America in crisis

"During the American Civil War, Secretary of State William Seward predicted that Russia and the United States would confront one another on the plains of Eastern Asia--and they did in the 1890s. The rivalry of these two great nation-states heightened when the Russian Revolution added a different ideological dimension to the struggle. The Cold War is the result of that past--and the dilemmas of Soviet and American foreign policies today have a half-century of history behind them. America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945-1966 examines the foreign policies of both countries in this historical setting. Professor LeFeber concentrates on two key periods in the Cold War--the first is the period from 1944-1946 when the situation intensified and the second is the mid-50s when it assumed a new shape. In the events of 1945 and 1946, he finds the background for Stalin's later moves in Germany and Korea as well as for the American policies which resulted in the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and NATO. In the mid-50s, both American and Russian foreign policies began to pivot away from their focus on Europe and became concerned with the newly-emerging nations. Professor LaFeber analyzes not only the policies of both the United States and Russia but also domestic sources for these policies. For the United States, he has used extensively the newly-opened papers of John Foster Dulles as well as the papers of Harry S. Truman, Bernard Baruch, William Clayton and others who were actively involved in U.S. policy decisions."--Dust jacket.

This concise text focuses on United States-Soviet diplomacy to explain the causes and consequences of the Cold War. It explores how the Cold War was shaped by domestic events in both the U.S. and the Soviet Union and presents a variety of other points of view on the conflict--Chinese, Latin American, European, and Vietnamese. The text includes both engaging anecdotes and quotes from primary sources to support key points and exemplify policies, and recent scholarship and materials from openings of the U.S., Soviet, and Chinese archives.

The story of American foreign relations since Vietnam is the story of how Americans came to terms - and, more frequently, failed to come to terms - with the muddy complexity of life in the late twentieth century. The aftereffects of Vietnam were one cause of the failures; American history and American politics were two others. Between the politics of reductionism and the yearning for simplicity, Americans after Vietnam had great difficulty accepting the complexity of the world they lived in. Sometimes they overcame the difficulty; sometimes the difficulty overcame them. What follows is the tale of both outcomes.

"Did America's passive foreign policy in the 1930s contribute to the onset of the Second World War? Would early and sustained American support have contained the expansive thrust of the Axis? Was the nation's security jeopardized by lack of leadership? These are just some of the thought-provoking questions explored in the new edition of this detailed examination of American entry into World War II."--Page 4 of cover.