Word: nuclear
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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...
...because nuclear strategy was developed by wise men in accordance with the wise and ancient principles of diplomacy and war, the real world does not intrude. Mandelbaum turns to Clauswitz, his hero, for a pigeonhole in which to sequester all the troublesome events of the last three decades, and uncovers the concept of "friction...
Hence, the rabid anti communism of the late 40s and 50s never appears in this book; presumably the widely-held 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...
Well thank you for letting us know. Actually most of what happened since 1945 is given short shrift in this book as Mandelbaum focuses on the strategic role played by Kennedy and McNamara in the nuclear debate. But though Mandelbaum manages to give a fairly competent review of the bare bones of the strategic disputes of the Kennedy administration, he persists in understanding policy development as the province of a very few, very talented men. Thank heaven for the best and the brightest...