Using extensive materials from both published and private sources, this concise text focuses on U.S./Soviet diplomacy to explain the causes and consequences of the Cold War. The thesis allows for use of anecdote and quotation to exemplify the policies.

Thirty years after the Soviet Union’s collapse, this book reveals how tensions between America, NATO, and Russia transformed geopolitics in the decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall “The most engaging and carefully documented account of this period in East-West diplomacy currently available.”—Andrew Moravscik, Foreign Affairs Not one inch. With these words, Secretary of State James Baker proposed a hypothetical bargain to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev after the fall of the Berlin Wall: if you let your part of Germany go, we will move NATO not one inch eastward. Controversy erupted almost immediately over this 1990 exchange—but more important was the decade to come, when the words took on new meaning. Gorbachev let his Germany go, but Washington rethought the bargain, not least after the Soviet Union’s own collapse in December 1991. Washington realized it could not just win big but win bigger. Not one inch of territory needed to be off limits to NATO. On the thirtieth anniversary of the Soviet collapse, this book uses new evidence and interviews to show how, in the decade that culminated in Vladimir Putin’s rise to power, the United States and Russia undermined a potentially lasting partnership. Prize-winning historian M. E. Sarotte shows what went wrong.

Using extensive materials from both published and private sources, this text focuses on US/Soviet diplomacy to explain the causes and consequences of the Cold War. It identifies major policy-makers and explores major crises in the post-1945 period. The author also looks at how the Cold War was shaped by domestic events in both the USA and Soviet Union. Material new to this edition includes: a rewritten post-1989 final chapter; the rewriting of the events in the 1950s, the Lyndon Johnson presidency and the Reagan presidential years; and a stronger focus on Soviet/Russian developments.

"During the American Civil War, Secretary of State William Seward predicted that Russia and the United States would confront one another on the plains of Eastern Asia--and they did in the 1890s. The rivalry of these two great nation-states heightened when the Russian Revolution added a different ideological dimension to the struggle. The Cold War is the result of that past--and the dilemmas of Soviet and American foreign policies today have a half-century of history behind them. America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945-1966 examines the foreign policies of both countries in this historical setting. Professor LeFeber concentrates on two key periods in the Cold War--the first is the period from 1944-1946 when the situation intensified and the second is the mid-50s when it assumed a new shape. In the events of 1945 and 1946, he finds the background for Stalin's later moves in Germany and Korea as well as for the American policies which resulted in the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and NATO. In the mid-50s, both American and Russian foreign policies began to pivot away from their focus on Europe and became concerned with the newly-emerging nations. Professor LaFeber analyzes not only the policies of both the United States and Russia but also domestic sources for these policies. For the United States, he has used extensively the newly-opened papers of John Foster Dulles as well as the papers of Harry S. Truman, Bernard Baruch, William Clayton and others who were actively involved in U.S. policy decisions."--Dust jacket.

“A creative, carefully researched, and incisive analysis of U.S. strategy during the long struggle against the Soviet Union.” —Stephen M. Walt, Foreign Policy “Craig and Logevall remind us that American foreign policy is decided as much by domestic pressures as external threats. America’s Cold War is history at its provocative best.” —Mark Atwood Lawrence, author of The Vietnam War The Cold War dominated world affairs during the half century following World War II. America prevailed, but only after fifty years of grim international struggle, costly wars in Korea and Vietnam, trillions of dollars in military spending, and decades of nuclear showdowns. Was all of that necessary? In this new edition of their landmark history, Campbell Craig and Fredrik Logevall engage with recent scholarship on the late Cold War, including the Reagan and Bush administrations and the collapse of the Soviet regime, and expand their discussion of the nuclear revolution and origins of the Vietnam War. Yet they maintain their original argument: that America’s response to a very real Soviet threat gave rise to a military and political system in Washington that is addicted to insecurity and the endless pursuit of enemies to destroy. America’s Cold War speaks vividly to debates about forever wars and threat inflation at the center of American politics today.

The United States is a nation in crisis. While Washington’s ability to address our most pressing challenges has been rendered nearly impotent by ongoing partisan warfare, we face an array of foreign-policy crises for which we seem increasingly unprepared. Among these, none is more formidable than the unprecedented partnership developing between Russia and China, suspicious neighbors for centuries and fellow Communist antagonists during the Cold War. The two longtime foes have drawn increasingly close together because of a confluence of geostrategic, political, and economic interests—all of which have a common theme of diminishing, subverting, or displacing American power. While America’s influence around the world recedes—in its military and diplomatic power, in its political leverage, in its economic might, and, perhaps most dangerously, in the power and appeal of its ideas—Russia and China have seen their influence increase. From their support for rogue regimes such as those in Iran, North Korea, and Syria to their military and nuclear buildups to their aggressive use of cyber warfare and intelligence theft, Moscow and Beijing are playing the game for keeps. Meanwhile America, pledged to “leading from behind,” no longer does much leading at all. In The Russia-China Axis, Douglas E. Schoen and Melik Kaylan systematically chronicle the growing threat from the Russian-Chinese Axis, and they argue that only a rebirth of American global leadership can counter the corrosive impact of this antidemocratic alliance, which may soon threaten the peace and security of the world.