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Loading... The Triumph of Improvisation: Gorbachev's Adaptability, Reagan's Engagement, and the End of the Cold War (2014)by James Graham Wilson
   None No current Talk conversations about this book.  Archivist13 | Apr 22, 2014 | 
 This is one of the better books on the end of the Cold War. With The Triumph of Improvisation: Gorbachev's Adaptability, Reagan's Engagement, and the End of the Cold War, an estimable young State Department historian, James Graham Wilson, has crisply countered the triumphalist narrative by offering a cogent, parsimonious, and well-written account of the final decade of the Cold War. If John Kerry ever gets to spend a day back home, the US secretary of state might wish to meet James Graham Wilson, a young scholar in his department’s Office of the Historian. Wilson’s recent book, The Triumph of Improvisation, offers a fresh and valuable look at the end of the cold war.
In The Triumph of Improvisation, James Graham Wilson takes a long view of the end of the Cold War, from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 to Operation Desert Storm in January 1991. Drawing on deep archival research and recently declassified papers, Wilson argues that adaptation, improvisation, and engagement by individuals in positions of power ended the specter of a nuclear holocaust. Amid ambivalence and uncertainty, Mikhail Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan, George Shultz, George H. W. Bush, and a host of other actors engaged with adversaries and adapted to a rapidly changing international environment and information age in which global capitalism recovered as command economies failed.Eschewing the notion of a coherent grand strategy to end the Cold War, Wilson paints a vivid portrait of how leaders made choices; some made poor choices while others reacted prudently, imaginatively, and courageously to events they did not foresee. A book about the burdens of responsibility, the obstacles of domestic politics, and the human qualities of leadership, The Triumph of Improvisation concludes with a chapter describing how George H. W. Bush oversaw the construction of a new configuration of power after the fall of the Berlin Wall, one that resolved the fundamental components of the Cold War on Washington's terms. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)327.73047Social sciences Political Science International Relations North America United States U.S.-European Relations U.S.-Russian RelationsLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (4.33)
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The book was easy to read, and considering that this is a scholarly work, that is quite welcome, as scholarly works often tend to be a bit dry-this book was anything but dry. It also seemed to me to be devoid of much bias, which is a prerequisite for a successful historical work.
The major point being made here is that the events that ended the Cold War were not orchestrated, but took place rather serendipitously, as the title implies. In essence, the author makes a good case for his thesis, which utilizes diary entries (Reagan, Bush, Gorbachev etc), and archival documents to Illustrate how leaders of the U.S. and USSR compromised, and essentially took leaps of faith to get to the ultimate goal of ending the cold war, bringing the Soviets into the fold of the New World Order of economic, and political partnership, relying on a new found mutual trust in drastically cutting nuclear missile proliferation to all-time lows.
I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the Cold War, or Post-WWII European politics and social history. The new documents used offer an interesting viewpoint on the American and Soviet cooperation towards ending the Cold War, and the thawing of US-Soviet relations. (