The Lost Peace: Leadership in a Time of Horror and Hope, 1945-1953

by Robert Dallek

Overview

"Robert Dallek brings to this majestic work a profound understanding of history, a deep engagement in foreign policy, and a lifetime of studying leadership. The story of what went wrong during the postwar period…has never been more intelligently explored." —Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Team of Rivals

Robert Dalleck follows his bestselling Nixon and Kissenger: Partners in Power and An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963 with this masterful account of the crucial period that shaped the postwar world. As the Obama Administration struggles to define its strategy for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Dallek's critical and compelling look at Truman, Churchill, Stalin, and other world leaders in the wake of World War II not only offers important historical perspective but provides timely insight on America's course into the future.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062016713
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	10/19/2010
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	451
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Robert Dallek is the author of An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963 and Nixon and Kissinger, among other books. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic Monthly, and Vanity Fair. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

Introduction 1

Part I A Wilderness Called Peace

1 London, Moscow, and Washington: Friends in Need 15

2 From Tehran to Roosevelt's Death 45

3 Collapse and Renewal 68

4 Hope and Despair 107

5 Irrepressible Conflicts? 146

6 The Triumph of Fear 179

Part II State of War

7 Cold War Illusions-and Realities 211

8 War by Other Means 241

9 The Military Solution 271

10 Limited War 301

11 Elusive Peace 333

Epilogue 363

Acknowledgments 371

Notes 373

Bibliography 395

Index 401

What People are Saying About This

Doris Kearns Goodwin

“Robert Dallek brings to this majestic work a profound understanding of history, a deep engagement in foreign policy, and a lifetime of studying leadership. This seminal work deserves widespread attention.”

Editorial Reviews

After WWII, the most destructive war in history, everyone yearned for a better world. Veteran historian Dallek (Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power) delivers a shrewd analysis of why world leaders failed to deliver it. Reviewing postwar crises--Soviet occupation of eastern Europe, the creation of Israel, India's independence, France's occupation of Indochina, China's civil war, the Korean War--Dallek sadly concludes that the Allies misread history, eschewing anything that smacked of appeasement, treating opponents, mostly the U.S.S.R., as they should have treated Hitler. Without attempting to rehabilitate Stalin, Dallek asserts that Western leaders managed to push all his paranoid buttons. Notwithstanding their conviction that he aimed to conquer the world, Stalin was no apostle of world revolution but a conventional nationalist obsessed with protecting Russia's borders and maintaining his own power. Despite repeated painful experiences and immense expense, traditional, pugnacious power politics proved irresistible (except, ironically, to WWII's losers, Germany and Japan), Dallek concludes in this perceptive work. 16 pages of b&w photos. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

An excellent book.” — The New York Times Book Review

“A perceptive work. . . . Veteran historian Dallek delivers a shrewd analysis of why world leaders failed to deliver a better world.” — Publishers Weekly

“Bound to provoke debate, Dallek’s tome should engage the readership for world politics.” — Booklist

“Robert Dallek brings to this majestic work a profound understanding of history, a deep engagement in foreign policy, and a lifetime of studying leadership. This seminal work deserves widespread attention.” — Doris Kearns Goodwin

From the Publisher

Bound to provoke debate, Dallek’s tome should engage the readership for world politics.

Booklist

An excellent book.

The New York Times Book Review

Robert Dallek brings to this majestic work a profound understanding of history, a deep engagement in foreign policy, and a lifetime of studying leadership. This seminal work deserves widespread attention.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

Bound to provoke debate, Dallek’s tome should engage the readership for world politics.

Booklist

A well-reasoned examination of the poor decisions made by post–World War II world leaders.

American historian Dallek (Harry S. Truman, 2008, etc.) frames the narrative around the fatal premise, shared by the best minds of the day, that war was justified in order to create a lasting peace. He considers the decisive, ultimately illusory military decisions of the mid '40s to early '50s, including the fraught meetings of war leaders Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill at Tehran and Yalta, which essentially created Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe; Truman's go-ahead to drop two atomic bombs on Japan, which only threatened the paranoid Soviet leader and diverted precious resources needed in rebuilding his country into matching America's atomic power; and the subsequent tit-for-tat played out between the two superpowers in the Persian Gulf, Eastern Europe, Iran, Korea and China. Despite the initial exhaustion instilled by total world war and the sense of "hope for a reformed world" engendered by the establishment of the United Nations and the prospects of the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan, the United States grew wary of Communist aggression, both Soviet and Chinese, and fearful of the prospect of nuclear attack. Dallek characterizes the prevailing mood through the late '40s as a "triumph of fear." Grandiose speeches by both Stalin and Churchill, each seizing on the epic confrontation between Marxism and capitalism, only fueled the fire. Nixon and Kennedy rode early congressional success on anti-communist platforms, and Truman was reelected largely on his firm stance in containing communism. The Soviet crackdown on Czechoslovakia and Berlin blockade, espionage rings and McCarthyism, the Korean War, French rule in Indochina and Ho Chi Minh's victory in Vietnam—all prompted "wretched acts of leadership." Dallek briefly touches on them and many others, providing a cautionary lesson in the mistakes of the past and an attempt to extract a "model of rational behavior" for the future.

A sage scholarly study.

Kirkus Reviews