From Free Life No. 22, April 1995.

`"Foreign affairs!" grumbled a blue-collar worker. "That's for people who don't have to work for a living."' This very American retort [p.145] is typical of the colourful quotations which bring alive Thomas G. Paterson's excellent study of the issue that dominated post-war international relations: the late and unlamented Cold War. I don't think I have read a book better illustrated with aptly chosen quotes, certainly not a scholarly work. From the description of Berlin in 1945 as "that rubble heap near Potsdam" [p.3] out of which, in part, the Cold War grew; to the exultation of some Americans today that they had "won the sucker and won it big"; [p.230] the book sparkles with bons mots. And not just carefully crafted one-liners produced by speech writers. Heartfelt or cynical, flippant or profound, they are the public and private utterances of admirals and GIs, of diplomats and pundits, of dictators or the man in the street. Nor are they mere decoration. Jewel-like in their accuracy or brilliance, they contain, reflect, and illuminate the solid chain of facts on which the thesis of On Every Front is set.

Like a necklace, too, the book is tightly made. Although the volume has over 300 pages, the quick-moving and closely argued text takes up only 230; with ten compact chapters covering the origins of the Cold War in the debris-littered aftermath of 1939- 1945; its evolution as the United States and USSR sought to build self-protective "spheres of influence" around the world or around themselves in the Forties and Fifties; and the resolution of the conflict via d‚tente as both "great powers" overextended themselves through excessive military spending and began in the Eighties to decline, to lose their influence, and in the case of the USSR, to disintegrate.

As one would expect from a professor of history at the University of Connecticut, the work is meticulously documented. The Notes [pp.233-82] are twice as long as most chapters, and hundreds of references draw on a cornucopia of sources. I would have liked a bibliography though, if only to find out whether Dr Paterson has read another book I enjoyed, Paul Johnson's Modern Times. The invitation to use the Notes "as an instructive bibliography" [p.xii] I found inappropriate, more suitable for students than the general reader. Ploughing through 50 pages of densely-packed small print - many notes refer to literally dozens of different sources - was far too much like work!

Although the subtitle refers to the "unmaking" of the Cold War, the book is much more concerned with analysing and explaining the "making". The first 190 pages take us from the end of World War II up to Stalin's death in 1953, leaving only 40 pages for a gallop across 35 years to the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, the highly symbolic end of the Cold War era.

Oddly enough, this weighting of content didn't trouble me, although I can well imagine a more hostile critic labelling the work "unbalanced", and perhaps demanding removal of "unmaking" from the subtitle. I think the reason I accepted Dr Paterson's division of labour is that he constructs his Cold War scenario so effectively that the conflict's resolution follows naturally and easily without requiring much in the way of elaboration. What took eight chapters to erect only needs two to take down.

While I found the book very readable - which is high praise in itself, foreign affairs have not been high on my agenda for a long time - I do have a number of reservations. The first of these concerns "national" point of view. Dr Paterson is (presumably) an American, and while he strives for objectivity - he always says "Americans" never "we" - he nonetheless writes as an expert on American foreign relations, from an American perspective, using predominantly American sources. While this is not necessarily a flaw, one can't help wondering whether a slightly longer work, paying more attention to the points of view of other participants, might not have created a more compelling thesis. He does refer to the "declassification" of foreign archives. [p.xi] Perhaps we can expect a more ample treatment in the future.

Dr Paterson's "American angle" is particularly apparent vis-…-vis the other main protagonist in the Cold War, the Soviet Union. Certainly, attention is paid to the USSR throughout, but when one finds three chapters in succession focusing on the USA alone; "ACTIVISM: American Ideology", "TOUGHNESS: Truman's Style of Diplomacy" and "CONSENT: American Public Opinion"; [pp.96-162] followed by just one specific chapter on the USSR; "SUSPICIOUSNESS: Soviet Foreign Policy"; [pp.163-88] one does start to wonder about balance.

Despite this selectivity of attention, the scales are not tipped in favour of the United States. Dr Paterson believes, and wants his readers to believe, that the USA was at least as responsible for the Cold War as the USSR, if not more so. Viz: "American atomic weapons accentuated instability"; [p.37] "the Americans looked more menacing than ever before to Soviet security"; [p.90] "joint responsibility for the beginnings of the Cold War". [p.95]

This tendency comes to a head when Dr Paterson discusses the commonly-held Western view that "capitalist encirclement" was a myth invented by the Soviets to help them preserve their dictatorship. He quotes American Secretary of State Dean Acheson as a proponent of this interpretation: "... the very nature of the police state and of the Russian police state is such that it must continue an aggressive expansionist foreign policy ... " He also cites the famous American journalist, Walter Lippmann, in support of the same view: "Does not the maintenance of the dictatorship in Russia depend upon maintaining a state of tension and insecurity to justify it?". [p.180]

Dr Paterson does not agree. He finds this to be a "speculative argument" which assumes "a passivity on the part of the United States" and which discounts "activist American behaviour" which "might have alarmed the Soviets". [pp.180-81]

While undoubtedly in some ways the Americans gave as good as they got in the Cold War, I do not accept Dr Paterson's case here. First, aggression towards its own peoples and its many neighbours virtually defined the Soviet government. It is quite apparent that American post-war attitudes were, in the first instance, a response to overt aggressiveness. Second, Dr Paterson hardly mentions the vast espionage industry upon which the Soviets' economy, and their military might, so heavily depended. (The CIA is mentioned several times, the KGB not at all, although "Soviet atomic spies" are alluded to [p.63]). The USSR's incalculable parasitism - it secretly pillaged the free world of everything from glue to hold things together to bombs to blow them apart - was integral to the whole Soviet Cold War effort: the looted mat‚riel being invariably redirected aggressively outwards as soon as the commissars had mastered what they stole. Third, the self-destructive irrationality of Soviet bureaucratic planning created an indescribable grey misery which Dr Paterson acknowledges only briefly ("they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work" 204). Yet it is one of the commonplaces of history that foreign war or the threat of it has been almost universally resorted to by authoritarian governments to justify oppression and quell or deflect domestic discontent. Granted his attention is on foreign affairs, but in ignoring or making light of such factors Dr Paterson weakens his analysis. (It occurred to me several times to wonder whether, like so many during the times of which he writes, Dr Paterson does not see the Soviets through rose-tinted spectacles.)

My other main reservation may be linked to the same issue. It has to do with Dr Paterson's relativist and collectivist ways of thinking. He writes: "Conflict is inherent in any international system simply because peoples and countries seldom share common goals, interests, cultures, and ideologies.... Core values clash". [p.22] He cites approvingly a post war radio broadcast by Professor Herman Finer of the University of Chicago: `"This is a lawless world, because it is a world without a common morality or a common superior. Nationalisms and moralities collide"'. [p.22] Dr Paterson also talks continuously as if "nations" had a living identity of their own, viz: "the nation's competitiveness"; [p.28] "Nations do not simply react.... They also act purposefully..."; [p.97] "Nations seek to fulfil their ideological preferences and to realise their economic-strategic needs". [p.108]

I could take issue with these conceptions in many ways, but I will confine myself to two simple historical observations. First, history showed me, when I studied it, that human beings have far more common interests than they do insuperable differences. From the Phoenicians, to the Hansa, to the Yankee schoonermen of the 19th Century, whenever people have been able to pursue their own ends without state interference, they have inevitably found mutual respect, recognition of rights, and peaceful trading to be the most productive and satisfying ways of dealing with one another. (The exception of slave-trading, complex as it is, proves the rule.)

How different the ways of "nations", and of those who run them. The other great lesson of history is that it is the ambitions of those who seek political power which bring most trouble to humanity. The source of conflict is not the "core values" of the world's various peoples, but the totally false presumption of those who gain power that political authority grants them the right to coerce.

It seems to me too, that historians contribute, and will continue to contribute, to mankind's troubles as long as they persist in treating "nations" as persons, and in not seeing that the only personalities that matter in the history of conflicts among "nations" are the mean little egos of men like Roosevelt and Stalin who lust after the reins of power.

I do not mean to be unduly harsh towards Dr Paterson, he is certainly not alone in his cast of mind. I also think he has written a very good book. "Foreign affairs" it may be, but he certainly works for his living! I would recommend On Every Front to anyone interested in modern history. I would also strongly recommend it to those interested in "limited government". The extent to which the American presidency has escaped from the checks and balances devised by the Founding Fathers, and the way in which Roosevelt and Truman were thus able to pursue goals contrary to the wishes of most Americans, are chillingly revealed in Dr Paterson's well-written pages.

I can't end without one more sample from Dr Paterson's dictionary of quotations. In showing how Soviet secretiveness forced Kremlin watchers to speculate, he tells the story of someone eliciting information from a Kentucky mountain boy:

"Where's yer paw?"

"Gone fishin'."

"How d'ye know?"

"Had his boots on and 'tain't rainin'"

"Where's yer maw?"

"Outhouse."

"How d'ye know?"

"Went out with a Montgomery Ward catalogue and she can't read."

"Where's yer sister?"

"In the hayloft with the hired man."

"How d'ye know?"

"It's after mealtime and there's only one thing she'd rather do than eat." [p.165]

Quotations alone make the book worth buying, but there is a lot more besides.

Nicholas Dykes