Paul Kennedy Books & Reviews

How the West Was Spun

Christopher Coker's Twilight of the West looks at present geopolitical trends and predicts the West's dissolution; David Gress, in From Plato to Nato, sees them as yet another episode in the long struggle between the mainstream W

Uncomfortable, but Invaluable

Urban's is not a happy memoir. The subtitle, My War Within the Cold War, sums up his theme. The new policy involved years of often bitter struggle with both grotesque reactionaries and Western appeasers.

The Cult of Secrecy

Senator Moynihan has expanded his appendix to the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy report into an elegant, quotable, scholarly, and timely book.

Crazy over Cuba

As this important volume demonstrates,  the overriding requirement of the era was not guts but wisdom. On that score, the Kennedys and their lieutenants flunked.

Acheson, Simply Put

Chace's Acheson is encompassing, graceful and prodigiously researched and annotated.

The Other France

 Modernizing the Provincial City does not tell us anything we did not already know about how the French became and are becoming what they have been and are.

Globalism and the American Tide

In this new book, Cairncross is a little breathless about the electronic communications that will conjure new worlds into existence. Nevertheless, because her text is well informed and her prose lucid, and because the technological developments ar

Rude Awakening

Fouad Ajami's new book argues that the Arabs have defeated themselves by a blind adherence to anachronistic ideologies of self-glorification, both nationalist and Islamist.

Loose Cannon

Whereas the principal aim of American nuclear policy during the Cold War was to deter a strong and aggressive Soviet Union, the nuclear risks we face today stem from Russian weakness.

Hayek's Slippery Slope

Friedrich Hayek's ideas,  particularly those set out in The Road to Serfdom, have been subject to extraordinary ups and downs in learned, as well as in popular and political, estimation.

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May 26, 2012