Strategic Containment: An Analysis of Post-War U.S. National Security Policy

Author: John Gaddis
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-05-01
Features: John Gaddis, a professor of history at Yale University, is one of the most important American diplomatic historians in the past two decades, as well as a distinguished strategic historian and strategic thinker. He has meticulously and innovatively implemented a shared insight with his colleague in strategic history, Paul Kennedy, that only historical research can provide the correct understanding of why grand strategy exists, how grand strategy is employed, and how strategists think and act in specific contexts. In 1982, he published this book, successfully revealing and showcasing multiple strategic logics and strategic ways of thinking that, in his view, transcend time and environment. This book is truly a masterpiece of strategic history at the level of a classic and has made significant contributions to the theory of grand strategy. It was immediately acclaimed as a landmark work upon publication. The book examines the grand strategy and national security policies of ten U.S. administrations, from the end of Franklin D. Roosevelt to Jimmy Carter, in a coherent and unified manner. It uncovers and explains the underlying evolutionary patterns, reveals the strategic mechanisms, and evaluates the concepts, programs, implementation, and successes and failures from the perspective of grand strategy. Due to the declassification and release of post-war U.S. foreign policy archives, there is an exceptionally rich and detailed archival record available on this topic, enabling him to conduct more precise and accurate research compared to his colleagues studying other subjects. He combines micro-level research based on a vast amount of primary sources with grand-scale macro-level thinking. At the same time, with his exceptional insight into mechanisms and conceptual shaping talent, he brilliantly reveals many subtle and complex strategic mechanisms embedded in the history of the containment strategy. In this regard, he surpasses any other renowned interpreter of grand strategy.