More Precious Than Peace: Fighting and Winning the Cold War in the Third World

Probing the history of the Cold War as it played out in the Third World nations, a noted foreign policy expert traces the conflict from the time of Wilson and the Bolsheviks to the diplomatic revolution created by Reagan and Gorbachev.

America's overriding task during the 20th century, in Rodman's view, has been reconciling its moral convictions with its strategic responsibilities. Here he traces the course of the Cold War and charts the interaction of the superpowers with particular attention to U.S.-Soviet rivalry for dominance in the Third World. The author praises President Reagan's efforts to shape a policy toward developing nations that accommodated American idealism with strategic necessity. The Reagan administration's strong policy toward Moscow, he asserts, led to the Soviet retreat from Afghanistan, Angola and Cambodia. An unusually upbeat, hardly objective view of the Cold War in relation to the Third World by a political theorist with government credentials: Rodman served as White House adviser to Henry Kissinger during the Nixon and Ford administrations and as policy-planning director at the State Department during the Reagan years. He is an editor of the National Review.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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.

Rodman served as a foreign policy official in several Republican administrations prior to becoming editor of the National Review in 1991. This volume rests upon the assumption that "America's most profound task in foreign policy has been to find the way to reconcile its moral convictions and its strategic requirements." Rodman surveys American and Soviet diplomatic competition and its effect on the nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. He uses case studies from Angola, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Central Ameria, the Middle East, and Vietnam to measure the balancing of Wilsonian idealism and Kissinger realism. Writing with verve, Rodman incorporates vignettes of some of the leading actors in these foreign policy dramas. The result is an ambitious book that combines his governmental experience, his sound academic analysis, and his journalist's prescription for America's role in international affairs in the 21st century. Recommended for informed readers.
James Rhodes, Luther Coll., Decorah, Ia.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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