Word: americanizing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...other nation embraced the tenets of liberal diplomacy with the enthusiasm of the United States...[But] liberal diplomacy ran counter to the deepest convictions of the Soviet leaders...The persistence at nuclear negotiations in the Eisenhower years, at least on the American side, was inspired by more than the hope of seizing an advantage in the conflict between East and West...
...Mandelbaum, the United States, whether demanding international control of nuclear arms, or bilateral restraint in their deployment, always acted from the purest of motives. And always the United States stands as an awesome benevolent entity facing the inscrutable and probably evil Soviet Bear. Mandelbaum sees American leadership as identical to America and thus assumes that their directions and motives reflect the unanimous sentiment of the American people...
...belief that the world was rife with commies had no impact on U.S. military strategy. Presumably the Korean war raised no questions about the use of nuclear weapons; Mandelbaum asserts only that Eisenhower's veiled references to The Bomb helped end the war. Presumably, in writing the history of American strategic thought in the last three decades, the Vietnam war is worth no more than a paragraph of simplistic analysis; for Mandelbaum the war was "first a laboratory...then a full-fledged war, and finally a national disaster...
...still believes, it seems from this book, that policy development is a coherent, discrete process; that America of the 40s and 50s was a disinterested defender of democracy and world peace; that America as a whole could be considered as a whole; that consensus still reigned in American politics in the crucial years of the nuclear debate...
This book, however, is more than just a reflection of that myth; it is an attempt to shore up its sagging walls. So Mandelbaum revives in over 200 pages a picture of American government that no longer plays even in Peoria. The Vietnam War happened for the rest of us, if not for Mandelbaum, and some of the basic ideas handed to generations of Gov. 40 veterans no longer ring true...