Book Recommendation: John Lewis Gaddis’s The Cold War Mike Rappaport
I recently finished this relatively slim (266 pages) book on the Cold War, and would recommend it strongly.
TheCold War
…for had Reagan s vice president, George H. W. Bush,succeeded him at that point, the Reagan presidency would have been a historicalfootnote and there probably would not have been an American challenge to theCold War status quo. Bush, like mostforeign policy experts of his generation, saw that conflict as a permanentfeature of the international landscape. Reagan, like Walesa, Thatcher, Deng, and John Paul II, definitely didnot.
Heshared their belief in the power of words, in the potency of ideas, and in theuses of drama to shatter the constraints of conventional wisdom. He saw that the Cold War itself had become aconvention: that too many minds in too many places had resigned themselves toits perpetuation. He sought to break thestalemate – which was, he believed, largely psychological – by exploitingSoviet weaknesses and asserting western strengths. His preferred weapon was public oratory.
Reaganwas deeply committed to SDI: it was not a bargaining chip to give up in futurenegotiations. That did not preclude,though, using it as a bluff: the United States was years, even decades, awayfrom developing a missile defense capability, but Reagan s speech persuaded theincreasingly frightened Soviet leaders that this was about to happen. They were convinced, Dobrynin recalled, thatthe great technological potential of the
United States
had scored again andtreated Reagan s statement as a real threat. Having exhausted their country by catching up in offensive missiles,they suddenly faced a new round of competition demanding skills that had nohope of mastering. And the Americansseemed not to even to have broken into a sweat.
Thetension became so great that when a South Korean airliner accidentally strayedinto Soviet airspace over Sakhalin on September 1, 1983, the militaryauthorities in
Moscow
assumed the worst and ordered it shot down, killing 269 civilians, 63 of themAmericans.
Gorbachevwas never a leader in the manner of Vaclav Havel, John Paul II, Deng Xiaoping,Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Lech Walesa – even Boris Yeltsin. They all had destinations in mind andmaps for reaching them. Gorbachevdithered in contradictions without resolving them. The largest was this: he wanted to savesocialism, but he would not use force to do so. It was his particular misfortune that these goals were incompatible – hecould not achieve one without abandoning the other. And so, in the end, he gave up an ideology,an empire, and his own country, in preference to using force. He chose love over fear, violatingMachiavelli s advice for princes and thereby ensuring that he ceased to beone. It made little sense in traditionalgeopolitical terms. But it did make himthe most deserving recipient ever of the Nobel Peace Prize.
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