Author Description

This volume presents a fresh & thought-provoking interpretation of the early history of the North Atlantic Alliance. The author demonstrates how early U.S. & West European NATO Cold War strategies based upon exaggerations of the Soviet/Communist threat helped shape a postwar world order that depended on the existing colonial model of a "global division of labor." Villaume also shows how alternative policies toward the Soviet bloc, suggested by top U.S. officials like Charles Bohlen & George Kennan, were continuously rejected, & how the arms race assumed a life of its own, serving as an internal political instrument in both East & West.