In This Review
Reconstructing Consensus: American Foreign Policy Since The Vietnam War

Reconstructing Consensus: American Foreign Policy Since The Vietnam War

By Richard A. Melanson

St. Martin's, 1990, 248 pp.

Employing the method of "structured, focused comparison" the author asks a set of identical questions about the Nixon, Carter and Reagan administrations. Writing before the crisis in the Persian Gulf, he concluded that a superficial consensus had been attained even before President Bush sent American forces into combat.