Superpower Diplomacy - Bibliography

Alperovitz, Gar. Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima andPotsdam, the Use of the Atomic Bomb and the American Confrontation with Soviet Power. New York, 1965. A passionate statement of what American diplomacy was not.

Bell, Coral. Negotiation from Strength: A Study in the Politics of Power. London, 1962. Enduring critique of the fallacies of power politics.

Beschloss, Michael R. Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev and the U-2 Affair. Boston, 1986. A lively account of a major failure of super-power diplomacy by an able journalist-historian lent support by subsequently declassified documents.

Bischof, Günter, and Saki Dockrill, eds. Cold War Respite: The Geneva Summit of 1955. Baton Rouge, La., 2000. The first of the ambivalent Cold War summits thoughtfully analyzed by leading international historians.

Bozo, Frédéric. Two Strategies for Europe: DeGaulle, the United States, and the Atlantic Alliance. Lanham, Md., 2001. A perceptive French scholar does justice to the challenge to the U.S. superpower by the larger-than-life French president.

Brzezinski, Zbigniew. Power and Principle: Memoirs of the National Security Adviser, 1977–1981. Rev. ed. New York, 1985. The account by a respected academic specialist on the Soviet Union turned a controversial statesman in the Carter administration.

Dobrynin, Anatoly. In Confidence: Moscow's Ambassador to America's Six Cold War Presidents (1962–1986). New York, 1995. Self-promoting and conceited but well-informed memoir of the Soviet bureaucrat who served in Washington through the rise and fall of détente.

Freedman, Lawrence. The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy. New York, 1981. The classic sober and sobering account by Britain's leading expert.

——. Kennedy's Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam. New York, 2000. On balance, Kennedy's accomplishments outweigh his deficiencies in this subtle assessment using up-to-date evidence.

Fursenko, Aleksandr, and Timothy Naftali. "One Hell of a Gamble": Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958–1964. New York, 1997. The first study based on extensive, if selective, Soviet documentation shows the web of misperceptions that made the Cuban missile crisis such a narrow escape from catastrophe.

Gaddis, John L. Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy. New York, 1982. An indispensable examination of the crucial relationship between strategy and diplomacy.

——. We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History. New York, 1997. Despite its title, a provisional, yet so far the most convincing assessment by the leading U.S. "postrevisionist" historian, benefiting from the wealth of new sources that surfaced after the end of the Cold War.

Garthoff, Raymond L. Détente and Confrontation:American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan. Washington, D.C., 1994. An experienced Washington analyst and staunch advocate of détente explores its course in painstaking detail.

Holloway, David. The Soviet Union and the Arms Race. New Haven, Conn., 1984. The standard account by a prominent U.S. academic expert.

Hutchings, Robert L. American Diplomacy and the End of the Cold War: An Insider's Account of U.S. Policy in Europe, 1989–1992. Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, 1997. A knowledgeable staff member of the National Security Council pays tribute to the management of the Soviet collapse by the Bush administration.

Kaplan, Lawrence S. The Long Entanglement:NATO's First Fifty Years. Westport, Conn., 1999. A spirited collection of essays by the dean of American NATO historians on the alliance that repeatedly complicated U.S. superpower diplomacy.

Kennan, George F. "The Sources of Soviet Conduct." Foreign Affairs 25 (1947): 566–582. The intellectual foundation of the policy of containment by its main architect.

Kissinger, Henry. White House Years. Boston, 1979. Self-serving but indispensable for understanding the achievements and limitations of America's foremost practitioner of superpower diplomacy.

Leffler, Melvyn P. Preponderance of Power:National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War. Stanford, Calif., 1992. The most extensively documented critique of the U.S. policy, inclined to give the Soviet Union the benefit of the doubt.

Lundestad, Geir. The American "Empire" and Other Studies of U.S. Foreign Policy in a Comparative Perspective. Oxford, 1990. The concept of "empire by invitation," persuasively argued by a Norwegian historian.

Mastny, Vojtech. The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity: The Stalin Years. New York, 1996. New Soviet evidence on how Stalin's exaggerated notions of security challenged the United States without giving the Soviet Union the security he wanted.

Matlock, Jack F. Autopsy of an Empire: The American Ambassador's Account of the Collapse of the Soviet Union. New York, 1995. Memoir by the scholarly U.S. ambassador shows how U.S. policy facilitated the peaceful demise of the Soviet superpower.

May, Ernest R., and Philip D. Zelikow, eds. The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis. Cambridge, Mass., 1997. Admirably interpreted record of the historic decision making that allowed the president to avert the Soviet threat he had inadvertently helped to precipitate.

Nye, Joseph S., Jr. Bound to Lead: The ChangingNature of American Power. New York, 1990. Harvard political scientist and former government official argues that, despite the changing nature of its power, the United States remains a superpower.

Pechatnov, Vladimir O. "'The Allies Are Pressing on You to Break Your Will': Foreign Policy Correspondence Between Stalin and Molotov and Other Politburo Members, September 1945–December 1946." Cold War International History Project. Working paper no. 25. Washington, D.C., 1999. Unique documentary material on highest-level Soviet decision making, interpreted by an able Russian historian.

Trachtenberg, Marc. A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945–1963. Princeton, N.J., 1999. An ambitious and subtle, yet often ambiguous, history of the superpower relations, giving due account to America's European allies though not its Soviet adversary.

Williams, William Appleman. The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. 2d rev. and enlarged ed. New York, 1972. The bible of the revisionist critics holding the United States responsible for provoking the Cold War.