
  • 7 - The Rise and Fall of Détente
    pp 174-208
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Franklin D. Roosevelt and his colleagues expected the United States to emerge from the postwar as the greatest power on earth. And after this war, unlike the aftermath of World War I, they were determined to assert American leadership. The apotheosis of the American-vision emerged from the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944. The principal goal at Bretton Woods was the creation of mechanisms for assuring stable-exchange rates. Indeed, Chiang Kai-shek, the Chinese-leader, to the irritation of the Americans, had posted half a million of his best-equipped forces as a barrier to Communist-expansion rather than risk those assets against the Japanese. Roosevelt died and Harry S. Truman became the thirty-third president of the United States. In 1945, Truman went to Potsdam where, amid the ruins of Hitler's Reich, he met with Churchill and Stalin in the last major conference of the war. Truman set sail for home, ordered atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and World War II was over.
  • 8 - In God’s Country
    pp 209-234
  • View abstract

    Summary

    In China, civil war loomed and the task of regaining even the marginal living-standards of the prewar era was gravely threatened. The newly empowered military establishment wanted funds to preserve the massive-forces the United States had assembled in the course of the war, forces that could now be used to deter would-be aggressors. A number of American-officials had begun thinking of the Soviet Union as the next enemy well before the end of the war. By the end of 1948, the United States and the Soviet Union were obviously no longer allies or friends. Walter Lippmann's term, Cold War, seemed apt. Both nations had ended their processes of demobilization and had begun military preparedness programs. The Communist-conquest of China, the Alger Hiss case, and the Soviet nuclear explosion fed disparate but overlapping forces in the United States.
  • 9 - America and the World, 1945–1991
    pp 235-250
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Stalin's Korean protégés, were determined to fight, to unite Korea by force. He tried to keep Korean Communist forces on a tight rein and supplied primarily with defensive weapons. All of Truman's advisers saw the events in Korea as a test of American will to resist Soviet attempts to expand their power, and their system. In Beijing, Mao and his advisers were terribly apprehensive about American intentions. The United States ordered warships to the Taiwan Strait to prevent Mao's forces from invading Taiwan and mopping up the remnants of Chiang Kai-shek's army there. Throughout the Korean War, the Soviet Union gave diplomatic support to its Korean and Chinese allies. The Korean War ended in 1953, shortly after the death of Stalin. The Korean War was a momentous turning point in the Cold War. An almost inevitable civil war among a people, Communist and non-Communist, determined to unite their country, became an international war and a catalyst for a terrifying arms-race.
  • 10 - The New World Order
    pp 253-301
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Concerns over Berlin and Cuba led American forces to confront Soviet forces in situations in which a misstep, a rash action by an aggressive or nervous officer, might have led to war. Nikita Khrushchev provoked each of these crises. The Berlin crisis he created in 1958 provides a useful example of how he functioned. The revival of German power in the late 1950s, and evidence of growing German influence within the Western alliance, worried Soviet analysts. By the spring of 1960, the American government knew unequivocally, from intelligence gathered by U-2 over-flights of the Soviet Union, that Khrushchev's claims of missile superiority were unwarranted. The Cuban Communist party was legalized and its members began to play a role, although relatively minor, in the implementation of Fidel Castro's programs. Air raids by CIA-operated bombers had failed to eliminate the tiny Cuban air force but had prompted a Cuban military alert and protest to the United Nations.
  • 11 - The “War” Against Terrorism
    pp 302-342
  • View abstract

    Summary

    America's war in Vietnam is the textbook example of great-power arrogance and self-deception, of the abuse and dissipation of wealth and power. American leaders discovered Indochina early in World War II, when the Japanese intruded on the French empire. Indochina became enormously important to the Dwight Eisenhower administration primarily because it was perceived in 1954 as the site of the next round in the battle with the Sino-Soviet split. John F. Kennedy's first emergency in Indochina came in Laos, where Eisenhower's attempts to create a pro-Western, anti-Communist regime had proven counterproductive. M. Nixon, Republican presidential candidate, had persuaded the South Vietnamese to reject any peace terms the Lyndon Johnson administration might be prepared to accept. The American military had long advocated a strike at Vietnamese sanctuaries in Cambodia, including what they believed to be the headquarters for the Communist insurgency in the South. Fifty-five thousand Americans and millions of Vietnamese died in the American phase of the Vietnamese revolution.
  • Bibliographic Essay
    pp 343-356
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, like all postwar American leaders, sought a stable world order in which American interests would be preserved. They wanted to end the asymmetry between Washington and Moscow, to be free to act as quickly and ruthlessly in pursuit of American interests as they imagined the Soviet Politburo acted. From the Kremlin, Leonid Brezhnev and his colleagues looked at the United States with growing disdain. The Soviets were troubled by the Nixon administration's effort to obtain funding for deployment of an anti-ballistic missile system. Perhaps the most serious problem the United States faced in the 1970s was posed by the decline in its economic power, especially as aggravated by the policies of the Johnson and Nixon administrations. The Soviets pressed hard for détente with Western Europe. Under the leadership of Ronald Reagan, the American people were prepared to mortgage the future of their children in a renewed effort to win the Cold War.

Bibliographic Essay

Perhaps the most important point to be apprehended by the student of the history of international relations in the Cold War era is that the documentary record remains incomplete, that American and British archival material is being released thirty years after the events at best. Moreover, there is evidence indicating that the integrity of the American record has been compromised. Other materials – Chinese and Soviet, for example – are being released very selectively, often to privileged nationals. Little was seen by Western scholars before the mid-1980s – and not much more has been seen since. For up-to-date information about the availability of documents, see the websites of the Cold War International History Project and the National Security Archives, two national treasures.

A second point worth noting is that enormously important work, much of it theoretical, has been done by political scientists and political economists. In particular the work of Robert Gilpin, Robert Jervis, Peter J. Katzenstein, Robert O. Keohane, Stephen D. Krasner, and Jack Snyder provides valuable guides to an understanding of what happened and why – and what is likely to happen tomorrow. See, for example, Gilpin, The Political Economy of International Relations (Princeton, 1987); Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton, 1976); Katzenstein, ed., Between Power and Plenty (Madison, 1978); Keohane, After Hegemony (Princeton, 1984); Krasner, ed., International Regimes (Ithaca, 1983); and Snyder, Myths of Empire (Ithaca, 1991).

The standard survey of American foreign policy since 1945 is Walter LaFeber, America, Russia and the Cold War, the tenth edition of which was published in 2008. Of enormous value are the essays collected by Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad for their three-volume Cambridge History of the Cold War (Cambridge, 2009). The Journal of Cold War Studies provides new revelations in every issue. And Diplomatic History always has a new and often important contribution to some episode from the American involvement in world affairs after 1945.

1. At War’s End: Visions of a New World Order

Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945 (New York, 1979), remains the most useful introduction to FDR’s thoughts on world affairs. The quest for a liberal international economic order can be followed from the 1920s through the 1940s in Michael J. Hogan, The Marshall Plan (Cambridge, 1990). Richard N. Gardner, Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy, expanded edition (New York, 1969), and Alfred E. Eckes, A Search for Solvency (Austin, Tex., 1975), are important to an understanding of the Bretton Woods agreements. The British perspective is most accessible in the relevant chapters of Roy F. Harrod, The Life of John Maynard Keynes (New York, 1951). Gabriel Kolko, Politics of War (New York, 1968), offers the least flattering evaluation of American ends leading up to Bretton Woods.

John Lewis Gaddis’s classic United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1947 (New York, 1972), captures Roosevelt’s sinuous path toward the goal of maintaining the Grand Alliance after the war. Herbert Feis, The China Tangle (Princeton, 1953), is still the best introduction to American problems with wartime China. See also Michael Schaller, The U.S. Crusade in China, 1938–1945 (New York, 1979). The most balanced account of Chiang Kai-shek’s wartime diplomacy is John W. Garver, Chinese-Soviet Relations, 1937–1945 (New York, 1988). Two very different efforts to read Stalin’s mind are William O. McCagg, Jr., Stalin Embattled, 1943–1945 (Detroit, 1978), and William Taubman, Stalin’s American Policy (New York, 1982). Gar Alperovitz, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam, expanded and updated edition (New York, 1985), is the best-known indictment of Truman’s use of the atomic bomb against Japan, but see J. Samuel Walker, “The Decision to Use the Bomb: An Historiographical Update,” Diplomatic History 14 (1990): 97–114. Roosevelt’s decisions on whom to share the bomb’s secrets with and whom to withhold them from can be followed in Martin J. Sherwin, A World Destroyed (New York, 1975). Two excellent volumes on the subsequent importance of nuclear weapons are Gregg Herken, The Winning Weapon (New York, 1980), and Robert Jervis, The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution (Ithaca, 1989).

2. Origins of the Cold War

The American domestic context is portrayed vividly in Eric Goldman, The Crucial Decade – and After, 1945–1960 (New York, 1960), and with more concern for women and minorities in William Chafe, The Unfinished Journey (New York, 1986). H. Bradford Westerfield, Foreign Policy and Party Politics (New Haven, 1955), remains the best account of how partisan politics contributed to the shaping of the Soviet-American relationship. The single most important study of Truman’s foreign policy is Melvyn Leffler’s magisterial A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford, 1992). Deborah Welch Larson, Origins of Containment (Princeton, 1985), provides a fascinating psychological study of how the policy toward the Soviet Union developed. Foreign economic policy is traced by Robert A. Pollard in Economic Security and the Origins of the Cold War, 1945–1950 (New York, 1985). Richard M. Freeland argues persuasively the relationship between The Truman Doctrine and the Origins of McCarthyism (New York, 1972). Joyce and Gabriel Kolko offer a densely written but otherwise engaging Marxist analysis in their Limits of Power (New York, 1972). Joseph M. Jones, The Fifteen Weeks (New York, 1955), is the standard work on the evolution of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan by a participant.

The Wise Men (New York, 1986), by Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, is a highly readable examination of the thought and interactions of six major policymakers, but Dean Acheson’s own Present at the Creation (New York, 1969) is still essential. There are too many books about George Kennan, whose own elegant writing and occasional profundities have led historians to exaggerate his importance. See, for example, Walter L. Hixson, George F. Kennan: Cold War Iconoclast (New York, 1989), and Anders Stephanson, Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy (Cambridge, Mass., 1989). The most recent is John Lewis Gaddis’ monumental George F. Kennan: An American Life (New York, 2012).

Lawrence Kaplan’s NATO and the United States (Boston, 1988) is particularly helpful on the origins of NATO. European perceptions and activities are best explored with Geir Lundestad, “Empire by Invitation? The United States and Western Europe, 1945–1952,” Journal of Peace Research 23 (1986): 263–77. See also Alan S. Milward, The Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1945–1951 (Berkeley, 1984), and Anton W. dePorte, Europe Between the Superpowers, 2d ed. (New Haven, 1986). Wolfram F. Hanrieder, Germany, America, Europe: Forty Years of German Foreign Policy (New Haven, 1989), offers a wealth of information and insights for the entire postwar period. Marshall D. Shulman, Stalin’s Foreign Policy Reappraised (New York, 1966), suggests Stalin was seeking to retreat from confrontation on the eve of the Korean War. Valuable insights into policies of the Soviet leader can be found in Vladislav Zubock and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), and Zubock’s A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (Chapel Hill, 2007).

Marc S. Gallicchio, The Cold War Begins in Asia (New York, 1988), looks at American fears of Soviet influence in East Asia in 1945. See also his The Scramble for Asia: U.S. Military Power in the Aftermath of the Pacific War (Lanham, Md., 2008), which portrays the aspirations of some American leaders. Steven I. Levine, Anvil of Victory (New York, 1987), explains the American response to Communist successes in Manchuria in 1946. The major works on relations with China are Dorothy Borg and Waldo Heinrichs, Uncertain Years: Chinese-American Relations, 1947–1950 (New York, 1980), and Nancy B. Tucker, Patterns in the Dust (New York, 1983). See also Robert J. McMahon, “The Cold War in Asia: Toward a New Synthesis,” Diplomatic History 12 (1988): 307–27, for a superb overview, especially of work at variance with the prevailing Tucker-Cohen thesis. For Japan, see Michael Schaller’s The American Occupation of Japan (New York, 1985), John Dower’s Empire and Aftermath (Cambridge, 1979), Embracing Defeat (New York, 1999), and Carol Gluck’s discussion of the issues and literature, “Entangling Illusions – Japanese and American Views of the Occupation,” in Warren I. Cohen, ed., New Frontiers in American–East Asian Relations (New York, 1983), 169–236. The early American involvement in Southeast Asia is most accessible in Gary Hess, The United States’ Emergence as a Southeast Asian Power, 1940–1950(New York, 1987). See also Robert J. McMahon, Colonialism and the Cold War: The United States and the Struggle for Indonesian Independence, 1945–1949 (Ithaca, 1981), on Indonesia.

3. The Korean War and Its Consequences

Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1981, 1990), is essential reading for the serious student of the war. James Matray, The Reluctant Crusade (Honolulu, 1985), and Burton I. Kaufman, The Korean War (New York, 1986), are more accessible. William Stueck, The Korean War: An International History (Princeton, 1995), is the broadest, most inclusive study to date. Rosemary Foot, The Wrong War (Ithaca, 1985), and A Substitute for Victory (Ithaca, 1990), are major contributions to understanding American strategy during the war and in the peace negotiations. Allen S. Whiting’s classic China Crosses the Yalu (Stanford, 1960) should be supplemented by Zhang Shuguang, Deterrence and Strategic Culture (Ithaca, 1993), which relies heavily on recently released cables exchanged between Mao and Stalin. Sergei N. Goncharev, John W. Lewis, and Xue Litai, Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao, and the Korean War (Stanford, 1993), Chen Jian, China’s Road to the Korean War: The Making of the Sino-American Confrontation (New York, 1994), and Zubock’s Failed Empire provide essential insights into Soviet and Chinese decision making.

Three important articles are Okonogi Masao, “The Domestic Roots of the Korean War,” in Akira Iriye and Nagai Yonosuke, eds., The Origins of the Cold War in Asia (New York, 1977), 299–320; James I. Matray, “Truman’s Plan for Victory: National Self-Determination and the Thirty-Eighth Parallel Decision in Korea,” Journal of American History 66 (1979): 314–33; and Robert Jervis, “The Impact of the Korean War,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 24 (1980): 563–92.

4. New Leaders and New Arenas in the Cold War

Eisenhower “revisionism” was a growth industry for historians in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as archival material for the 1950s was declassified. Richard A. Melanson and David Mayers, eds., Reevaluating Eisenhower (Urbana, Ill., 1987), is a convenient place to start. Ronald W. Preussen, John Foster Dulles (New York, 1982), is the best of the current biographies. Richard H. Immerman, ed., John Foster Dulles and the Diplomacy of the Cold War (Princeton, 1990), contains a number of superb essays. Immerman’s own book, The CIA in Guatemala (Austin, Tex., 1982), is a very good account of how Eisenhower got things done, as is Fred I. Greenstein, The Hidden-Hand Presidency (New York, 1982). Burton I. Kaufman, Trade and Aid: Eisenhower’s Foreign Economic Policy (Baltimore, 1982), delivers what it promises. Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War (Cambridge, 2005), demonstrates how the Soviet-American confrontation spread to the Third World.

Warren I. Cohen and Akira Iriye, eds., The Great Powers in East Asia, 1953–1960 (New York, 1990), includes the perspectives of British, Chinese, Japanese, and Soviet, as well as American, scholars. The Chinese essays are especially interesting. Simei Qing, From Allies to Enemies: Visions of Modernity, Identity, and U.S.-China Relations, 1945–1960 (Cambridge, Mass., 2007), is an important guide to understanding both American and Chinese policies in that era. Akira Iriye and Warren I. Cohen, eds., The United States and Japan in the Postwar World (Lexington, Ky., 1989), has substantial material on the 1950s, from Japanese and American scholars, economists, and political scientists as well as historians. Nancy Bernkopf Tucker’s The China Threat (New York, 2012) offers the final word on American policy toward China in the Eisenower years.

Robert J. McMahon is thoughtful as always in “Eisenhower and Third World Nationalism: A Critique of the Revisionists,” Political Science Quarterly 101 (1986): 453–73. On the Eisenhower administration and Castro, see Richard E. Welch, Jr., The Response to Revolution: The United States and the Cuban Revolution, 1959–1961 (Chapel Hill, 1985). Stephen Rabe, Eisenhower and Latin America (Chapel Hill, 1988), is cast more broadly. Diane Kunz, The Economic Diplomacy of the Suez Crisis (Chapel Hill, 1991), provides a fresh approach to a battered subject. The single most important volume on the Suez crisis is W. Roger Louis and Roger Owen, eds., Suez 1956 (New York, 1989). John C. Campbell, Defense of the Middle East (New York, 1960), is still useful for understanding the designs of the Eisenhower administration in the region, but Peter L. Hahn’s The United States, Great, Britain, & Egypt, 1945–1956 (Chapel Hill, 1991) and Caught in the Middle East (Chapel Hill, 2004) mine more recently available sources. Howard Palfrey Jones, Eisenhower’s ambassador to Indonesia, relates the pathetic tale of being undermined by Washington and especially the CIA in his efforts to woo Sukarno in Indonesia: The Possible Dream (New York, 1971). George M. Kahin, Intervention (New York, 1986), is excellent on Indochina.

Useful works on the Soviet side include Adam Ulam, Expansion and Coexistence (New York, 1974), William Zimmerman, Soviet Perspectives on International Relations, 1956–1967 (Princeton, 1969), and Bruce D. Porter, The USSR in Third World Conflicts (Cambridge, 1984), as well as Zubock’s Failed Empire, cited earlier. William Taubman’s Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York, 2003) is essential reading.

5. Crisis Resolution

Thomas Paterson, ed., Kennedy’s Quest for Victory (New York, 1989), is the best place to start the study of the early 1960s. Warren I. Cohen, Dean Rusk (Totowa, N.J., 1980), is more revealing than Rusk’s own story, As I Saw It (New York, 1990). See Gordon Chang, Friends and Enemies (Stanford, 1990), for some especially provocative suggestions on Kennedy’s policy toward China.

The Berlin crisis has not received as much recent attention as has the Cuban missile crisis. It can be studied in Philip Windsor, City on Leave (London, 1963); Jean Edward Smith, The Defense of Berlin (Baltimore, 1963); Robert M. Slusser, The Berlin Crisis of 1961 (Baltimore, 1973); and Jack M. Shick, The Berlin Crisis, 1958–62 (Philadelphia, 1972). See also the relevant portions of Alexander L. George and Richard Smoke, Deterrence in American Foreign Policy (New York, 1974), and Wolfram F. Hanrieder, Germany, America, Europe: Forty Years of German Foreign Policy (New Haven, 1989).

The history of the missile crisis has benefited enormously from a series of conferences involving American, Cuban, and Soviet participants. It is apparent the world was even closer to nuclear war than we had imagined previously. See James G. Blight and David A. Welch, On the Brink (New York, 1989), and Raymond L. Garthoff, Reflections on the Cuban Missile Crisis, rev. ed. (Washington, D.C., 1989). See also Leycester Coltman, The Real Fidel Castro (New Haven, 2003).

6. America’s Longest War

An unusually wide range of documentation has been available on the war in Vietnam since the Pentagon Papers were first published in 1971. The U.S. Department of State Historical Office subsequently accelerated publication of the relevant volumes of the Foreign Relations series.

George Herring, America’s Longest War, 4th ed. (New York, 2002), remains the single most valuable book on the war in Vietnam. Frederik Logevall, Choosing War (Berkeley, 1999), is a superb study of the decisions that led to America’s massive intervention. In On Strategy (Carlisle Barracks, Pa., 1981), Harry Summers explains how the war could have been won. Other books of interest include Gabriel Kolko’s dense Anatomy of a War (New York, 1985) and Timothy J. Lomperis’s The War Everyone Lost – and Won (Baton Rouge, 1984). Marilyn B. Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1945–1990 (New York, 1991), is a powerful statement by a leading historian and antiwar activist. Lomperis, Reading the Wind (Durham, N.C., 1987), is a valuable analysis of the fictional and memoir literature. See also Katherine Kinney, Friendly Fire: American Images of the Vietnam War (Oxford, 2000). Ilya V. Gaiduk, Confronting Vietnam (Washington, D.C., 2003), reveals the Soviet role from 1954 to 1963, and Qiang Zhai, China and the Vietnam Wars, 1950–1975 (Chapel Hill, 2000) provides important insights into Beijing’s efforts.

7. The Rise and Fall of Détente

The single most valuable book for the Nixon, Ford, and Carter years is Raymond L. Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation (Washington, D.C., 1985). Although ruthless editing might have produced a better book at half the length, it is a gold mine of information provided by a thoughtful midlevel participant. Henry Kissinger’s two-volume memoir, The White House Years (Boston, 1979) and Years of Upheaval (Boston, 1982), is self-serving but nonetheless essential reading. Walter Isaacson, Kissinger (New York, 1992), provides a reasonable corrective. William Hyland, Mortal Rivals: Superpower Relations from Nixon to Reagan (New York, 1987), is a useful study by another midlevel participant.

The complex character of Richard M. Nixon is deciphered only in Garry Wills, Nixon Agonistes (Boston, 1970). Good critical accounts of the Nixon-Kissinger years are provided by the journalists Tad Szulc, The Illusion of Peace (New York, 1979), and Seymour Hersh, The Price of Power (New York, 1983), the latter probably a trifle severe for the taste of most readers.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, Power and Principle (New York, 1983), is informative, especially of the author’s efforts as national security adviser to usurp power once reserved for the secretary of state. For ego, the memoir rivals Kissinger’s – but lacks the self-deprecating wit that was always Henry’s charm. Instead of Carter’s memoir, look to Gaddis Smith, Morality, Reason and Power (New York, 1986), for an understanding of Carter’s foreign policy efforts. Cyrus Vance tells his own story in Hard Choices (New York, 1983).

Given the limited documentation available, Soviet-American relations are covered surprisingly well. Robert S. Litwak, Détente and the Nixon Doctrine (Cambridge, 1984), neatly indicates the contrasting expectations each side had of détente. Joseph S. Nye, Jr., The Making of America’s Soviet Policy (New Haven, 1984), contains several useful essays. Harry Gelman, The Brezhnev Politburo and the Decline of Détente (Ithaca, 1984), is vintage Kremlinology. The Soviet thrust in the Third World characteristic of the late 1970s is analyzed nicely in Rajan Menon, Soviet Power and the Third World (New Haven, 1986), and Jerry Hough, The Struggle for the Third World (Washington, D.C., 1986). David Holloway, The Soviet Union and the Arms Race, 2d ed. (New Haven, 1984), focuses on the other critical issue in Soviet-American relations in the 1970s. Melvyn P. Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War (New York, 2007), and Zubock, Failed Empire, are especially good on the Brezhnev years.

For Sino-American relations, see Harry Harding, A Fragile Relationship: The United States and China Since 1972 (Washington, D.C., 1992). John W. Garver, China’s Decision for Rapprochement with the United States, 1968–1971 (Boulder, Colo., 1982), is interesting and suggestive. Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, Strait Talk: United States-Taiwan Relations and the Crisis with China (Cambridge, Mass., 2009), provides the definitive analysis of the Taiwan issue. See also Michel Oksenberg, “A Decade of Sino-American Relations,” Foreign Affairs 61 (1982): 175–95. The Chinese perspective is offered in David Shambaugh’s fascinating analysis of the views of China’s foreign policy elite, Beautiful Imperialist (Princeton, 1991). See also Chen Jian’s Mao’s China and the Cold War (Chapel Hill, 2001). William B. Quandt, Decade of Decisions: American Policy Toward the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1967–1976 (Berkeley, 1977), and Gary Sick, All Fall Down (New York, 1985), are excellent on Arab-Israeli relations and the collapse of the American position in Iran, respectively. On Iran, see also James A. Bill, The Eagle and the Lion (New Haven, 1988). Oksenberg, Quandt, and Sick all served on the National Security Council. For economic issues, especially the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, Joanne Gowa, Closing the Gold Window: Domestic Politics and the End of Bretton Woods (Ithaca, 1983), and Robert Gilpin, The Political Economy of International Relations (Princeton, 1987), are most helpful.

8. In God’s Country

The journalist Lou Cannon has been studying Ronald Reagan for a very long time, and his President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (New York, 1991) is the most knowledgeable and the best-balanced biography. Another journalist-cum-historian, Don Oberdorfer, has written a valuable portrait of Reagan’s metamorphosis from apocalyptic horseman to Gorbachev’s partner in the quest for peace. See his The Turn: From Cold War to the New Era: The United States and the Soviet Union, 1983–1990 (New York, 1991), based heavily on interviews with George Shultz. Shultz’s own memoir, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State (New York, 1993), is also useful. Leffler’s For the Soul of Mankind and James Mann’s The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan (New York, 2009) are superb on Reagan’s transformation. See also Michael Mandelbaum and Strobe Talbott, Reagan and Gorbachev (New York, 1987), and Talbott, Deadly Gambits (New York, 1984). A very thoughtful, accessible overview of the Reagan years is Robert W. Tucker, “Reagan’s Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs 68 (1989): 1–27.

The role of the Bush administration in ending the Cold War is most accessible in James A. Baker III, The Politics of Diplomacy (New York, 1995), and George Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (New York, 1998).

The Soviet side of the 1980s is approached most easily through Seweryn Bialer, Politics, Society, and Nationality Inside Gorbachev’s Russia (Boulder, Colo., 1989), and Seweryn Bialer and Michael Mandelbaum, Gorbachev’s Russia and American Foreign Policy (Boulder, Colo., 1988). See especially articles by Robert Legvold and Bialer. The articles in Marshall D. Shulman, ed., East-West Tensions in the Third World (New York, 1986), are also helpful; see the essays by Elizabeth K. Valkenier, Donald S. Zagoria, and Frances Fukuyama in particular. Jack F. Matlock, Autopsy of an Empire: The American Ambassador’s Account of the Collapse of the Soviet Union (New York, 1995), delivers on the promise of its title. Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor (Oxford, 1997), is elegantly written, insightful, and accessible.

The historical context for American policy toward Central America is provided by Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions (1984). For a more contemporary focus see Nora Hamilton et al., Crisis in Central America (Boulder, Colo., 1988); Mary B. Vanderlaan, Revolution and Foreign Policy in Nicaragua (Boulder, Colo., 1986); Robert A. Pastor, Condemned to Repetition (Princeton, 1987); and Tommie Sue Montgomery, Revolution in El Salvador, 2d ed. (Boulder, Colo., 1990).

9. America and the World, 1945–1991

In addition to works already mentioned, see Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York, 1987); David P. Calleo, The Imperious Economy (Cambridge, Mass., 1982); Richard Rosecrance, The Rise of the Trading State (New York, 1986); and John Lewis Gaddis, The Long Peace (Oxford, 1987).

10. The New World Order

Baker’s Politics of Diplomacy and Bush-Scowcroft, World Transformed, are useful introductions to the Bush administration’s activities beyond its dealings with Moscow. Lawrence Freeman and Ephraim Karsh, The Gulf Conflict, 1990–91: Diplomacy and War in the New World Order (Princeton, 1993), and the relevant chapters in Gary R. Hess, Presidential Decisions for War (Baltimore, 2001), are excellent on the Gulf War. For a brief discussion of Bush’s mishandling of the Tiananmen massacre, see Warren I. Cohen, America’s Response to China, 5th ed. (New York, 2010), and the oral histories of James Lilley and Winston Lord in Nancy Bernkopf Tucker’s China Confidential (New York, 2000). On the search for a new role for the United States in the post–Cold War world, see the relevant chapter in Warren I. Cohen, America’s Failing Empire (Oxford, 2005), and Ronald Steel, Temptations of a Superpower (Cambridge, Mass., 1995).

Warren Christopher’s Chances of a Lifetime (New York, 2001) indicates his priorities as Clinton’s secretary of state, 1993–6. Thomas Lipman, Madeleine Albright and the New American Diplomacy (Boulder, Colo., 2000), is best on her service as ambassador to the UN during Clinton’s first term. Michael Dobbs, Madeleine Albright: A Twentieth Century Odyssey (New York, 1999), captures the woman and her life story. William Hyland, Clinton’s World: Remaking American Foreign Policy (Westport, Conn., 1999), is an unflattering analysis. Derek Chollet and James Goldgeier, America Between the Wars: From 11/9 to 9/11 (New York, 2008), is the best book to date on the policies of the Clinton era. The Russian side of those years can be found in three excellent studies: Michael Mandelbaum, ed., The New Russian Foreign Policy (New York, 1998), Lilia Shevtsova, Yeltsin’s Russia: Myths and Realities (Washington, D.C., 1999), and Archie Brown and Lilia Shevtsova, eds., Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Putin: Political Leadership in Russia’s Transition (Washington, D.C., 2001). For relations with China, see David M. Lampton, Same Bed, Different Dreams (Berkeley, 2001), and Robert Suettinger, Beyond Tiananmen: The Politics of U.S. Chinese Relations, 1989–2000 (Washington, D.C., 2003). For Japan, Michael Armacost, Friends or Rivals: The Insider’s Account of U.S. Japan Relations (New York, 1996), remains useful. Samantha Power, “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide (New York, 2002), has blood-curdling accounts of events in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Kosovo.

The essential book on the backdrop to the Bush administration’s foreign policy is James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (New York, 2004). Also very useful is the volume by Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay, America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy (Washington, D.C., 2003). Among the conservative critiques of neoconservative influences on Bush’s policies, the most temperate is probably Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, America Alone: The Neoconservatives and the Global Order (Cambridge, 2004). See also Glenn Kessler, The Confidante: Condoleezza Rice and the Creation of the Bush Legacy (New York, 2007).

11. The “War” Against Terrorism

The story of 9/11 and its aftermath is obviously incomplete. An excellent book with which to begin is Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York, 2006), to be accompanied by Richard Clarke’s Against All Enemies (New York, 2004). Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars (New York, 2004) is excellent on the early efforts in Afghanistan. Seth Jones, In the Graveyard of Empires (New York, 2009), does justice to what followed. To understand why so many members of the foreign policy elite accepted the decision to attack Iraq, start with Kenneth Pollack, The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq (New York, 2002). For events subsequent to the invasion, see Thomas Ricks, Fiasco: America’s Military Adventure in Iraq (New York, 2006), and George Packer, The Assassin’s Gate: America in Iraq (New York, 2005).

For a superb analysis of China’s grand strategy, see Avery Goldstein’s Rising to the Challenge (Stanford, 2005). Russian strategy is best understood after reading Robert Legvold, ed., Russian Foreign Policy in the 21st Century & the Shadow of the Past (New York, 2007).

To appreciate the problems that the Obama administration was forced to address on the day it took office, David Sanger’s The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power (New York, 2009) is the best place to start. James Mann’s The Obamians (New York, 2012) examines the administrator’s performance through 2011.

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