It was, as Gaddis asserts, a time of "moral amnesia. Even Mutual Assured Destruction, the doctrine that insured that neither side would launch an all-out nuclear strike for fear of annihilation, implied a threat to civilian populations worldwide.
Soviet tanks might crush the fledgling democratic movements of central Europe without international opposition, but US aid and arms were reserved for recipients like Saddam's Iraq and Pinochet's Chile. Right-wing dictatorships were shored up by the US to prevent the emergence of left-wing regimes. By the time that the US and the Soviet Union had groped their way through to détente, a dowdy compromise that left too much unsaid, the idea of a global balance of power between them had become a diplomatic commonplace. It also sets out to explain assumptions and fears that now seem absurd, but which, just 20 years ago, were part of everybody's lives.Įach incident is shown to have made sense at the time, but the gradual acceptance of a particular set of rules and conventions cumulatively created a sterile, inhuman politics. This book, accordingly, assumes no prior knowledge of events. An entire mode of thinking vanished almost overnight at the end of the 1980s, evaporating rather than collapsing, and for the students in Gaddis's class at Yale, many of whom were infants when the Berlin Wall came down, its language and its values seem surreal.
Shorthand expressions like "the West" made sense back then today they are as redundant as the word "comrade" in Putin's Russia. It set the tone for a particular kind of moralistic, polarised debate, for bar-room arguments over Trotsky and Mao, earnest meetings about banning the bomb.
For my generation, as for his, the Cold War was not just a dangerous and costly stand-off between two great powers. Like many of the lecturers who will be recommending the book, I understand exactly what he means. In his introduction to this brilliant and concise book, John Lewis Gaddis notes that the students whose questions inspired it are now too young to remember the events it describes.
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