Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (review)

210 SAIS REVIEW Still Liska's study is not only stimulating reading, it is also an extremely helpful addition to a growing body of literature on U.S.-Soviet relations. Even if his policy recommendations are not entirely practical, his penetrating analysis is a welcome reminder of how banal and primitive are our conventional ways of thinking about another superpower. And even if there will be no enlightened prince to adopt Liska's suggestions in their entirety, there is still the possibility that the current chain of one-term presidencies marked by foreign policy extremes may be interrupted and a strong, self-confident, and sophisticated chief executive will give Liska's blueprint the attention it deserves. Meanwhile, Russia and the Road to Appeasement is "must" reading for everybody who is sufficiently interested in international relations to struggle through the complexity of the book's argument and language. —Dimitri Simes Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal ofPostwar American National Security Policy. By John Lewis Gaddis. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. 432 pp. $25. Statesmen commonly seek to circumvent the judgments of contemporary critics by appealing to the vindication of history. But history is not some wise and impartial deity. It is very largely historians. The retrospectivejudgments of historians are notoriously subject to the perspectives—often the prejudices and fashions—of their time. That is why histories frequently tell as much about the time of writing as the time written about. The historiography of America's foreign relations is awash with successive waves ofrevisionism and counterrevisionism, which correspond to the oscillations in American attitudes toward foreign policy—particularly between the affirmation and rejection of American power. Histories of enduring value must transcend the wave of the moment by revealing a pattern of national behavior that lends coherence to the continuities and changes throughout a distinct period of national experience. In retrospect, the cold war, from 1946 to the present, holds a special opportunity and danger for historians. The opportunity lies in the conjunction of momentous changes with striking continuities and in the flood of primary sources—including official documents, presidential papers, and information gleaned through the Freedom of Information Act—that has become available to investigators of this period. The danger is that the historian's generalizations about the pattern of national behavior will obscure the richness of reality with the distortions of perception that inevitably afflict the writing of contemporary history. In Strategies ofContainment John Lewis Gaddis has seized the opportunity to write a transcendent interpretation of the pattern of American cold war policy and relate it to current issues. Although he has not entirely avoided the danger of oversimplification, his interpretation of the continuities and changes is far superior to either Vietnam-born revisionism or the preceding orthodoxy as an explanation of the basic character and issues of U.S. policy. BOOK REVIEWS 211 Gaddis rightly focuses on containment—the basic policy of preventing the expansionby forceorsubversionofSovietcontrolandinfluenceoverindependent countries—as the great continuity at the core of American cold war policy. He traces the familiar oscillations in the implementation of containment—the fluctuations between the augmentation and retrenchment of means—as a function ofshifting "strategic" assumptions about American interests, the threats to them, and the methods of countering them. His interpretation emphasizes the ideas and attitudes that move experts and statesmen, but it does not ignore the framework ofmaterial and political (both domestic and international) conditions within which policies are made and actions taken. The result is a penetrating analysis and revealing synthesis, rich with insights and fortified with exhaustive research. The explicit synthesis that Gaddis employs to explain the strategic dynamics of containment and the divergent views that underlie them are less satisfactory, although the basic merits of the study shine through. He sees this synthesis in the tension and fluctuation between a "symmetrical" and "asymmetrical" strategy. The former depends on countering the adversary's threats and moves against one's security interests with matching means at every point. The latter depends on countering them at places and by means that apply one's own strengths against the adversary's weaknesses. The problem with this formulation is that its ambiguity and oversimplification obscure the most significant distinctions it is...