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  • A Companion to American Foreign Relations
  • J. Garry Clifford
Robert D. Schulzinger, ed., A Companion to American Foreign Relations. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003. 562 pp. $131.95.

This collection of twenty-five historiographical essays surveying the current state of U.S. diplomatic history is one of a series of Blackwell Companions to American History. The volume will be indispensable reading for scholars in the field as well as for graduate students preparing for general exams. Covering the entire field of U.S. foreign relations from the colonial era to the present, the essays highlight the rich variety of new approaches that have energized international history over the past three decades. Save for three chapters on ideas, culture, and the environment that encompass the entire period of American history, most essays focus on regional relations, critical periods, and major wars from the late nineteenth century on. More than half of the authors discuss the key sources, literatures, and debates pertaining to the Cold War.

Readers of this journal will find several relevant essays. Mark A. Stoler discusses the historiography on World War II, emphasizing that scholars have continued to interpret wartime diplomacy and strategy as "the first round in the Cold War" (p. 188). The release of Soviet documents since the late 1980s, he notes, has not resolved the half-century debate over Franklin Roosevelt's realism (or lack thereof) in dealing with Josif Stalin. That issue aside, Stoler, like Warren E. Kimball in Forged in War: Roosevelt, Churchill, and the Second World War (New York: W. Morrow, 1997), suggests that sustaining a wartime alliance, defeating the Axis, and fashioning postwar international institutions were notable and necessary achievements. The legacies of World War II also inform Jeremi Suri's balanced essay about the early Cold War. He writes that recent scholars have focused on "how the Cold War was fought, not why" (p. 226). Suri juxtaposes Melvyn Leffler's A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), which emphasizes the growing American conception of national security, with John Lewis Gaddis's We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), which emphasizes Stalin's ideologically driven expansionism. Leffler and other historians such as Arnold Offner, Michael Hogan, and Carolyn Eisenberg highlight the errors and excesses of the national security state under Harry Truman, whereas Gaddis, Vojtech Mastny, Vladislav Zubok, and Constantine Pleshakov, among others, assemble persuasive evidence that the Soviet threat was real, even if Washington may have exaggerated that threat at times. Hence, Suri posits an emerging historiographical consensus that the Soviet-American Cold War arose from [End Page 144] Soviet aggression in Eastern Europe and U.S. overreaction and soon extended to Asia and the rest of the world.

Other essays survey the periphery and later periods of the Cold War. Evelyn Goh and Rosemary Foot summarize the literature on Sino-American relations since 1949. Scholars using available Chinese sources now debunk the idea of a "lost chance" for the United States to normalize relations with China before the Korean War, and they also have shown that the U.S. defense of South Korea provided "the justification, rather than the trigger, for Chinese involvement" (p. 260) in that conflict. Richard Immerman's careful essay on the 1950s concludes that Dwight D. Eisenhower did "a better job of managing competition with the Soviets than promoting cooperation with peoples on the global periphery" (p. 304). Eisenhower also bungled relations with allies. Stephen G. Rabe's examination of U.S.–Latin American relations from 1961 on makes the telling point that scholars who have done research in Moscow and interviewed former Soviet experts on Latin America conclude that the Soviet Union, ever cautious about confronting Washington in "America's backyard," never actively supported revolutionary movements in Latin America. According to Rabe, the Soviet aid that was given to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua after they took power was intended primarily to counter U.S. support for the anti-Communist fighters in Afghanistan. Rabe argues that "the political and economic needs of the Soviet state mattered more than the ideological imperatives of the international communist movement...

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