Campbell Craig (1) (1964–)

This is the best, and most balanced, interpretation of the Cold War - its origins, its motives, and its consequences - that I have read. That assessment is based on a long career - Cold War and post-Cold War - as an American diplomat, as a life-long student of the subject, and as a university teacher of post-WWII American foreign policy.

Craig and Logevall examine the fundamental assumptions underlying American Cold War policy that too often are taken for granted in the academic literature and in the writings of foreign policy pundits. This is not "revisionist" history; the authors are not suggesting that American leaders possessed secret agendas or deliberately misled (for the most part) the American people into fearing the Soviet threat or were using the Cold War as a subterfuge to impose American "hegemony" on the world.

Rather, they examine the key presidential decisions of the entire Cold War era to better understand how, and why, those decisions were made - and if they truly benefited American interests. They are particularly good in examining what they call the "intermestic," the intersection of international and domestic politics that drove so much of American Cold War policy.

Studies that focus only on the fraught relations with the Soviet Union, on the necessity of militarizing US foreign policy to maintain "credibility" with US allies and foes alike, and thus on the need for a global military presence to "contain" communist aggression usually take the US official rhetoric on the inevitability of the Cold War at face value.

But it's clear that many of the decisions taken, from Truman to Reagan, often for immediate political purposes, proved unnecessarily dangerous and expensive over the longer term. Some of those, like the reliance on nuclear deterrence over diplomacy, were rethought before we slid into nuclear war. Others, such as the enormous defense budget that continues, 30 years after the end of the Cold War, to fund a global US military presence, to support arms sales to friends, allies, and others, and to subsidize the military-industrial complex on which so much of the US economy has come to depend, have proved much more difficult to turn around.

The book also has the virtue of being clearly and concisely written, building largely on the more detailed research of other scholars to create a comprehensive picture and avoiding the jargon (and assumptions) of international relations theorists. Even a reader new to the history of the Cold War will have no problem following the story here - that's why I assign it to university students!… (meer)