The United States and the End of the Cold War: Implications, Reconsiderations, Provocations

This collection of eleven essays provides one of the first explanations of how and why the United States forty year struggle with the former Soviet Union has finally ended. The book contains significant new interpretations of the American style in foreign policy, the objectives of containment, and the role of morality, nuclear weapons, and intelligence and espionage in Washington's conduct of the Cold War. It controversially reassesses the leadership of two distinctive cold war warriors, John Foster Dulles and Ronald Reagan, and employs new methodological techniques to account for the sudden and surprising events of 1989. Chapters One through Seven are reconsiderations of Cold War history in the light of the fact that we can now view that history as a whole, from its beginnings to its end. Chapters Eight through Eleven (and to some extent Chapters Six and Seven) represent preliminary attempts, from several different analytical perspectives, to deal with how the end of the Cold War came about and what the implications of that development might be for the future. Each chapter is meant to question conventional wisdom with regard to the topics they address. Moreover, Gaddis questions our inability to foresee very clearly the future during these past few years. He contends that we understood much less about this conflict than we realized, and may, in turn, face even greater surprises - not all of them pleasant - in the Cold War's aftermath. He points to the fact that we are, on the whole, greatly unmoved by this victory and possibly unprepared to deal with the inevitable challenges ahead, both national and international.

John Gaddis is the author of several books including The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War (OUP NY, 1989), Strategies of Containment: Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (OUP NY, 1983), and Russia, the Soviet Union and the United States: An Interpretive History (McGraw, 1990). He lives in Ohio, USA.