America, Russia & the Cold War

LaFeber focuses on the role of the United States in the Cold War, but he cannot be said to be a biased reporter. He tries to discover the causes and effects of the Cold War from both sides, and he does this effectively, without blaming either side. He shows how the Cold War actually had its origins in the last century, when the United States and Russia met, one expanding westward and the other expanding eastward. Both sides in the Cold War had their own mixed motivations for their part in the conflict, which LaFeber sees as the result of blunders and misperceptions on both sides.

LaFeber's most important conclusion is that the Cold War has come to an end, and that the leaders of the world must be careful to ensure that the post-Cold War world is not worse than the Cold War world:

The Russian and the American, once bitterly locked in Cold war, now agreed that if the world's people did not use "their minds" to solve the growing . . . problems [of the world], then . . . they . . . could too easily resort to . . . "the law of our members" (355).

In other words, LaFeber is saying that unless the lessons of the Cold War are learned and applied to the "New World Order," the disruptions and wars around the world will be

. . .
d flourish, and for keeping it going through misleading rhetoric aimed at their own people and at the world. For example, he exposes Truman's deception in scaring the American people after World War II at a time when the Soviets were too wounded to pose a threat. However, on the other hand, he seems to paint an historical picture in which the Cold War appears to have been inevitable. Perhaps that is LaFeber's point---that there is a certain amount of "inevitability" in such a huge phenomenon as the Cold War, but at the same time leaders do have a certain amount of freedom in the way they respond to that "inevitability." In any case, both sides' leaders seem to have taken almost every opportunity to escalate the tension. Neither side trusted the other, and they had had different conflicts between them for over half a century, even before the United States took action to prevent the success of the 1917 Russian Revolution. One conclusion of Lafeber's book is that the economic, political, strategic, ideological and military aspects of each side's involvement were so intertwined that once the Cold War was under way in earnest, stopping it was impossible. Each side by that time simply had too much invested in too many ways to try to
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1611
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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