America's Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity by Campbell Craig; Frederik LogevallReview by: Lloyd C. GardnerPacific Historical Review, Vol. 79, No. 4 (November 2010), pp. 671-672Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/phr.2010.79.4.671 .

Accessed: 25/09/2013 15:13

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to PacificHistorical Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 216.165.126.139 on Wed, 25 Sep 2013 15:13:32 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Reviews of Books 671

America’s Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity. By Campbell Craig and Frederik Logevall. (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2009. 439 pp. $26.95)

Every so often a really good synthesis of recent (and not so re-cent) scholarship on a big topic comes along. This is such a book. It is also distinguished, however, by advancing some important new ideas about Cold War decisions that the nation’s leaders made dur-ing the nearly five decades of the Soviet-American confrontation.

PHR7904_09.indd 671 10/11/10 12:15:42 PM

This content downloaded from 216.165.126.139 on Wed, 25 Sep 2013 15:13:32 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Pacific Historical Review672

The hero of the book is George Frost Kennan, who is given full credit for designing the winning policy—and also for warning against the temptations of trying to make containment fit outside Europe. Alas, these warnings were ignored, and we wound up in the rice paddies of Southeast Asia without an exit strategy.

Within that generally well-known framework, the authors sug-gest a way of looking at the Cold War that offers readers much to think about. The most important contribution in this regard is the discussion of how America’s Cold War “empire” was really at home. Instead of pursuing a colonial policy in the style of nineteenth- century world powers, the United States achieved success by military Keynesianism—yes, that force that Dwight Eisenhower deplored in his farewell address, the Military Industrial Complex. While Presi-dent Harry Truman moved into North Korea, he wisely halted after the Chinese intervention. But from Korea onward, the U.S. economy boomed as defense spending made all the difference.

But herein was a dilemma. While the authors pay special atten-tion to the individual choices of Presidents and tend to divide them into the familiar categories, realists and idealists, such a distinction over-emphasizes individual choices and minimizes the structural nature of the Cold War. Military Keynesianism depended upon promoting Cold War dangers to the highest level so as to insure that the defense budget would never fall off precipitately and, at the same time, no election be lost because of seeming soft on commu-nism. It set in place a continuous cycle of rumors of wars to main-tain the nation’s lifestyle.

However one thinks about such questions of causation, this book is a fine review of Washington’s Cold War successes and trag-edies. The authors do not shirk from presenting the dark side of the struggle in terms of costs to those outside the relatively shel-tered North American continent. The book ends with an account of the final summit of the Cold War between George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev in a ceremony reminiscent of Lee at Appomat-tox, when Gorbachev agreed to the terms that had once been of-fered by the Marshall Plan in 1947. Stalin’s rejection of American terms had helped bring on the Cold War; “Now, Gorbachev unam-biguously declared that the USSR would join the capitalist world in the global market” (p. 343). His agreement at Malta signaled the end of the ideological contest between capitalism and commu-nism, write the authors, but not the end of history, and certainly not the end of empire as a way of life.

Rutgers University LLOYD C. GARDNER

PHR7904_09.indd 672 10/11/10 12:15:43 PM

This content downloaded from 216.165.126.139 on Wed, 25 Sep 2013 15:13:32 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions