Anders Stephanson

Stalin's Hyper-Realism

Book reviewed in this article: Gabriel Gorodetsky, Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia

Senator John F. Kennedy: Anti-Imperialism and Utopian Deficit

Opinions of John F. Kennedy differ but it is commonly agreed that he was an impatient man and easily bored (though when he was laid up lengthily in a hospital bed, which happened not infrequently, his stoicism and patience were nothing short of astonishing). It stands to reason, then, that one of the things that bored him in the 1950s was the cold war, by then solidified into a dogmatic and rigid system. 1 It is the ideological nature of that boredom, or discomfort, its dilemmas and limits, that interest me here. My double wager is that if one pursues Kennedys idiosyncrasies on this score without reading him backwards from the unflinching coldwar policies he actually launched, apparently, in his presidency, then one will learn something both about the cold war at the time and about Kennedy himself.

The Twentieth Century as Detour

Frank Ninkovich. Modernity and Power: A History of the Domino Theory in the Twentieth Century

Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy.

Part 1 The Soviet problematic : the thirties war and alliance back in the USA. Part 2 The American problematic: reconstruction and division dark continents the importance of being realistic. Part 3 Class and country: no exit Utopian containment. Appendices: survey of the Soviet analysis after 1950 on ideology.