The Cold War: A New History
by John Lewis Gaddis
Post War Era
Military & Foreign Policy
Thesis:
The Cold
War changed what war meant and how wars would be fought for the world as a
whole. The author hopes to correct the current misunderstanding that the Cold
War was a war where dangers were not real and the threat of Soviet Union was exaggerated. In fact, the threat was very real and the world narrowly escaped detrimental destruction.
Specific examples/evidence that supports the
thesis:
Summary:
The author first describes how capitalism and socialism were positioned in conflict with one another immediately following WWII. The US found itself in a powerful position after the war, with a relatively uneffected homeland and population. At the same time, Russia had suffered vastly during the war but had come out victorious, without Russia and the Eastern front, the allies could not have won on the European front. While Stalin accepted assistance to rebuild after the war, he was also preparing his people for the next war, he thought was inevitable as tensions between capitalist nations built back up after this war.
The nuclear weapons used by the US were in large measure meant to force cooperation of the Soviets during peace negotiations for WWII. In this way, they were effective. However, the USSR also had spies and a nuclear program of their own.
What does this tell us about Military and Foreign Policy in the Post War Era?
What parts of the book can be applied to lectures?
This book is an excellent over view of the events and forces involved in the Cold War Era. This is the author's field of research and the subject he most often teaches. This is his abbreviated version of history and it was very helpful.
General Thoughts:
Excerpts from Book Reviews:
My Highlighted Passages:
Stalin’s was a very different
vision: a settlement that would secure his own and his country’s security while
simultaneously encouraging the rivalries among capitalists that he believed
would bring about a new war. Capitalist fratricide, in turn, would ensure the
eventual Soviet domination of Europe. 451
Despite their revolutionary
character those bombs were built under an old and familiar set of assumptions:
that if they worked, they would be used. Few of the thousands of people
employed in the wartime Manhattan Project saw their jobs as differing from the
design and production of conventional weapons. Atomic bombs were meant to be
dropped, as soon as they were ready, on whatever enemy targets yet remained. 835
Technology might have changed,
but the human habit of escalating violence had not. 839
And Truman himself had left it
to the Army Air Force to determine when and where the first atomic weapons
would be dropped: the names “Hiroshima” and “Nagasaki” were no more familiar to
him, before the bombs fell, than they were to anyone else.10 859
After that happened, though,
Truman demanded a sharp break from past practice. He insisted that a civilian
agency, not the military, control access to atomic bombs and their further
development. 861
But Truman did have one unique
qualification for demanding a return to Clausewitz: after August, 1945, he had
the ability, by issuing a single order, to bring about more death and
destruction than any other individual in history had ever been able to
accomplish. That stark fact caused this ordinary man to do an extraordinary
thing. He reversed a pattern in human behavior so ancient that its origins lay
shrouded in the mists of time: that when weapons are developed, they will be
used. 881
But he also tried to be nice
about it: at one point, while bullying an American visitor, Hubert Humphrey, he
paused to ask where his guest was from. When Humphrey pointed out Minneapolis
on the map, Khrushchev circled it with a big blue pencil. “That’s so I don’t
forget to order them to spare the city when the rockets fly,” he explained
amiably.43 1122
Wilson’s vision, at least, had
been revived: the contest of ideas that he and Lenin had begun during World War
I would continue now within the emerging 1500
Cold War. That became apparent
in three important speeches, given within thirteen months of one another in
1946–47. 1501
Stalin made the first one in
Moscow on February 9, 1946, and in it he went back to basics. He restated
Marx’s condemnation of capitalism for distributing wealth unevenly. He
reiterated Lenin’s claim that, as a result, capitalists were likely to go to
war with one another. He drew from this the conclusion that peace could come
only when communism had triumphed throughout the world. 1502
Winston Churchill, recently
turned out of office, gave the second speech in the improbable setting of
Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, with President Truman sitting at his side. 1508
an iron curtain has descended
across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of ancient states
of central and eastern Europe. . . . [A]ll these famous cities and the
populations around them . . . are subject in one form or another, not only to
Soviet influence, but to a very high and increasing measure of control from
Moscow. 1511
Truman himself gave the third
speech a year later, on March 12, 1947, in which he asked Congress for aid to
Greece and Turkey and announced the Truman Doctrine, with its implied American
commitment to assist victims of aggression and intimidation throughout the
world. 1518
His ideological justification
for these measures was Wilsonian: the world was now divided between “two ways
of life”—not communism versus capitalism, but democracy versus 1519
authoritarianism, a distinction
that allowed him to link this new American involvement in European affairs with
the ones that had preceded it in 1917 and in 1941. 1521
United States, after World War
II, assumed peacetime responsibilities beyond its hemisphere. Stalin’s
challenge had helped to bring that about. 1531
He did so with a view to
preserving communism: reform could only take place by acknowledging error. “I
was obliged to tell the truth about the past,” he later recalled, “whatever the
risks to me.”37 But the system he was trying to preserve had itself been based,
since the time of Marx and Engels, on the claim to be error-free. That was what
it meant to have discovered the engine that drove history forward. A movement
based on science had little place for confession, contrition, and the
possibility of redemption. The problems Khrushchev created for himself and for
the international communist movement, therefore, began almost from the moment
he finished speaking. One was simple shock. Communists were not used to having
mistakes admitted at the top, and certainly not on this scale. It was, as
Secretary of State Dulles commented at the time, “the most damning indictment
of despotism ever made by a despot.”38 The Polish party leader, Boleslaw
Bierut, had a heart attack when he read Khrushchev’s speech, and promptly died. 1681
He ordered farmers throughout
China to abandon their crops, build furnaces in their backyards, throw in their
own furniture as fuel, melt down their agricultural implements—and produce
steel. The result of Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” was the greatest single human
calamity of the 20th century. Stalin’s campaign to collectivize agriculture had
caused between 5 and 7 million people to starve to death during the early
1930s. Mao now sextupled that record, producing a famine that between 1958 and
1961 took the lives of over 30 million people, by far the worst on record
anywhere ever.46 1749
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