The Free World Colossus: A Critique of American Foreign Policy in the Cold War (American Century Series)

By David Horowitz

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0809001071
• ISBN13: 9780809001071
• Release Date: January 1971
• Publisher: Hill and Wang
• Length: 465 Pages
• Weight: 1.13 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A brilliant book by a.............Oh nevermind

The author published this book in 1965 and revised it in 1971. The edition which I just completed reading was the former. The author writes with clear and graceful English and shows extraordinary good sense and perception with a wide variety of immense and credible documentation. This is not the greatest left critique of American cold war foreign policy ever written but there are streches where it very much seems that it is. The author shows very clearly the origins of the Cold war. It had always been the announced intention of the Western powers to destroy the Soviet Union. With the United States aquring virtually unchallenged and unprecedented world power after World War II it viewed the Soviets as its primary rival. The Soviet Union was occupying Eastern Europe through which it had been invaded three times in the preceeding decades, the latest of course being the immensely barbaric Nazi occupation. The Soviets hoped to neutralise Germany's military capacity and hoped to acquire immense reparations to help themselves rebuild. American loans of course, came with alot of strings attached, especially with regard to economic policies. The Americans refrained from discussing any sort of mutual withdrawl from occupied territories with the Soviets. They rebuffed Soviet efforts at mutual disarmament (or accepted then rebuffed as in 1955) prefering to have "Open skies" inspections whereby the U.S. could fly its U-2's over Russian territory unimpeded as it kept producing more sophisticated and lethal nuclear weapons. As the Soviets reduced their military arsenal and manpower the Americans increased theirs, helping to fuel the arms race. The theory was articulated George Kennan "Mr. X": the Soviet Union is incapable of negotiating with (which is to say succumbing to each and every U.S. demand), therefore it must be "contained" i.e. in large part meaning effecting its gradual weakening and hopeful destruction. In reality U.S. policies and actions (one example being announcing the Truman doctrine while the Western foreign ministers were meeting with Molotov in Moscow) tended to strengthen the most reactionary elements in the Soviet Union and its satellites and delay and weaken any movements towards liberalization; the Stalinization of Eastern Europe began in the months after the Truman doctrine was announced. This was recognized by a few elite intellectuals and planners like Walter Lipmann and later George Kennan himself and "containment," would eventually be moderated somewhat later due to changing conditions of U.S. power vis a vis the Soviets. The author also engages in extensive and important though not very profound discussion about the true intentions about U.S. fulminations about communist totalitarianism. The U.S., of course, used alleged Soviet expansionism as an excuse to block revolutions away from the misery of the vast majority of the populations of the third world, away from the right wing status quo. The British and then the Americans reins