History and Strategy

by Marc Trachtenberg

Overview

This work is a powerful demonstration of how historical analysis can be brought to bear on the study of strategic issues, and, conversely, how strategic thinking can help drive historical research. Based largely on newly released American archives, History and Strategy focuses on the twenty years following World War II. By bridging the sizable gap between the intellectual world of historians and that of strategists and political scientists, the essays here present a fresh and unified view of how to explore international politics in the nuclear era. The book begins with an overview of strategic thought in America from 1952 through 1966 and ends with a discussion of "making sense" of the nuclear age. Trachtenberg reevaluates the immediate causes of World War I, studies the impact of the shifting nuclear balance on American strategy in the early 1950s, examines the relationship between the nuclearization of NATO and U.S.-West European relations, and looks at the Berlin and the Cuban crises. He shows throughout that there are startling discoveries to be made about events that seem to have been thoroughly investigated.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691217987
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	09/01/2020
Series:	Studies in Intellectual History and the History of Philosophy , #1
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	577 KB

Table of Contents

	Preface	vii
Chapter 1	Strategic Thought in America, 1952-1966	3
Chapter 2	The Coming of the First World War: A Reassessment	47
Chapter 3	A "Wasting Asset": American Strategy and the Shifting Nuclear Balance, 1949-1954	100
Chapter 4	The Nuclearization of NATO and U.S.-West European Relations	153
Chapter 5	The Berlin Crisis	169
Chapter 6	The Influence of Nuclear Weapons in the Cuban Missile Crisis	235
Chapter 7	Making Sense of the Nuclear Age	261
Appendix	Key to Abbreviations in Chapter Five	287
	Index	289