History and Strategy

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991. Second printing [stated]. Trade paperback. Good. xii, 292 pages. Appendix. Index. Footnotes. A few ink marks and comments noted on the half-title and title pages only. This is one of Princeton's International History and Politics series. Marc Trachtenberg (born February 9, 1946)[1] is a professor of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Berkeley in 1974 and taught for many years for the history department at the University of Pennsylvania before coming to UCLA. He is the author of the following books : Reparation in World Politics: France and European Economic Diplomacy, 1916-1923 (Columbia University Press, 1980), A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945-1963 (Princeton University Press, 1999), History and Strategy (Princeton University Press, 1991) and The Craft of International History: A Guide to Method (Princeton University Press, 2006). Trachtenberg was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow in 1966-1967, a Guggenheim Fellow in 1983-1984, a German Marshall Fund Fellow in 1994-1995, and an Adjunct Research Fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government's Center for Science and International Affairs in 1986-1987. In 2000 he received the American Historical Association's George Louis Beer Prize He maintains a website dedicated to Cold War research. This work is a powerful demonstration of how historical analysis can be brought to bear on the study of strategic issues, and, conversely, how strategic thinking can help drive historical research. Based largely on newly released American archives, History and Strategy focuses on the twenty years following World War II. By bridging the sizable gap between the intellectual world of historians and that of strategists and political scientists, the essays here present a fresh and unified view of how to explore international politics in the nuclear era. The book begins with an overview of strategic thought in America from 1952 through 1966 and ends with a discussion of "making sense" of the nuclear age. Trachtenberg reevaluates the immediate causes of World War I, studies the impact of the shifting nuclear balance on American strategy in the early 1950s, examines the relationship between the nuclearization of NATO and U.S.-West European relations, and looks at the Berlin and the Cuban crises. He shows throughout that there are startling discoveries to be made about events that seem to have been thoroughly investigated.