Review of Norman A. Graebner, Richard Dean Burns, and Joseph M. Siracusa. America and the Cold War, 1941-1991: A Realist Interpretation, 2 vols. (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010). H-Diplo/ISSF Roundtable Forum 1:6 (2010), 17-28. (original) (raw)
Related papers
Rethinking early Cold War United States foreign policy : the road to militarisation
2016
This thesis rethinks the foundations of US foreign policy determination in the early Cold War period. In opposition to approaches in IR which privilege an ‘external’ realm of causation, it focuses on the domestic bases for foreign policy formation. Having started by reviewing historiographical debates on US foreign policy and US foreign economic policy, the thesis moves on to critique some of the existing ways the US foreign policy has been theorised in IR. The thesis then develops a theoretical and conceptual stance, drawing on a range of different literatures. Within IR, it places itself within the tradition of Marxist Historical Sociology. At the level of macro-history, this places the reconstruction of US foreign policy within broader world historical process of the development of capitalism within the political form of the nation-state and state system, and ongoing spatialisation strategies that states form in order to manage capitalist spatial politics. This macro perspective ...
Realism and the End of the Cold War
International Security, 1994
as a reaction to the breakdown of the post-World I M o d e r n realism began War I international order in the 1930s. The collapse of great-power cooperation after World War I1 helped establish it as the dominant approach to the theory and practice of international politics in the United States. During the Cold War, efforts to displace realism from its dominant position were repeatedly thwarted by the continued salience of the US.-Soviet antagonism: although indirect, the connection between events and theory was undeniable. Now, the U.S.-Soviet antagonism is history. Suddenly, unexpectedly, and with hardly a shot fired in anger, Russian power has been withdrawn from the Elbe to the Eurasian steppe. A central question faces students and practitioners of international politics. Do the rapid decline and comparatively peaceful collapse of the Soviet state, and with it the entire postwar international order, discredit the realist approach?
This paper tests the explanatory power of the main strands of neoclassical realism in accounting for US foreign policy after the Cold War. According to the emphasis they place on the relevance of structural versus non-structural variables in foreign policy making, three schools can be identified. The first school restricts the role of non-structural factors to accounting for anomalous behavior; the second school argues that non-structural variables should also be included in order to understand the policy's timing and style, and, in times of security plenty, its content; while the third school contends that it is international structural factors, i.e. a state's strategic interactions with other polities, that shape most foreign policy. Following the test of their forecasts versus the historical record, the third school emerges as providing the most accurate account and as the most promising avenue of research for neoclassical realism.