Stephanson on Gaddis

ANDERS STEPHANSON: "SIMPLICISSIMUS"

New Left Review 49, January-February 2008

Anders Stephanson on John Lewis Gaddis, Cold War and Surprise, Security and the American Experience. Diplomatic history as mirror for presidents, with postwar geopolitics recast as morality tale.

"John Lewis Gaddis has been one of the most ideological figures within the subfield of us ‘diplomatic history’. All historians, of course, operate in and through ideology; Gaddis, however, has been unusual in foregrounding the ideological nature of his works. Though the message to be conveyed has not always been the same, he has been constant in his defence of us interests, and has consistently mirrored—albeit with slight lags—the prevailing attitudes of the powers that be. A realist in the 1970s and neo-Reaganite from the late 1980s onwards, Gaddis was somewhat disgruntled in the Clinton era, but has found the second Bush altogether more congenial. Gaddis’s method, too, has endured across his extensive œuvre: always disdainful of any excessive fascination with the archives, he has preferred to pick out some theme or idea and drive it through with relentless single-mindedness and clarity, subordinating every aspect of the proceedings to his ideological aim. His characterization of Ronald Reagan in his most recent book, The Cold War, applies equally to himself: ‘His strength lay in his ability to see beyond complexity to simplicity’.

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There remains the insurmountable problem called the People’s Republic of China. Where does it fit in Gaddis’s scheme? How could the United States virtually ally itself with the most radical of Communist regimes, which was not even diplomatically recognized, against a far more conservative one, officially committed to the idea of peaceful coexistence? On these issues, Gaddis offers nothing but cursory remarks, murmuring vaguely that the consensus on China is still unclear—as though any such consensual clarity would have mattered to him. This reticence stems from a certain ambiguity on the foundational question of whether the Cold War was a systemic conflict. If a utopian communist such as Mao could decide, on ‘realistic’ grounds, to ally with the us, and if the us could ally with him in the name of triangulation, what systemic dimension could there possibly be?

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Moreover, pre-emption, unilateralism and hegemony cannot be said to form a specifically ‘American’ trinity as Gaddis contends. Indeed, there is arguably no trinity at all: what makes the former two effective is, in the end, hegemony. Without this normative ingredient, pre-emption and unilateralism would become simple tools of classical statecraft, or, put differently, the military house rules of the state of Israel. This, not the redoubtable John Quincy Adams, seems the immediate model."