Out Of The Cold: New Thinking For American Foreign And Defense Policy In The 21st Century
Robert McNamara served as secretary of defense during the Kennedy and most of the Johnson administrations. In the two decades since he left the Pentagon he has been consistently thoughtful and constructively critical about past American behavior, including his own, and about prospects for the future. In this volume he succinctly describes how the cold war distorted both American and Soviet values; he describes Gorbachev's "new thinking" and pronounces it genuine, and argues that the West can respond more creatively and without undue risk even should Gorbachev fail.
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The American century, far from being over, is on the way. The information revolution, which capsized the Soviet Union and propelled Japan to eminence, has altered the equation of national power. America leads the world in the new technologies. Its emerging military systems can thwart any threat. On the "soft-power" side, it projects its ideals and other countries follow. To prevent an information race, America must share its lead; to preserve its reputation, it must keep its house in order.
Although terrorism is a top U.S. concern, the State Department's annual terrorism report was riddled with errors. If Washington wants to win the war, it needs to get its facts straight.
The Bush administration has done little to contain the spread of weapons of mass destruction, even as undeterrable nonstate actors grow more intent on obtaining and using them. U.S. counterproliferation policy needs an overhaul. Its new goals should be to get nuclear material out of circulation, reinforce nonproliferation agreements, and use new technologies and invasive monitoring to get better and more actionable intelligence.
