America's Cold War

Campbell Craig and Fredrik Logevall. America's Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009.

Craig and Logevall approach the Cold War from the vantage point of domestic politics. They acknowledge that this approach is somewhat out of step with the more internationalist vantage point may other scholars take, but while they concede that the internationalist view has ample merit and is an important endeavor, they point out that excessively “de-centering” the Cold War “runs the risk of assigning greater agency to these other actors than they deserve” (5). The power balance was asymmetrical; furthermore, the documentary records that so many historians rely on tend not to reflect domestic political considerations but rather internal foreign policy deliberations. Ultimately, the authors conclude that while the Cold War was largely a success for the United States, it went on too long and at too high a cost relative to the actual security threat posed by the USSR. Cold War policy was vested in the executive branch from the Truman Administration on, and too often, Presidents based policy on their own political fortunes as well as those of their party (LBJ in particular worried about the fate of his Great Society initiatives). Therefore, the United States often chose confrontation when containment would do, and all too often made moral compromises and inflicted military violence on foreign populations for no clear foreign policy advantage.

The structure of the book in chronological, beginning during the mid-years of World War II and ending during the Presidency of George H.W. Bush. This straight-forward structure is framed by a 1984 speech by one of the original architects of the Cold War containment strategy, George F. Kennan. Kennan had long been leery of the degree to which his original strategic approach to the Soviet threat had taken on a life of its own, un-moored from actual strategic considerations or the capabilities of the Soviet Union. By 1984, he was concerned enough to give a public speech in the midst of Ronald Reagan's reelection campaign on the subject.

The authors clearly agree with Kennan's larger view, but at the same time they argue that the Cold War was in arguably an American success; the Soviet Union was ultimately vanquished, and the American people were able to enjoy relatively peace and historically unparalleled prosperity during the conflict. In other words, Kennan's basic premise--that the USSR represented a genuine security threat, which could be best faced by boxing it in internationally and forcing its internal contradictions to undo it--was entirely correct. Had US Cold War policy adhered to the policy of containment, the triumph would have been relatively unambiguous.

But, unfortunately, domestic political pressures--the rightward shift of American foreign policy, the growing political clout and economic importance of the military-industrial complex, etc.--mitigated against restricting American policy to the parameters Kennan had sketched out. President after President felt compelled to prove himself "tough on Communism" and to escalate military posturing when diplomacy often might have been more effective. The Cold War was an American victory, but the cost was unjustifiably high.