This study will provide a book report on Thomas G. Paterson's On Every Front: The Making and Unmaking of the Cold War. Paterson is a professor in the Department of History at the University of Connecticut, and the author and editor of twelve other books. He is the recipient of Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships, and has been the president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. The current work is a revised edition of a 1979 work, including an updating of events which transpired after that year, most notably the opening of Soviet society in the 1980s and the collapse of the Soviet Union which resulted in the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Paterson writes that he has been able to take advantage of a decade of research for his revision, learning from
international perspectives based upon declassified documents in other nations. The promising . . . opening of the Soviet record and the freer expression Soviet historians began to enjoy in the late 1980s permitted me to study afresh Soviet foreign policy (Paterson xi).
Paterson is eminently qualified to write such a book, and he has made effective use of the materials unavailable when he wrote his original work.
This book puts the Cold War, its background, its development, and its demise, into clear and concise historical perspective. As the author notes, in order to understand the end of the Cold War, it is first necessary to understand its beginnings. Paterson writes that the end of the Cold War has set an agenda for the world just as much as the Cold War did when it was active:
Like a huge glacier, the Cold War had imposed a distinct topography on international relations; its retreat exposed a scarred, debris-littered landscape much in need of repair and redefinition. Historical memories of the Cold War era guided the creation of a new world order. Past, present, and future, as always, fus...