Foreign policy scholar Robert Kagan has a new book, The World America Made, and surprise, surprise he’s out on the speech circuit promoting it. Below is a video of Mr. Kagan being interviewed by David Gregory of Meet the Press and semi-debated by New York Times columnist David Brooks:

Kagan, like another historian/foreign policy scholar Walter Russell Mead who I admire, is an optimist when it comes to the United States hanging on to its position as the leader of liberal, free market world order. Though Kagan does come at his optimism from a sober, realist vantage point. For instance, he argues, that sure the US faces a partisan political environment that seems incapable of finding solutions to difficult problems, but to Kagan this is ‘what’s new!’ And he has a strong point as American history is full of partisan bickering over what now seem like slam dunk policy decisions and strategic visions. I’ve read all of Kagan’s previous major works, with Dangerous Nation and Of Paradise and Power truly masterful works, and I look forward to reading and reviewing his latest.

I just spent my Saturday morning doing some solid nerding. By that I mean, I read two great articles about that rising behemoth, China. The first was ‘China’s Bumpy Road Ahead by international consultant and geopolitical analyst Ian Bremmer. Bremmer, has a blog at Foreign Policy that features many guest writers and covers impactful global events, has been a long time favorite of mine and his pieces are always informative and usually provide a long term strategic outlook. (You might say Bremmer is brimming with insight!) His ‘Bumpy Road’ article is no different as it attempts to temper the conventional wisdom that China’s rise and eventual replacement of the United States as a world power is a slam dunk, home run, and another American sports cliche. Bremmer makes a compelling list of the challenges the Middle Kingdom has to still overcome, including:

this is a country that measures its annual supply of large-scale protests in the tens of thousands. For 2006, China’s Academy of Social Sciences reported the eruption of about 60,000 “mass group incidents,” an official euphemism for demonstrations of public anger involving at least 50 people. In 2007, the number jumped to 80,000. Though such figures are no longer published, a leak put the number for 2008 at 127,000. Today, it is almost certainly higher.

There is certainly no credible evidence that China is on the brink of an unforeseen crisis, but all that public anger points to enormous challenges on the road ahead. Emerging powers like India, Brazil and Turkey can continue to grow for the next 10 years with the same basic formula that sparked growth over the past 10. China, on the other hand, must undertake enormously complex and ambitious reforms to continue its drive to become a modern power, and the country’s leadership knows it.

The financial crisis made clear that China’s dependence for growth on the purchasing power of consumers in America, Europe and Japan creates a dangerous vulnerability.

A few weeks ago, I highlighted Henry Kissinger’s excerpt of his new book ‘On China’, which I was surprised to learn was about China. Have you stopped laughing? Good, I’ll continue. Well, I found an excellent review of Kissinger’s latest book by Zachary Keck from E-International Relations. Keck does a reader friendly, old fashioned book review where he smoothly intertwines Kissinger’s prior books and IR philosophies as well as other major works on the topic with ‘On China’. Keck was as impressed as I was with Kissinger’s emphasis and ‘ability to portray [the] mindset’ of various Chinese leaders:

Although China’s offensive deterrence is borne out of geopolitical realities, Kissinger does not overlook the importance of individual leaders. Indeed, one of the most noteworthy parts of the book is Kissinger’s intense focus on the nature of individual leaders and his ability to illustrate the dilemmas they faced. Given his nearly unprecedented access to a vast range of high-ranking officials on both sides of the relationship, Kissinger is uniquely qualified to tell this history. In doing so, Kissinger allows the reader to “look over the shoulder” of the statesmen in the best traditions of Classical Realism.

Overall, Kissinger portrays leaders in both countries in a fairly positive manner. This is especially true with American Presidents and occasionally their advisers (most notably, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Winston Lord), whom Kissinger finds little to criticize.

Although similar in many respects to his portrayals of American leaders, ultimately Kissinger’s accounts of their Chinese counterparts are more interesting. Kissinger clearly understands the difficult conundrums Chinese leaders often face when weighing the importance of good relations with the United States against domestic political considerations.  Kissinger’s ability to put the reader in the minds of Chinese officials is the aspect of the book that will likely be the most enticing to current and future diplomats dealing with China.

Keck ends his review with an analysis of the current battle between Republican Party’s two main foreign policy schools: Realists vs. Neoconservatives. Keck is more sympathetic to Kissinger’s realism-based view of a rising China, arguing that at this moment, it provides the ‘best prospects for peace’.

I enjoyed my ‘China’s Rise’ morning of nerdy reading, now it’s your turn. Get to those articles!

Gen. Washington and the Continental Army crossing the Delaware

I began my preparations for this year’s July 4th celebration about a month ago when I started reading David McCullough’s ‘1776‘. This was hardly difficult work as the book was a breeze to read and all I needed to prepare for was to eat hot dogs, drink beer, and love my country. That is an easy check, check, check for me. Of course, the fact that I get to have such a wonderful and carefree celebration is due to the sacrifices of so many. Hundreds of thousands of Americans will celebrate today’s 4th overseas, with many in harms way. American history is full of troubled times and events that tested our freedom, security, and way of life. It may be tough to say with a straight face, but freedom isn’t free, and it isn’t a buck o’ five either.

Our country’s Founding Fathers where aware of this and they risked life and limb in order to free the United States from her mother England. Though it is true that almost all of the Founding Fathers who signed the Declaration of Independence were from well-to-do backgrounds, many of them lent their arms on the battle field of the Revolutionary War and all of them stuck their figurative and literal necks out when they signed the Declaration. McCullough’s engaging and substantive overview of the tumultuous first year of the Revolutionary War provides a multitude of examples of bravery and devotion by General George Washington, many of his lieutenants, the Continental Congress, and thousands of everyday citizens.

The book strictly covers the happenings of only the year 1776; basically going through the battle of Boston, New York, and ending with the Continental Army’s triumph at the Battle of Trenton. One will not find a detailed description of the writing and signing of the Declaration of Independence in ’1776′ as this is mainly a military history which also brings to light elements of the society and politics of the day. ’1776′ is a fantastic way to remind yourself that the United States just didn’t happen. Cold nights, a most formidable foe, Loyalists abounding, young and weak central governance, disease, inexperienced military soldiers and leaders (even Washington), a near non-existent navy; these were just some of the trials and obstacles standing in the way of American independence. Independence and freedom just don’t spring up out of the ground or fall from the sky. It takes tremendous sacrifice and determination, things of which our forefathers had in spades. According to McCullough, General and future President George Washington and the men he led were prime examples of this:

Financial support from France and the Netherlands, and military support from the French army and navy, would play a large part in the outcome. But in the last analysis it was Washington and the army that won the war for American independence. The fate of the war and the revolution rested on the army. The Continental Army – not the Hudson River or the possession of New York or Philadelphia – was the key to victory. And it was Washington who held the army together and gave it ‘spirit’ through the most desperate of times.

He was not a brilliant strategist or tactician, not a gifted orator, not an intellectual. At several crucial moments he had shown marked indecisiveness. He had made serious mistakes in judgement. But experience had been his great teacher from boyhood, and in this his greatest test, he learned steadily from experience. Above all, Washington never forgot what was at stake and he never gave up.

’1776′ Pg. 293

So while I’m enjoying my family, food, and fireworks today, I will have in my thoughts the brave men and women who made this day possible. Not only those who brought American independence in 1776, but those who have stood tall to defend it in the nearly 250 years since. Thank you and Happy 4th of July.

Founder and editor of National Review magazine, William Buckley, Jr. wrote his first book “God and Man at Yale” shortly after graduating from Yale University. The book was released in 1951, shortly after the Second World War ended and in the early years of the McCarthy-era. The divide between the East and West was hardening as their respective philosophies on man, capital and government duked it out.

In the United States, the East’s (e.g., U.S.S.R. most notably) biggest supporters had just enjoyed significant influence in government under FDR and his New Deal agenda. Many would find their way out of government and into academia. While many of their collectivist leanings were just as dangerous philosophically as the leaders in Moscow and Beijing, these individuals were treated as the best and brightest our country had to offer. Likely, this had a lot to do with where they were standing (here instead of Moscow).

But Yale was supposed to be different. It was a private college that had a long history of promoting individualism, critical thinking and of course, strong religious (predominantly Christian) values. These ideals were imprinted on its students and alumni, written into its charter and frequently used to embody the university and its faculty’s mission statement.

Buckley’s thesis was that, in fact, Yale had deviated from their mission statement and betrayed their founding ideals. By 1950, through faculty members, assigned textbooks and campus atmosphere, Yale was effectively preaching religious skepticism and political statism. Naturally, the reaction to Buckley’s book was unfriendly. He received enormous push back from Yale’s faculty who were under attack, an administration worried about their reputation and funding and also, the media that generally supported the teaching of collectivist/statist ideology. Indeed, one observer, Dwight MacDonald, amusingly commented that Yale’s authorities “reacted with all the grace and agility of an elephant cornered by a mouse.”

Over the first few chapters, Buckley lays out his case for why he believes atheism and collectivism have been granted a favored role in the Yale curriculum and among lectures given by the faculty. He goes in to significant detail to highlight the textbooks used and the dearth of faculty members who would consider themselves proponents of the private sector/capitalism and religion’s role in understanding the world.

Buckley’s case is quite persuasive as he discusses the range of classes and material that students would face as they go about meeting their pre-requisite courses. And while the education is delivered under a shroud of “academic freedom” – another subject that Buckley spends a good deal of time discussing – it is undeniable that the open hostility of the vast majority of faculty members toward capitalism/democracy and faith/piety greatly influence the impressionable minds of their students.

For Buckley, a stalwart of conservatism, individualism and Christian values, this is a travesty. Not merely because of the indoctrination of views contrary to his own but more importantly, because the views being taught are anathema to the founding principles and mission statement of the university and our country. Furthermore, this institution – likely representative of the education in many of the best schools around the country at that time – was producing the country’s future business leaders, judges, diplomats and political leaders.

Buckley’s fear was that the university was headed down a dangerous path that damaged the institution and failed its students. On a deeper level, though, I believe Buckley was expressing his concern for the academic direction our country was heading in as a whole.  For he thought, as goes the graduates of Yale, Harvard and Berkeley, so go – to an extent – the future of our country’s government and business leaders.

In my view, his concerns were quite prescient. The academic freedom movement quickly morphed into the cultural relativism and political correctness that has done such great damage to our educational institutions and broader culture in the last 50 years. (For more on this subject, Alan Bloom’s “Closing of the American Mind” is a must read.)

Buckley was also right about the gradual upheaval of the individualist mindset among today’s faculties across the country.  Because although communism had been discredited utterly and completely after the fall of the USSR, its younger sibling, socialism remains alive and well. Now does socialism pose the same threat as communism? No. At least not in the short term. But does its fundamental objective rely on collectivist philosophy which also underpins communism? Absolutely. This philosophy posits that an imposing, well-funded government – a group of elected politicians and unelected bureaucrats – is necessary to protect regular citizens from the evils of the free market system. It is premised on the idea that the government is better suited to make decisions for the individual than is the individual. For the government can spend the individual’s money better than he is able to spend it himself. And on and on.

At its core, collectivism looks to the redistribution of wealth to accomplish its ends. Reminiscent of the famous Marxian slogan, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” collectivism is the tie that binds socialism and communism together. Under socialism, though, its muted enough so it doesn’t offend the sensibilities of the average American as much. In this sense, it is allowed to exist and continue to permeate our culture and ideas.

As a close, I would highly endorse this book for readers interested in a thorough examination of the perilous road our academic institutions have taken us down by advocating for religious skepticism, collectivism and cultural relativism.

In Robert Kagan’s excellent piece of early American history, ‘Dangerous Nation‘, a complex picture is painted of an exceptional country, whose growth endangered societies both near and far. In ‘Nation’, Kagan in great depth profiles how the people who founded and grew the United States had to deal with an enormity of challenges of the physical (great power rivals of Europe, Native American tribes, untamed frontiers) and ideological (as a liberal republic in world of monarchies and despots) nature. The superpower we see before us today was not just born that way, it had to become one. And it was not easy!

Kagan tightly ties together the seemingly contradictory notion of a United States as both a practical realist nation and one born with a revolutionary ideology that continues to shape how it sees the world. In Kagan’s words: ‘Americans did not form a nation and then embark on a foreign policy to protect and further its interests. They began a foreign policy in order to establish themselves as a nation.’ The American liberal, democratic republic was a challenge to the monarchies of Europe and the native peoples of the American continent, but as Kagan accurately points out, back then, as well as today, the American people did not view themselves as challengers or ‘dangerous’. In fact, most Americans still believe their nation’s natural tendencies are toward ‘passivity, indifference, and insularity’. Though Kagan may be going a bit over the top here, he is basically correct in noting that Americans view themselves as much more passive than the peoples of the world perceive us. ‘Dangerous Nation’s main themes of early US foreign policy are well laid out in this paragraph:

The statesman of the founding era were not unfamiliar with the ways of power politics, however. They were idealists in the sense that they were committed to a set of universal principles, the defense and promotion of which they believed would improve the human condition as well as further American interests. But they were practical idealists. In their moment of weakness they employed the strategies of the weak. They viewed alliances as necessary but dangerous. They denigrated so called power politics and claimed an aversion to war and military power, all realms in which they were far inferior to the European great powers. They extolled the virtues of commerce, where Americans competed on a more equal plane. They appealed to international law as the best means of regulating the behavior of nations, knowing that they had not other means of constraining the great powers of Britain and France. They adjusted themselves to an unhappy reality that they knew to be very much at odds with their aspirations. They looked forward to the day when, as a more powerful nation, they might begin to shape the world to conform more closely to their ideals. Fortunately for the young United States, the world was configure in such a way as to make this possible.”

Robert Kagan’s ‘Dangerous Nation’, Page 57

Besides a general analysis of the broad themes of American foreign policy from its colonial beginnings til the Spanish-American war at the turn of the 20th century, ‘Nation’ offers in-depth coverage of several crucial inner conflicts in American history. The three most intriguing conflicts detailed were the battle between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson in guiding the nascent Republic, the foreign policy schizophrenia of slavery, and the still under emphasized great power coming out party of the Spanish-American war.

Kagan devotes three extensive chapters on how slavery affected American foreign policy and stances for most of the 19th century. This coverage showcases another one of Kagan’s main themes; the prominent influence of partisan politics affecting American foreign affairs. For example, in the section ‘Northern Containment, Southern Expansion’, Kagan describes how the interests of the southern states differed from the northern states in almost all cases of territorial expansion, including the Louisiana Purchase. This is an important lesson for those who believe that partisan politics ends at the ‘water’s edge’. This theme can be vividly seen in the domestic debates to decide if the US should go to war with Spain over Cuba, with many Republican operatives being against the war, before they were for it.

The study of the America’s early foreign policy is still lacking, but ‘Dangerous Nation’ joins WR Mead’s ‘Special Providence‘ and Merrill/Paterson’s ‘Major Problems in American Foreign Relations‘ series in bringing light to a fascinating topic.

I just finished Paul Berman’s ‘Flight of the Intellectuals‘ and while not a tour de force like its prequel, ‘Terror and Liberalism’, was a phenomenal read. I will give a full length review after my vacation (warning GPP is going on a two week travel break), but right now I will highlight to key part of the book’s conclusion. This section features Berman building his theme of Western intellectuals failing to stand up to the Islamist’s ideology, which he clearly lays out was partly fathered by European fascism, while at the same time spitting venom at actual liberal people with Muslim backgrounds, such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali. The following sections immediately follow a listing of Western intellectuals (some with Muslim backgrounds) who require bodyguards to protect them from Islamist violent radicals. The list is sadly long. Enough of me, here’s Berman:

‘And so, Salman Rushdie has metastasized into into an entire social class. It is a subset of the European intelligentsia-its Muslims free-thinking and liberal wing especially, but including other people, too, who survive only because of bodyguards and police investigations and because of their own precautions. This is unprecedented in Western Europe since the fall of the Axis. Fear-mortal fear, the fear of getting murdered by fanatics in the grip a bizarre ideology-has become, for a significant number of intellectuals and artists, a simple fact of modern life. And yet, if someone like Pascal Bruckner intones a few words about the need for courage under these circumstances, the sneers begin-”Now where have we heard that kind of thing before?”- and onward to the litany about fascism. In the New York Times Magazine Ian Buruma held back from hinting even obliquely at the genuinely fascist influences on [Tariq] Ramadan’s grandfather, the founder of the modern cult of artistic death-Hassan al-Banna, who spoke highly of Adolf Hitler and helped the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem escape from getting tried at Nuremburg. Yet Pascal Bruckner, the liberal-here is somebody, Buruma would have us think, on the brink of fascism!’….[Pg. 296]

‘The Rushdies of today find themselves under criticism, contrasted unfavorably in the very best of magazines with Tariq Ramadan, who is celebrated as a bridge between cultures-Ramadan, an alumnus of the anti-Rushdie Islamic Foundation in Britain. Ramadan, who, even in 2009, managed to commend in a single sentence of his book Radical Reform both Sheikh Qaradawi, the theologian of the human bomb, and the Egyptian sheikh Muhammad al-Ghazali, who publicly defended the assassination of Foda. And yet, if there is a menace to society, nowadays it is said to come from Hirsi Ali or some other vocal and articulate opponent of the violent sheikhs-the European intellectuals from Muslim backgrounds who, in their unforgivable departure from the child-like image of how Muslims are supposed to behave, have arrogated to themselves the right to update a few ideas from John  Locke or John Stuart Mill or Bertrand Russell. During the Rushdie affair, liberals who called for courage were applauded. Liberals from Muslim backgrounds were positively celebrated. But not today.’ [pg. 298]

Hopefully, you were able to follow Berman’s thinking in these paragraphs. If so, please give GPP your thoughts. If not, please give GPP your confused thoughts.

Teddy Roosevelt ; Power politics, Teddy Roosevelt ; Power politics, etc. What the heck do these two have in common? It turns out quite a lot. According to Edmund Morris’s Pulitzer Prize-winning ‘The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt’, America’s 26th president was an ambitious man who strongly believed the United States should claim its rightful place as a power among nations and helped makes this come to fruition around the turn of the 20th century. ‘Rise’, which is the first of what is expected to be a 3 volume set, does not even cover a day of Roosevelt’s presidency (covered in ‘Theodore Rex’), but much can be learned about the US as a rising power by following the triumphant rise of Theodore the student, rancher, state legislator, colonel, Governor, and Teddy the Vice President. In fact, Morris portrays Roosevelt’s rise to power and greatness as inevitable and it is not too far fetched to believe that the reader should see Ol’ Teddy as a metaphor for the United States as a whole.

“No triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumphs of war”

Growing up in New York City, Theodore Roosevelt came from a privileged background and was also able to travel to Britain, all over Europe, North Africa, and the Levant in his youth. He had an affinity for naval history throughout his life and fostered a close friendship with none other than Alfred Thayer Mahan, probably the most influential naval strategist in modern times. Mahan promoted a strong navy, which would be used as a projection of power tool in global affairs and Roosevelt couldn’t agree more. Roosevelt would serve as Assistant Secretary of the Navy under President McKinley and helped put this policy into practice.

However, Roosevelt’s stay in Department of the Navy was short lived as much to his delight the United States was to enter a war with Spain over the Spanish-controlled colonies of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines. This was to be the Spanish-American war of 1898 and after a clear American victory, the United States not only found itself with imperial colonies of its own, but also as a great power player that would not leave the world stage ever again (while at least up until 2010). Roosevelt, besides being a major hawk pushing for the war, helped train and lead the eccentric military regiment, the so-called Rough Riders, into the successful defeat of the Spanish in Cuba. The pathetic details of the lack of training and professionalism of the whole American military at this time, especially the Rough Riders, is hard to believe. At the time, the US was anything but a well-polished military machine. Without a professional army, groups like the Rough Riders, a mix of western cowboys and Harvard intellectuals, had to created, drilled, and organized along with other fighting units in a very short period. Nevertheless, despite some setbacks, Roosevelt’s Rough Riders (march on San Juan Hill) and the American Navy (clearly outclassed the Spaniards in the Pacific) showed itself more than a match for a fading Spanish power. That’s great powers for ya, either you’re up or you’re down.

“It is through strife, or the readiness for strife, that a nation must win greatness”

To cover the ‘Speak softly, Carry a big stick’ presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, I’ll have to get through ‘Theodore Rex’, which is on my bookshelf right now (right next to The Onion’s ‘Our Dumb World’). Ironically, the bombastic, always looking for a challenge Teddy Roosevelt had a rather peaceful two-terms as president. Morris’s ‘Rise’ was an intriguing, in-depth look (almost 800 pages) at one America’s greatest men and one can’t help but come away with a more clear picture of a nation coming into it’s own on the world stage.

The Hawk and the Dove is a compelling and accessible dual biography of Cold War strategists Paul Nitze and George Kennan.  Nicholas Thompson, the author, is Nitze’s grandson, but Thompson doesn’t allow this familiar attachment to cloud his objectivity.  Instead, Thompson respectfully analyzes, compares, and contrasts the views held by Nitze and Kennan throughout their lives.

As Thompson readily admits in the book’s introduction, “[n]either of these idiosyncratic and original men conformed exactly to the hawk and dove labels, of course.”  Kennan, the alleged dove, thought the U.S. should have gone to war over the Iran hostage crisis and once wrote, “Perhaps the whole idea of world peace has been a premature, unworkable grandiose form of daydreaming…” Nitze, the alleged hawk, rejected SIOP-62, which advocated obliterating the Soviet Union after a Soviet attack, favoring “flexible response,” in which the U.S. would respond proportionately and hopefully avoid a broader conflict.  Sometimes Nitze and Kennan’s policy prescriptions were actually in synch.  Both helped create the Marshall Plan, both supported U.S. involvement in the Korean War and opposed crossing the 38th parallel, and both opposed the Vietnam War relatively early in the conflict.

Thompson even argues that Kennan and Nitze deliberately constructed fictional personas, a phenomenon demonstrated by the Nitze-Kennan disagreement over the nature of containment.  Kennan, who prescribed containment in his Long Telegram and his Foreign Affairs X article, believed the tools of containment should be primarily economic and political.  Nitze, in NSC-68, which he co-authored, favored militaristic containment, advocating a massive conventional arms build-up.  However, as Thompson probes deeper, the line between the hawk and the dove blurs.  Thompson notes that Nitze based his NSC-68 arguments on a paper Kennan had penned.  Also, in the 1970’s, Kennan was trying to portray himself as a proponent of peace and began to actively suppress documents that might lead people to believe that he supported militaristic containment. Kennan was not as dovish as he claimed.

However, Thompson does not intend for his book’s title to be ironic.  Despite the aforementioned hawk-and-dove line-blurring, Thompson hopes to draw a sharp contrast between Kennan and Nitze.  In Thompson’s narrative, the two strategists drift slowly away from one another, and the bifurcation reaches its apogee in the late 1970’s, “when nuclear weapons haunted every element of America’s foreign policy, Nitze and Kennan seemed to agree on nothing.  Now they truly became the hawk and the dove.”  But Thompson struggles to back this claim.  He notes that in the early 1980’s Kennan advocated a 50% reduction in nuclear stockpiles and a two-thirds reduction in arsenal size.  However, he also writes earlier that Nitze, participating in the second round of SALT talks under Nixon, advocated proposing a 40% reduction in nuclear arsenal size.  Furthermore, Nitze believed Kennan’s 1980’s proposal could work, as long as the “throw weight” factor was taken into consideration. Such examples lead the reader to wonder if Thompson has merely bought into the fiction of the hawk-dove distinction.

Thompson also examines the Nitze-Kennan disagreement over the nature of America, and this debate actually proves more compelling than the hawk-dove distinction.  Thompson successfully traces Kennan’s authoritarian bent throughout his career.  Kennan wrote an essay in the 1930’s about the positive aspects of authoritarianism and wrote in the 1950’s that the West “could be saved from itself only by 50 years of benevolent dictatorship which would, like a doctor, restore the patient to a reasonable state of origin and then put him on his own again.”  Freed from the constraints of U.S. idealism, Kennan could see the flaws in American democracy.  He once compared democracy to a “prehistoric monster,” for “[h]e is slow to wrath – in fact, you practically have to whack his tail off to make him aware that his interests are being disturbed; but, once he grasps this, he lays about him with such blind determination that he not only destroys his adversary but largely wrecks his native habitat.”  Nitze, on the other hand, could not see such problems as clearly.  Pondering Japanese conduct in World War II on his way to visit the devastation of Hiroshima, Nitze concluded that the Japanese were “the most hateful of all people on earth.”  The irony of such a statement, made en route to a site where the U.S. killed tens of thousands of civilians, is lost on Nitze, but made clear to the reader by Thompson.  Nitze was so enamored by his country that he could not see its flaws.

On the question of the U.S.’s moral superiority, Thompson keeps to his usual objectivity, flirting with both sides of the argument.  At times, Thompson paints the Soviet Union as the U.S.’s foil.  For example, he contrasts Joseph McCarthy’s hearings over Robert Oppenheimer’s alleged communist activities with the Soviet Union’s execution of Lavrenti Beria.  Oppenheimer was an intellectual who opposed the hydrogen bomb.  Beria was a torturer and a rapist who found himself embroiled in a power struggle in the wake of Stalin’s death.  Oppenheimer faced harsh congressional hearings and had his security clearance revoked.  Beria was executed with a pistol.  With this example Thompson insinuates that McCarthyism, though unfortunate, was far more civil than parallel struggles in the Soviet Union.  However, Thompson finds frequent similarities between U.S. and Soviet foreign policy.  Both countries were willing to do whatever it would take to win the Cold War, no matter the moral costs, and were thus moral peers.  Thompson leaves his readers to draw their own conclusions about where they fall on the realism-idealism spectrum.

The Nitze-Kennan disagreements are a useful lens through which to examine America’s rise to global prominence after World War II.  As John Lewis Gaddis notes on the book’s back cover, Kennan and Nitze were “the Adams and Jefferson of the Cold War.”  Though their disagreements did not always result in drastically different policy prescriptions, their contrasting worldviews present two very different ways to approach international politics.

Rob Grace blogs for the Foreign Policy Association at http://lawandsecurity.foreignpolicyblogs.com.  He has an MA in International Relations from NYU and a BA in Drama from Vassar College.  He is also an award-winning playwright whose work has been produced around the globe.

If you want to become immersed with human tragedy and destruction this holiday season, I strongly recommend Antony Beevor’s history of the Soviet invasion of the Third Reich, culminating in the fall of Berlin, in his excellent work, ‘The Fall of Berlin: 1945‘. Beevor is a fine writer and historian, who wrote a similarly styled book ‘Stalingrad’ in the 1990s and just recently came out with a work telling the story of the Normandy invasion on D-Day. The guy has World War II running through his veins.

Speaking of veins, ‘The Fall of Berlin’ is a visceral reminder that bloody wars for territory, power, and ideology are not that far back in Western civilization’s history, just decades folks. President Obama offered a reminder of this fact in his Nobel address, including a reference that there is ‘evil’ in this world. Beevor’s ‘Fall’ in meticulous fashion (431 pages), describes the Soviet armies, led by General Zhukov, advance starting in Russian territory all the way to the brutal onslaught of Berlin. However, the main thrust of the book are the battles over East Prussia and the Third Reich’s capitol. If one is looking for the American, British, etc. assault on Germany from the West this is not the book for you. Beevor’s description of the invasion of East Prussia largely focuses on the Soviet and civilian side of the matter, as I found myself at time at a loss as to where and what the Nazi armies were at and doing. This was one of the only serious flaws of the book, as I found it difficult, even with a large group of maps presented at the book’s beginning, to picture whole army movements and strategies, especially on the German side. In contrast, the details of individual groups and soldiers’ actions were extremely well told and vivid.

Though Beevor portrays no sympathy toward the Nazi leadership in elite, he also holds nothing back in describing the ruthless nature of Soviet military and political leadership in getting revenge from against the Third Reich and conquering for the motherland all the territories in its path. Beevor spends a great deal of time bringing to light the immense instances of rape against German women during the assault. He paints a picture of a German society, specifically all of East Prussia which Stalin reportedly wanted wiped off the face of the earth, being destroyed and abused from every angle, much like the Nazi’s own invasion of Russia just a couple years back. East Prussian villages and citizens who had been in existence for centuries were first looted and then burned to the ground, with the plan that they were never to be rebuilt.

The fall of the Reichstag

The actual ‘fall’ of Berlin is told in exhaustive detail, with the military, political, societal, moral and psychological aspects all getting ample attention. Beevor paints the American military and political leadership as naive, as he argues that Stalin successful downplayed the importance of Berlin and the Soviet’s postwar plans to dominate all of Eastern Europe. A major theme of the war’s final days is the tremendous desire of all Germans to surrender to the Americans, British, etc., anybody but the Soviets. It is accurate to say that death was preferable to Soviet capture for many Germans, from Hitler and Goebbels down to civilian women, as suicide was another major theme that ran through the book. It of course is a bitterly ironic story. Hitler and the Nazis wanted to bring the German nation to the zenith of mankind and instead in many ways destroyed it. A suicide one might say.

In short, GPP highly recommends Beevor’s ‘The Fall of Berlin: 1945′ as a serious work of one of the most important and tragic events in great power politics and human history. I’ll leave you with one of the book’s closing lines as Beevor enters the mind of a surviving Soviet soldier after the war:

‘They needed to digest what had happened during all those moments when they had not dared to think too much. There was no doubt that what they had been through was the most important period not just of their own lives, but also of world history.’