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“... One of the difficulties with weapons is that they do not automatically self-destruct once they have fulfilled their function. The problem particularly afflicts Americans who, taking advantage of lax gun-control laws, tend to buy whatever they think they need to defend themselves. But as the danger recedes, they frequently forget about the lethal arsenals they have accumulated ...”

“... its effects have survived the deepening disillusionment with the Iraqi and Afghan interventions. John LewisGaddis is a true product of this nationalist ideology and the imperial establishment it supports. Take this statement, from his short history of the Cold War: Americans, he writes, are ‘impatient with ...”

“... was devoted to East-West relations. At its first session a musty-looking gentleman called Sir John Lawrence proposed that we begin from the assumption that the decline of the Soviet economic system had passed the point of no-return. Any policy recommendations must therefore reckon with the consequences of its collapse within the next few years and the ...”

“... were named after him and he was the recipient of mandatory encomia on official occasions. John LewisGaddis’s biography is a tombstone-sized tribute, based on unlimited access to its subject and his papers. Not bad for a mid-level policy planner whose most senior diplomatic postings were a brief ambassadorial ...”

“... and security, that we can recognise how weird those years really were. The importance of John LewisGaddis’s book is that it is the first coherent and sustained attempt to write the Cold War’s history since it ended. That alone makes it hard to resist, but it is also wise and imaginative and written in a ...”

“... his important 1997 book based on the newly opened Soviet archives, We Now Know, the Yale historian John LewisGaddis took a post-revisionist approach. He argued that Cold War studies should focus on the battle of ideas, and not just on military power, since the Soviet Union fell not as a result of military defeat or an ...”

“... reasonable expectations, and colluded in outlawing demons on both sides. By 1987 comforters like John LewisGaddis could write that the Cold War and the Iron Curtain had been a ‘way of life’ for more than two generations, with the result that ‘it simply does not occur to us to think about how it might end ...”

“... was seamed with cracks into which ‘wedges’ could be driven. The Cold War historian John LewisGaddis wrote 20 years ago that American statesmen in the postwar period never ‘believed in the existence of an international Communist monolith’. After reading Selverstone’s work, it would be hard to ...”

“... which could destabilise Eastern Europe and resurrect Cold War hostilities. In 1998, John LewisGaddis bemoaned that the decision to admit Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic was taken with almost no public debate and that ‘with remarkably few exceptions’ historians saw it as ...”

“... of those who wished it so. They had lived through what complacent historians in the West like John LewisGaddis called the ‘Long Peace’ of postwar Europe, but which for them was an unbroken long war of fifty years, starting with the Soviet invasion of the Baltic states in August 1939, before Hitler attacked ...”