Summary of John Lewis Gaddis's The Cold War

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 The war was won by a coalition of countries that were already at war with one another ideologically and geopolitically. The victors would have to cease being who they were or give up much of what they had hoped to attain by fighting the war.
#2 The American and Russian armies, which met in 1945 on the banks of the Elbe River, had similarities in their birth in revolution and their global ideologies, but they differed in their distrust of concentrated authority.
#3 The American and British governments were able to choose where, when, and in what circumstances they would fight, which greatly minimized the costs and risks of fighting. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, had no such advantages. It had only one war, and it was the most terrible one in all of history.
#4 The Soviet Union had one other advantage as well, which was that it alone among the victors emerged from the war with tested leadership.

Sujets

• Politique
• Général
• 20th century
• modern

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 01 avril 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 3
• EAN13: 9781669373049
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on John Lewis Gaddis's The Cold War
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6 Insights from Chapter 7
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The war was won by a coalition of countries that were already at war with one another ideologically and geopolitically. The victors would have to cease being who they were or give up much of what they had hoped to attain by fighting the war.

#2

The American and Russian armies, which met in 1945 on the banks of the Elbe River, had similarities in their birth in revolution and their global ideologies, but they differed in their distrust of concentrated authority.

#3

The American and British governments were able to choose where, when, and in what circumstances they would fight, which greatly minimized the costs and risks of fighting. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, had no such advantages. It had only one war, and it was the most terrible one in all of history.

#4

The Soviet Union had one other advantage as well, which was that it alone among the victors emerged from the war with tested leadership.

#5

Stalin’s goals were security for himself, his regime, and his country. He wanted to make sure that no internal challenges could ever again endanger his personal rule, and that no external threats would ever again place his country at risk.

#6

Stalin’s understanding of his wartime allies and their postwar objectives was based more on wishful thinking than on an accurate assessment of priorities. He believed that capitalists would never be able to cooperate with one another for very long, and that communists would need to wait until the economic crisis returned before taking power.

#7

Stalin’s goal was not to restore a balance of power in Europe, but to dominate it completely. He believed that the long-term forces of history would compensate for the catastrophe World War II had inflicted upon the Soviet Union.

#8

After World War II, the Americans wanted security, but they were less certain of what they would have to do to obtain it. The reason was because they had not yet concluded that their security required transplanting their principles abroad.

#9

After World War II, the United States committed itself to restoring a balance of power beyond the western hemisphere. Roosevelt had four priorities: to sustain allies, to secure their cooperation in shaping the postwar settlement, to ensure that the settlement was sellable to the American people, and to avoid returning to isolationism.

#10

The British had simpler objectives: to survive at all costs, even if this meant relinquishing leadership of the Anglo-American coalition to Washington, and even if it meant weakening the British empire. They would try to influence the Americans as much as possible.

#11

The Allied coalition was a means of cooperating to defeat the Axis, but it was also an instrument through which each of the victors sought to position itself for maximum influence in the postwar world.

#12

The importance of second fronts was not just military, but political as well, as they meant that the Americans and British would participate in the surrender and occupation of Germany and its satellites.

#13

Stalin got the territorial acquisitions and the sphere of influence he wanted: the Soviet Union’s borders were moved several hundred miles to the west, and the Red Army installed subservient regimes throughout Eastern Europe. The Americans and British had hoped for a different outcome: one in which the Eastern Europeans would choose their own governments.

#14

Stalin’s plan to install a Marxist-Leninist government in eastern Germany and unify Germany under Soviet control was based on the belief that the government would become a magnet for Germans in the western occupation zones, causing them to choose leaders who would eventually unify the entire country under Soviet control.

#15

The second problem was that the Americans had little incentive to include the Soviets in the occupation of Japan. The Soviet Union had not declared war on that country after Pearl Harbor, and its allies expected it to at a time when the German army was on the outskirts of Moscow.

#16

The American and Soviet leaders were both surprised and alarmed by the breakdown of the Grand Alliance. Their hopes for a different outcome were real, otherwise they would not have made the efforts they did to agree on what was to happen when the fighting stopped.

#17

The vision of Roosevelt and Churchill was a postwar settlement that would balance power while embracing principles. Stalin’s vision was a settlement that would secure his country’s security while simultaneously encouraging the rivalries among capitalists that he believed would bring about a new war.

#18

After World War II, Stalin sought to expand Soviet territory by removing what he saw as vulnerabilities in the south. He demanded territorial concessions from Turkey as well as bases that would give the Soviet Union control of the Turkish Straits.

#19

The new firmness in Washington was accompanied by a search for explanations of Soviet behavior. The best answer came from George F. Kennan, a Foreign Service officer serving in the American embassy in Moscow. He argued that the Soviet Union’s intransigence resulted from the internal necessities of the Stalinist regime, and nothing the West could do would change that.

#20

The Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan were two separate but related policies that the US government developed to help rebuild Europe after World War II. The Truman Doctrine stated that it must be the policy of the US to support free peoples who were resisting subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressures.

#21

The Marshall Plan was based on the premise that the most serious threat to western interests in Europe was not Soviet military intervention,