Research Catalog

Title

The United States and the end of the cold war : implications, reconsiderations, provocations / John Lewis Gaddis.

Author

Gaddis, John Lewis

Publication

New York : Oxford University Press, 1992.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

ix, 301 p.; 25 cm.

Summary

Two decades ago, historian John Lewis Gaddis published The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, a pioneering work of scholarship that sought to explain how Americans found themselves, at the moment of their victory in World War II, facing a long, difficult, and dangerous struggle with an erstwhile ally, the Soviet Union. That struggle has finally concluded in a manner as abrupt, and with a victory as decisive, as the one Americans celebrated in 1945. In The United States and the End of the Cold War, Gaddis provides one of the first explanations of how this happened; he also considers what this outcome suggests about War history--and the post-Cold War future. The United States and the End of the Cold War 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 reassesses, in ways sure to be controversial, the leadership of two distinctive cold warriors, John Foster Dulles and Ronald Reagan. It employs new methodological techniques to account for the sudden and surprising events of 1989. And it provides the clearest view yet of what a world without the Cold War is likely to be. Written with the vigor, authority, and adventurousness readers have come to expect from Gaddis's work, The United States and the End of the Cold War offers important new insights into how we got to where we are, and where we may be going.

Subjects

• United States > Foreign relations > 1945-1989
• Soviet Union > Foreign relations > 1945-1991
• United States > Foreign relations > 1945-
• Soviet Union > Foreign relations > United States
• United States > Foreign relations > Soviet Union
• Cold War

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. 267-285) and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

The American Foreign Policy style in the twentieth century -- The objectives of containment -- Morality and the American experience in the Cold War -- The unexpected John Foster Dulles -- Intelligence, espionage, and Cold War history -- The essential relevance of nuclear weapons -- The unexpected Ronald Reagan -- How the Cold War might end: an exercise in faulty prediction -- Tectonics, history, and the end of the Cold War -- Great illusions, the long peace, and the future of the international system -- Toward the post-Cold War world.

ISBN

• 0195085515 (pbk.)
• 0195052013 (alk. paper)

LCCN

^^^91017992^//r93

OCLC

• 23768354
• SCSB-12097438

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library