Disarray, as a consequence, seemed the dominant theme.įrom the onset of the Cold War, the U.S. Both the 19 presidential election campaigns had seen strong criticisms by the victors of what their predecessors had done. Vietnam had been a disaster and the Nixon-Kissinger détente, which appeared for a while to have repaired the damage, was beginning to fall apart. The inadequacies of American policy were painfully obvious. I was writing the book during the late 1970s and early 1980s, the last point at which it was still possible to think that the Soviet Union might somehow prevail in the Cold War. But it might be worth sketching out what seem to me now to be some of the shortcomings in Strategies, not least because "containment" remains a tempting framework for thinking about the post–Cold War world. A revised edition is not in the works: life is too short, and the list of other interesting projects is too long. My book Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy appeared in 1982 under just these circumstances.ĭespite its age, the book is still widely used in history and political science classes, and I’m often asked how I would write it differently now. And for those of us who were writing Cold War history while the Cold War was still going on, there was a special problem: we were attempting to chronicle an event without knowing its outcome. Responsible scholars can disagree on what the documents show. Despite what historians like to claim on their book jackets, there is no such thing as a definitive account of any historical episode.
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