Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
I think it is the best synthetic treatment of American grand strategy during the Cold War. Gaddis does a very good job of telling the story of the emergence of US efforts to contain the Soviet Union, and he packages the story in a conceptual way that I think has shaped public debate about American strategy ever since.
Your third book is Strategies of Containment by John Gaddis.
I see this book as in some ways the US companion to Kennedy’s Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery. I think it is the best synthetic treatment of American grand strategy during the Cold War. Gaddis doesn’t, as Kennedy does, deal with US strategy from soup to nuts. He really starts the book with the end of World War Two and the rise of American efforts to contain the Soviet Union.
Gaddis does a very good job of telling the story and he packages it in a conceptual way that I think has shaped public debate about American strategy ever since.
For me the lasting legacy of the book is really the treatment of the 40s and the 50s and the 60s where he delineates between two very different versions. One version was the brainchild of George Kennan and the other was the brainchild of Paul Nitze. Gaddis uses these two figures to paint a very interesting picture of the contending paradigms that inform strategy.
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Charles Kupchan is Professor of International Affairs at Georgetown University and Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He was Director for European Affairs on the National Security Council during the first Clinton administration. He has served as a visiting scholar at Harvard University’s Center for International Affairs, Columbia University’s Institute for War and Peace Studies, the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, and the Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Internationales in Paris. During 2006-2007 he was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the Henry A Kissinger Scholar at the Library of Congress.
