Does America risk repeating a historic post-war error it made?
4 min read . Updated: 24 Aug 2020, 09:03 PM ISTV. Anantha Nageswaran
An overestimated Soviet threat may have set off the Cold War but China's quest for hegemony is real
I started reading Daniel Yergin's Shattered Peace during the lockdown. The book is about how and why the Cold War started. It is fascinating just to go back and read about how World War II was brought to an end. Then US President Harry Truman made a decision to drop the bomb, which was calculated to save at least 500,000 American lives. He was in office because Franklin Roosevelt had passed away within three months of being re-elected as president and after having agreed to a post-war global arrangement of "great powers" with Britain's Churchill and Russia's Stalin at Yalta.
Roosevelt had so personalized his conversations with the other two major powers that Truman was out of depth upon becoming president. The vice-president had been in the dark about Roosevelt's thinking. Harry Hopkins, a foreign policy advisor who was in the know, too died in January 1946. In the absence of the architects who had tried to fashion a new super-power working arrangement, American foreign policy fell back on comfortable inter-war core beliefs and views. It is also possible that, implicitly or otherwise, Americans felt no need for its war-time allies, with Germany having been defeated and nuclear weapons at hand.
... rest deleted for copyright reasons
4 min read . Updated: 24 Aug 2020, 09:03 PM ISTV. Anantha Nageswaran
An overestimated Soviet threat may have set off the Cold War but China's quest for hegemony is real
I started reading Daniel Yergin's Shattered Peace during the lockdown. The book is about how and why the Cold War started. It is fascinating just to go back and read about how World War II was brought to an end. Then US President Harry Truman made a decision to drop the bomb, which was calculated to save at least 500,000 American lives. He was in office because Franklin Roosevelt had passed away within three months of being re-elected as president and after having agreed to a post-war global arrangement of "great powers" with Britain's Churchill and Russia's Stalin at Yalta.
Roosevelt had so personalized his conversations with the other two major powers that Truman was out of depth upon becoming president. The vice-president had been in the dark about Roosevelt's thinking. Harry Hopkins, a foreign policy advisor who was in the know, too died in January 1946. In the absence of the architects who had tried to fashion a new super-power working arrangement, American foreign policy fell back on comfortable inter-war core beliefs and views. It is also possible that, implicitly or otherwise, Americans felt no need for its war-time allies, with Germany having been defeated and nuclear weapons at hand.
... rest deleted for copyright reasons
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