From Kirkus Reviews:
Rodman swerves from objective scholarship to partisan cheerleading in this chronicle of the struggle between the US and the Soviet Union for control in the Third World. Rodman served on the National Security Council and in the State Department under presidents Nixon, Reagan, and Bush; he is now an editor of the National Review and a fellow in international studies at Johns Hopkins University. He brings a scholar's eye to the years 191768, describing in dispassionate detail the trends in American and Soviet foreign policy that eventually brought the two superpowers to the battlefields of the Cold War. Rodman describes the tendency of each side to overestimate the abilities and desires of the other. He offers fascinating descriptions of the Soviet struggle to reconcile its support for revolutionary movements in the Third World with classic Marxist-Leninist theory, and of America's ``most profound task'': ``to find the way to reconcile its moral convictions and its strategic responsibilities.'' In describing the years from 1968 on, Rodman is no longer the scholar but the player, and the book becomes a passionate argument for the Kissinger- and Reagan-era policies that Rodman helped formulate. In what became known as the Reagan Doctrine, the US pursued dual tracks of diplomacy and force, negotiating with the Soviets with one hand while fomenting anti-Soviet guerrilla wars with the other. This approach, Rodman insists, turned the tide against communism in the Third World and contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union. To make his case, the author offers richly detailed case studies of Third World confrontation points--Afghanistan, Cambodia, Angola, Nicaragua--but his biases are obvious. Rodman's arguments are immensely persuasive, but his contempt for critics of the Reagan Doctrine keeps him from adequately addressing the question suggested by the book's title: What is more precious than peace? The answer would have been of interest to the hundreds of thousands who died on the Cold War's proxy battlefields. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
From Booklist:
Rodman, a prot{‚}eg{‚}e of Kissinger's, examines how the decolonizing revolution became, after Europe and the strategic military competition, the third front in the cold war. Rodman served Republican administrations and watched as the Soviets, convinced the correlation of forces was swinging in their favor, armed anti-Western radicals worldwide in the seventies and eighties. This thick overview spans the period from Lenin's and Wilson's rival and irreconcilable anticolonial positions through the fatal Soviet overstretch in Afghanistan. U.S. policy, without the eschatological impetus Lenin's book Imperialism lent to the Soviets, was far less single-minded. Rodman explains the dilemmas inherent in our de facto position as the status quo power while simultaneously being in favor of progress and decolonization. Its contradiction furnished much of the domestic U.S. argument between liberals and conservatives, an enduring feature of American foreign policy that Rodman accurately analyzes. Rodman's tincture of experience enlivens high policy the way academic tracts cannot. Intrinsically interesting to policy pros, and to libraries where such types are detected. Gilbert Taylor
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.