John Lewis Gaddis The Cold War Summary

John Lewis Gaddis is a very well know Cold War historian and through his book The Cold War: A New History, he studies and follows the relations between the United States and the Soviet Union starting from World War II until the fall of the USSR. Gaddis presents an outstandingly written complete view of the Cold War, shining light with insightful judgments which helps bring life to the four decades of the US-USSR conflict. In this book, Gaddis stresses on the fact that the Cold War was both essential and obvious because the rise of communism was never going to be tolerated by the US and the Soviet Union and its allies had to be contained. This book serves the purpose of being an easy to understand, to the point fusion of the Cold War history.

There are three very import lessons of the Cold War that Gaddis has out forth in this book. First, we saw the fall of dictatorship during the Cold War. Although China, USSR and many other European countries had authoritarian governments during this time, Gaddis points out that after the George Orwell’s Totalitarian World was publishes in 1948 we saw that the spread of these authoritarian governments stopped, they did not spread to other countries. We also saw that due to the failure of the communism promise to provide a better life for the workers, it quickly fell out of favor during the latter part of the 20th century. Second, we saw that

Gaddis states that due to the absence of wars and economic depressions, coupled with a worldwide increase in literacy and that the lack of both great wars and economic depressions coupled with increased levels of literacy worldwide and guiding principle to promote democracy led to the spread of