SEARCH FOR HEGEMONY
Kolko, Gabriel
BOOKS BRIEFLY Search for Hegemony CONFRONTING THE THIRD WORLD: United States Foreign Policy 1945-1980 by Gabriel Kolko Pantheon. 333 pp. $24.95 hardcover, $15.95 paper. At the end of World War...
...policymakers believed that America "not only had...
...The next time the Philippines or Angola, Brazil or El Salvador erupts into the headlines, a quick reference to Confronting the Third World will help explain what's going on...
...Another strength is Kolko's consistent recognition of context: Every turn of events has its causes and consequences...
...Elsewhere, too—in Iran, for example, and in the Caribbean—things haven't always worked out the way American strategists thought they would...
...Still, the search for ways of exercising hegemony—by military or economic means, by covert action or open intervention—remains the central theme of U.S...
...The Korean war posed a tougher challenge than Washington had anticipated, and the Vietnam war proved to be a total disaster...
...intervention...
...Reality has chipped away at that arrogant assumption...
...foreign policy...
...Kolko, distinguished research professor at York University in Toronto and one of the most influential of revisionist historians, provides a lucid and persuasive account of three-and-a-half decades of U.S...
...One great virtue of Confronting the Third World is that Kolko is careful to recognize the distinctions among various nations, avoiding the pitfall of treating the Third World as an abstract agglomeration...
...the obligation to intervene actively in any country or area in the world in which it thought its interests warranted such intervention but, above all, also the power to do so successfully...
...At the end of World War II, Gabriel Kolko observes in this engrossing study, U.S...
Vol. 53 • March 1989 • No. 3
