28 Билет Foreign policy since 1945

US FOREIGN POLICY SINCE 1945 Those in quest of a comprehensive and empirically rich treatment of American foreign policy since the ending of the second World War-one moreover that at the same time is able to be reasonably concise-can stop searching, for this is their book. In some 250 or so action- and factcrammed pages, authors Alan Dobson and Steve Marsh take the reader through a vigorous and often critical assessment of the high and low points in American diplomacy during a six-decade era mostly dominated by the pursuit of a grand strategy of containment, both of the Soviet Union as a state, and of communism as an ideology. The book is a collaborative effort on the part of two British scholars of American foreign policy and transatlantic relations, Dobson at Dundee University in Scotland, and Marsh at Cardiff University in Wales.

The authors' British background is noteworthy for two reasons. First, it is refreshing to have such an informed analysis of US foreign policy presented by non-American s. This is certainly no knock on Americans' assessments of their country's diplomatic record, but it is useful to have the benefit of insights provided by outsiders with detailed knowledge of the field. secondly, because the British tradition of international relations scholarship is one that emphasizes historical and normative assessments more than does the American school of IR (so often said to be afflicted with an obsession for "positivist" theorizing), the reader is provided a different epistemological experience from that normally found in similar accounts written by political scientists in the US. Indeed, one could almost say this book is as much a study in diplomatic history as it is in political science (again, no knock intended).

Yet if the disciplinary divide within IR finds the political scientists to be more inclined than their historian counterparts a) to generalize, and b) to judge, then the Dobson and Marsh book clearly demonstrates its political science credentials. For the book's core generalization, you could even say its story line, centres upon the grand strategy of containment, the ups and downs of which the authors trace in exquisite detail. It is also containment that provides the standard by which they judge America's foreign policy. Dobson and Marsh do not suffer from any misplaced nostalgia for the Cold War, nor do they give the impression of thinking that containment as strategy was easy to implement, or particularly ethical in its operations. On the all-important question of whether it worked, they are hesitant to ratify the thesis that the US "won" the Cold War, but they certainly acknowledge the obvious, that it did not lose it.