John Lewis Gaddis
John Lewis Gaddis
John Lewis Gaddisis the Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale University. He is best known for his work on the Cold War and grand strategy, and has been hailed as the "Dean of Cold War Historians" by The New York Times. Gaddis is also the official biographer of the seminal 20th-century American statesman George F. Kennan. George F. Kennan: An American Life, his biography of Kennan, won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionHistorian
CountryUnited States of America
I think the way to think about the impact of Hiroshima is to think about it as a sudden shift in the balance of power.
The doctrine of preemption has a long and distinguished history in the history of American foreign policy.
I don't think there is necessarily a contradiction between being a hegemonic power on the one hand and functioning multilaterally on the other.
George Kennan and Paul Nitze were the Adams and Jefferson of the Cold War. They were there for the beginning, they witnessed its course over almost half a century, and they argued with each other constantly while it was going on. But they maintained throughout a remarkable friendship, demonstrating-as few others in our time have-that it is possible to differ with civility. Nicholas Thompson's is a fine account of that relationship, carefully researched, beautifully written, and evocatively suggestive of how much we have lost because such civility has become so rare.
It is worth starting with visions, though, because they establish hopes and fears. History then determines which prevail.