Ralph B. Levering

In The Cold War: A Post-Cold War History, Ralph B. Levering “seeks to explain the Cold War’s beginning in the mid-1940s, the alternating tendencies toward increased hostility and toward reduced tensions in U.S.-Soviet relations between the late 1940s and the mid-1980s, and the conflict’s rapid and surprising ending in the late 1980s” (pg. xii). To this end, he draws upon both historiography and recently declassified documents from U.S., Russian, and Chinese sources to craft a monograph both for undergraduates and grad students that succinctly explores the major events of the Cold War.

Levering writes, “As much as from any of the many specific wartime and postwar dilemmas and disagreements, the Cold War grew out of the contrasting national traditions, political ideologies, and approaches to foreign policy – the different assumptions and ways of looking at the world – that formed a vast chasm between Soviet and Western leaders even as they collaborated in the war against Nazi Germany” (pg. 13). He continues, “Nuclear weapons both set limits to the struggle – that is, helped to keep it cold – and also intensified it in many ways, not the least of which was the feat in each country that the other might try to obliterate it in a surprise attack. Even at those times in which there were relatively few other major issues in dispute, the threat of nuclear destruction loomed like a thunderhead over U.S.-Soviet relations” (pg. 21). Of diplomatic achievements in the 1950s and early 1960s, Levering writes, “It could be argued, at the risk of giving Soviet leaders too much credit, that improvements in U.S.-Soviet relations occurred despite [Secretary of State John Foster] Dulles’s opposition and Eisenhower’s hesitation – in other words, that Russia’s repeated diplomatic initiatives and occasional concessions created a momentum for achieving modest agreements that even the skeptical secretary of state could not withstand” (pg. 58).

Describing détente, Levering writes, “When Nixon triumphantly visited both Beijing and Moscow in the first half of 1972 and pledged America to improved relations with both countries, and when Soviet officials subsequently visited Washington and toasted détente, the term ‘cold war’ seemed applicable only to an earlier era” (pg. 91). He cautions, however: “An important irony runs through U.S. foreign policy during the 1963-72 period of the Cold War: at the same time that America was working to improve relations with Russia and China, it became deeply involved in a brutal war in Indochina fought ostensibly to prevent the spread of Russian and Chinese influence in Asia” (pg. 124). Of the 1980s, Levering writes, “As much as any specific action by America or Russia, the combination of the administration’s frightening rhetoric and the equally scary warnings about nuclear war coming from the protest movements, from such best-selling books as Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth (1982) and from such graphic depictions of the possible effects of nuclear war as the television film The Day After (1983) established the bone-chilling ambience of this third dangerous phase of the Cold War” (pg. 159). He describes this post-détente era as a roller coaster with diplomatic victories interspersed with saber-rattling and invasions of Third World countries (pg. 170).… (altro)