Max Boot is Olin senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and well-qualified to review the Gaddis book. This review is available from the CFR archives:
A great many books analyzing the recent shifts in American foreign policy have appeared since September 11, 2001. Most are harshly critical of President Bush and all his works. Their tenor can be judged by some of their titles: Rogue Nation, The Bubble of American Supremacy, The Sorrows of Empire, Superpower Syndrome. The more scabrous among them do not hesitate to compare George W. Bush to Adolf Hitler and America to Nazi Germany. And that is to say nothing of the books, which have become bestsellers in Europe, claiming that the CIA (or was it the Mossad?) was actually behind the 9/11 attacks. In response, some on the Right have produced equally histrionic screeds, like Ann Coulter’s Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism and Sean Hannity’s Deliver Us From Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism and Liberalism–books that, in essence, accuse Bush’s critics of being fifth columnists.
It is a relief, therefore, to pick up Surprise, Security, and the American Experience, a sober attempt to analyze Bush’s foreign policy in historical context and without partisan rancor. Its author is John Lewis Gaddis, our most eminent historian of the cold war, who taught for many years at Ohio University and now holds the Robert A. Lovett chair in military and naval history at Yale.
Gaddis first rose to prominence with the publication in 1972 of The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947, which rejected revisionist attempts to pin the blame for that conflict on the U.S. To Gaddis, the Soviet Union was at least equally responsible. Then, following the release in the 1990’s of new documents from the Soviet archives, Gaddis revised this position, concluding that Stalin was solely responsible for the post-World War II break with the West. He also disavowed his earlier view that the cold war was largely governed by geopolitical rivalries. His 1997 book We Now Know argued that Communist ideology had played a bigger role than realpolitik in motivating Soviet conduct.
Though he has long outraged New Left historians, Gaddis is hardly known as a conservative. His reputation is that of a moderately liberal scholar–which makes the assessment of Bush’s foreign policy that he offers in this slender volume all the more interesting and all the more likely to discomfit the administration’s critics.
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