Beyond The Cold War

In writing about international affairs in the 1960s, historians have naturally focused on the Cold War. The decade featured perilous confrontations between the United States and the Soviet Union over Berlin and Cuba, the massive buildup of nuclear stockpiles, the escalation of war in Vietnam, and bitter East-West rivalry throughout the developing world. As the world historical force of globalization has quickened and deepened, however, historians have begun to see that many of the global challenges that we face todayinequality, terrorism, demographic instability, energy dependence, epidemic disease, massive increases in trade and monetary flows, to name just a few examples asserted themselves powerfully during the decade. Beyond the Cold War examines how the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson responded to this changing international landscape. To what extent did U.S. leaders understand these changes? How did they prioritize these issues alongside the geostrategic concerns that dominated their daily agendas and the headlines of the day? How successfully did Americans grapple with these long-range problems, with what implications for the future? What lessons lie in the efforts of Johnson and his aides to cope with a new and inchoate agenda of problems? By reconsidering the 1960s, this work suggests a new research agenda predicated on the idea that the Cold War was not the only or perhaps even the most important feature of international life in the postwar period. Review: Distinguished historians Frank Gavin and Mark Lawrence have assembled an all-star cast of young scholars of U.S. foreign relations to shed new light on the 1960s, a decade we thought we already knew perhaps too well. These excellent essays focus on contemporary global issues of the greatest importance - environmental change, energy, poverty and disease, human rights, religion, globalization - and trace them back to their emergence as policy concerns during the Lyndon Johnson administration. The authors challenge and expand our understanding of national security in a global age. This is some of the best of the new U.S. international history. * Thomas Borstelmann, author of The Cold War and the Color Line *