The Strategic Defence Initiative: US Policy and the Soviet Union (review)

Someday the definitive book will be written on Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) and its role in ending the Cold War in the 1980s. This is not that day, however, and this is definitely not that book.

Obviously adapted from an undergraduate or master's-level thesis, The Strategic Defence Initiative is a dense collection of quotations representing personal recollections of and international media reaction to the events that began with Reagan's March 1983 SDI speech through the December 1988 summit meeting in New York City between Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. During this period the world experienced a roller coaster of emotional highs and lows as the two superpowers shifted from a warlike stance to a steady improvement of relations. The Soviet Union then essentially gave up the fight and surrendered. To what extent was SDI responsible for that drastic change in the international security environment? According to Mira Duric, we cannot be certain. Indeed, following the roller-coaster structure of her book is as unnerving as the Cold War once was. The book consists of five chapters in roughly chronological order, although this structural approach does not apply to the material in each chapter.

When you first pick up the book, it appears to be a nice, quick read, with well under 200 pages. One might expect to find a concise but thorough accounting of events from 1983 through the breakup of the Soviet Union. But as it turns out, the book includes 70 pages of endnotes and index, meaning that the actual text is skimpy. Despite the brevity of The Strategic Defence Initiative, the convoluted style makes reading it most challenging, let alone trying to follow its train of thought. Enthusiastically documented and extensively researched, the book nevertheless suffers from a number of serious flaws. Its structure, which appears so logical in the table of contents, is anything but. Seemingly random thoughts and "oh, yes, this was interesting" anecdotes appear in the most surprising places. Duric relies too heavily on a handful of notes from a small number of people she interviewed on one trip to the United States in late 1998, some of whom have well-known parochial political leanings. Worse yet, the book is poorly edited, showing the publisher's manifold lack of concern for a tightly argued text that reflects a high standard of English usage. One suspects that English is not Duric's first language, yet nobody spent much time fixing her prose before the book made it into print.

Grammatical errors occur throughout the text. The blame for most of these rests with the publisher, but Duric's writing style also leaves much to be desired. The first sentence of the introduction gives some indication of the convoluted style and confused logic that typify the book: "Located in an endnote in the back of this book, The United States and the End of the Cold War: Implications, Reconsiderations, Provocations, one of the leading scholars in US foreign policy John Lewis Gaddis, makes a striking (and wholly accurate) claim" (p. 1). Several pages later we are treated to this not-so-remarkable revelation: "Attention focused on strategic defence only when the idea was mentioned" (p. 10). When describing Gorbachev's visit to the United Nations (UN) in 1988, Duric is probably correct in saying that his speech "signaled the end of ideological conflict" and that "the unilateral arms cutbacks that Gorbachev announced were historic." But she then says that "Gorbachev [at the UN] disbanded the Warsaw Pact" (p. 124), a statement that is patently erroneous. The military structures of the Warsaw Pact survived until February 1991, and the political components of the Pact were not dissolved until the end of June 1991. Given the myriad grammatical and factual errors in the book, I am amazed that the publisher allowed it to get into print. The quality of some of the writing is more suitable to an undergraduate research paper than a published...