This non-use of a potentially war-deciding weapon was critical. Gaddis begins in Korea, with Truman – who claimed to have lost no sleep ordering the first atomic bombings in history – refusing to allow A-bombs to be deployed against the Chinese troops pouring over the Yalu. The second chapter of The Cold War is focused on the threat of nuclear war. In my own nod to briefness, I’ll give just one example about how this is executed. Instead of marching along the timeline, Gaddis explores different themes, such as the differences between the communist and capitalist systems, the way that post-colonialism intertwined with the larger Cold War, and the change in thinking among world leaders that helped lead to its finale. Though taken as a whole they follow an overarching chronology – the opening chapter begins as the Second World War ends, while the last chapter gives us the Soviet Union’s collapse – within each chapter there is a great deal of temporal overlap. To that end, The Cold War is broken into seven chapters that somewhat resemble essays. Instead of a sweeping, all-encompassing account of every political decision, uprising, revolution, coup, crisis, and limited war, Gaddis breaks things down into what he considers the decisive moments, and uses them as a springboard for illuminating discussions of how it went down, and what it all meant.Įmploying a word count only slightly higher than one of my wife’s Instagram posts, Gaddis cannot simply start his narrative at the Potsdam Conference and end with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Even though it’s not much longer than a typical cell phone contract, Gaddis makes his words count. More importantly, as becomes clear early on, The Cold War is the product of a great deal of thought. His work has been credited – for better and for worse – with shaping the way that many view the so-called “long peace.”
Gaddis has written extensively on the Cold War, including a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of George Kennan. John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New Historyĭespite having an admitted big-book bias, when I went looking for a general history of the fraught, potentially-world-destroying period from 1945 to 1991, John Lewis Gaddis’s The Cold War proved an easy choice.įor one, it comes with an impeccable pedigree, having been produced by a renowned historian of this particular era. The tragedy was this: that victory would require the victors either to cease to be who they were, or to give up much of what they had hoped, by fighting, to attain…” Whatever the Grand Alliance’s triumphs in the spring of 1945, its success had always depended upon the pursuit of compatible objectives by incompatible systems. “he war had been won by a coalition whose principal members were already at war – ideologically and geopolitically if not militarily – with one another.
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