Word: ulam
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Actually, Russia wanted a bit more in Cuba, Ulam maintains. In the forties, Germany--and to a lesser degree. Japan--had loomed as the major threat. But by the sixties, another villain had walked on stage. One of the great ironies of history is that the Communist victory in China, which Americans eyed as an unprecedented calamity, turned out to be an even greater blow for the Communist comrades in the Soviet Union. By 1962, the Soviets feared China as much as Germany, China, along with Germany, was the target of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty that Khruschchev hoped would emerge...
...scramble out backwards. The German question was never resolved. For once, America had been firm: but whereas in the past, firmness would have produced material rewards, in 1962 the U.S. pushed the world to the brink of the apocalypse and came out with little to show for it. If Ulam is right, and the Russians were after a treaty, we might all be better off had the ploy worked. The only beneficiary was Kennedy's prestige, and an assassin's bullet the following year made that gain negligible...
What could the U.S. have won? What did she want? Ulam's depiction of the Soviet side of the coin is perceptive and imaginative. His analysis of the thrust of American policy is confused and disingenuous...
...Kennanist, Ulam believes that a fuzzy idealism fogs American objectives. He is surely correct in thinking that popular sentiments in a democratic state can have an important influence on policy decisions. But on the other hand, public opinion is largely molded by society's portrayal of facts. Often the interests, if not the motives, of people and government coincide. For example, Ulam chides the U.S. for her rigid anti-imperialism in the late forties. He blames it on idealism, on "the Americans' real incomprehension as to what the international order is or could be in this sinful and complex world...
Pretty intricate issues. Ulam ignores them. By studying "good intentions" in a vacuum, he misses the drift of American foreign policy. His "analysis" of Vietnam is typically shallow and absurd. Contradicting the consensus of past and present critics (including such men as President Eisenhower). Ulam contends that Ngo Dinh Diem would have won had elections been held in 1956. "It is a testimony not so much to his undemocratic propensities as to his political clumsiness, one should think, that Diem did not insist on having elections," he writes. What evidence has he for this astonishing conclusion? "The partition of Vietnam...