THE STANDARD READER
The Standard Reader Victor's Remorse Derek Leebaert weighs the costs of the Cold War A sore loser is easy to find, but you don't come across many sore winners. Nonetheless, they exist—and for...
...It's hardly news that "big government" is not the most wise or efficient instrument for conducting human affairs...
...Nonetheless, they exist—and for proof, you need look no further than Derek Leebaert, whose book on the Cold War adds new worries to the truism that history is written by the victors...
...But that hasn't killed off the old, Dr...
...It's clear that a good portion of America's elite now believe the Cold War was less a noble endeavor than a necessary evil...
...Strangelovian claim of America's Cold War mirroring of its enemy...
...Remember the great warning—issued over and over again by America's anti-anti-Communists— that the United States was going to turn into the very kind of totalitarian state it was fighting...
...As Aaron Friedberg's In the Shadow of the Garrison State convincingly documented a few years ago, it never happened...
...What is new is a curious convergence of the left and the right—joining together to mourn the freedoms lost in the fifty-year struggle against Soviet Stalinism...
...To the contrary, it's a good bet that factions on the left and the right alike will preemptively use Leebaert's account to cast doubts on the global call to arms being issued by President Bush...
...Moreover, the damage done was not nearly as profound or as lasting as Leebaert suggests...
...And, more to the point, the principal lesson it teaches is getting a little long in the tooth...
...Make no mistake: Leebaert is clearly glad the West won the Cold War...
...But it suf- : fers from the lack of a convincing alternative strategy for the Cold War...
...If only we ; had been smarter...
...But in The Fifty-Year Wound: The True Price of America's Cold War Victory, he piles angry account upon account to show that we did so in the most hamhanded and ultimately damaging fashion...
...But we weren't, and "splendid cities of the mind and spirit j have been lost—ones that might have towered in place of missile silos, command centers and barracks...
...The Fifty-Year Wound will do nothing to check that view...
...The Fifty-Year Wound is written with zip and often with insight...
...A Georgetown University professor and former editor of the prestigious journal International Security, Leebaert believes the cost of victory for the United States j was unnecessarily high: a waste of treasure, talent, and civic capital...
Vol. 7 • June 2002 • No. 40
