The End of U.S. Cold War History?: A Review Essay

The End o f US. Cold wm History? A Review Essay A Preponderance of Power: Nutional SecuYity/ the Truman Administration, and the Cold War by Melvyn P. Leffler Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992, 689 pages. Lynn Eden I T w o fundamental issues have shaped the historical literature on early Cold War U.S. foreign policy. First, and most important, should foreign policy be understood as shaped primarily by the external environment or as shaped primarily by the internal environment of U.S. state and society?*Second and related, should decisions be understood as coherent-those of a single rational actor-or as resulting from internal conflict? Political scientists are well-versed in these issues.* In recent years, there has been a fruitful cross-disciplinarypollination between history and political science, with political scientists reading deeply in the historical literature (and some doing archival work) to build and test theory, and historians borrowing from the theoretical tool-kits of political science and other disciplines to shape inquiry and argument. Lynn Eden is Senior Research Scholar, Center for lnternational Security and Arms Control, and Lecturer, Department of Sociology, at Stanford University. I would like to thank Benjamin Valentino for research assistance, William Burr, David Holloway, and Robert Jervis for comments, and Elizabeth Kier for comments on several drafts. 1. Richard H. Immerman, ”The History of U.S. Foreign Policy: A Plea for Pluralism,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 14, No. 4 (Fall 1990),pp. 580-581. 2. On the former, see Fareed Zakaria, “Realism and Domestic Politics: A Review Essay,” lnternational Security, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Summer 1992), pp. 177-198. On the latter see, of course, the academic cottage industry on bureaucratic politics, especially Graham T. Allison, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971); Morton H. Halperin with the assistance of Priscilla Clapp and Arnold Kanter, Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1974);and three critiques: Robert J. Art, ”Bureaucratic Politics and American Foreign Policy:A Critique,” Policy Sciences, Vol. 4, No. 4 (December 1973), pp. 467-490; Jonathan Bendor and Thomas H. Hammond, ”Rethinking Allison’s Models,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 86, No. 2 (June 1992), pp. 301322; and David A. Welch, ”The Organizational Process and Bureaucratic Politics Paradigms: Retrospect and Prospect,” lnternational Security, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Fall 1992), pp. 112-146. Znternutionul Security, Vol. 18, No. 1, (Summer 1993), pp. 174-207 0 1993by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 174 The End of U.S. Cold War History? I 175 Melvyn Leffler’s magisterial history of U.S. security policy in the Truman administration, A Preponderance of Power, will be widely appealing to political scientists and others grappling with issues in U.S. postwar security and foreign economic policy, not only because of its obvious virtues, but also because Leffler’s argument, grounded in realism, will be highly congenial to many. Yet, to fully appreciate this work, in the sense both of recognizing its significance and of making a judgment about it, we need to understand the style of argument and the debates that have animated Cold War historiography . From this vantage, we will be able to see better what Leffler has achieved, what choices he has made, and what problems inhere in those choices. I argue that Leffler has achieved a powerful synthesis of competing explanations of U.S. Cold War policy and has strongly elucidated U.S. grand strategy. However, his approach entails an intellectual strategy that underemphasizes the role of domestic political economic interests and political conflict in generating and shaping foreign policy decisions. Leffler’s is not an unreasonable choice, but it is problematic, and I will argue that a different strategy can, in principle, provide a more powerful explanation. A Preponderance of Power is a highly ambitious, thoughtful, and important work of scholarship, indisputably the outstanding historical synthesis of U.S. foreign policy in the early Cold War era. The scope is enormous: U.S. grand strategy under Truman in its full political, military, economic, and global dimensions. The research is prodigious. Leffler spent almost a dozen years immersed in the archival documents of the Truman period...