Lawrence S.Wittner is Professor of History at the State University of N.Y./Albany. His latest book is Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present (Stanford 2003)

Decades ago, the late C. Wright Mills, that extraordinary sociologist, referred caustically to the "American Celebration," and it is certainly alive and well in our own time. American flags, it seems, are ubiquitous in the United States, accompanied by assorted patriotic paraphernalia and injunctions to "Support Our Troops."

In this context, Cold War Triumphalism provides an excellent source for a better understanding of this phenomenon. Edited by Ellen Schrecker, Professor of History at Yeshiva University, the book is a collection of scholarly essays written by leading historians and political scientists. As Schrecker explains the work, "a patriotic celebration prevails, glorifying Washington's past actions in order to justify its present ones." But "by presenting alternative explanations of the Cold War," the writers in this book "complicate the standard narrative and thus challenge the uses to which it is being put." And the uses of such triumphalism, she notes, are fairly clear; it is trotted out to justify U.S. militarism, laissez-faire capitalism, belief in religious orthodoxy, and imperialism -- or, rather, U.S. imperialism.

Schrecker contends that "this book seeks to hold the key assumptions of Cold War triumphalism up to critical scrutiny." Although the essays "do that from different political and intellectual perspectives, they all demonstrate . . . how seriously the celebratory interpretation of the Cold War distorts our understanding of the recent past and thus provides a misleading and dangerous set of guideposts for the United States and the world in the twenty-first century."

Unfortunately, the book suffers from a problem endemic to a collection of articles -- they don't always mesh very well or sustain a coherent narrative. In fact, at times, some of the essays provide differing interpretations of events. Even so, the articles are provocative and interesting, and readers can simply choose which ideas and emphases they will adopt and which they will reject. In short, Cold War Triumphalism does not lay out a carefully-organized meal, but a tasty smorgasbord.

In it, Leo Ribuffo examines the foreign policy ideas of three intellectuals (Reinhold Niebuhr, William Appleman Williams, and John Lewis Gaddis), concluding: "We still lack sustained and consistent moral arguments that might help us to resolve -- or at least clarify -- difficult and painful foreign policy questions." In another examination of U.S. intellectual life, Bruce Cumings -- after, astonishingly, maintaining that there were virtually no critical thinkers in the United States during the 1980s -- demolishes the triumphalist intellectual paradigms of Francis Fukuyama, Samuel Huntington, and John Mearsheimer. For his part, Nelson Lichtenstein denounces not only free market triumphalism, but the role "wishful intellectuals" played in smoothing its path to ideological hegemony. Michael Bernstein advances the dubious proposition that only with the end of the Cold War did U.S. presidents cease to blend a concern with social and economic equity with their foreign and military policy priorities. Moreover, in a particularly well-crafted essay, Maurice Isserman and Schrecker show that recent revelations about Soviet spying in the United States are less damning to most American Communists and less supportive of Senator Joseph McCarthy than conservative pundits have maintained.

Other writers, although dealing with disparate subjects, also provide illuminating insights. Carolyn Eisenberg delineates the misrepresentation of the Berlin blockade of 1948-49, which set the stage for subsequent military buildups and proxy wars. Jessica Wang shows how, alongside the development of an aggressive, self-centered U.S. foreign policy, there emerged a competing international system, "one premised upon the submission of nation-states to international institutions, the rule of law, and the will of the global community." Examining three separate Cold Wars -- in Europe, Asia, and Latin America -- Chalmers Johnson argues powerfully that the continuity of the last two demonstrates the imperial thrust of U.S. policy. Marilyn Young maintains that U.S. elites,since their debacle in Vietnam, have been scrambling to come up with a war that will be viewed as glorious and, more recently, that will extend the benefits to them that they once secured through the Cold War. Finally, Corey Robin, in a very imaginative essay, suggests that U.S. conservatives, bored with the acquisitive, commercial society they have created in the United States, recently have sought to give it a less humdrum, more romantic direction through imperialism.

This last point leads to a question that goes beyond the United States and beyond the Cold War: What is there about nationalism -- and, in its most inflamed form, imperialism -- that is so exciting, so exhilarating? Historians and other scholars have been struck by how captivated the lower classes sometimes have been by flag-waving and patriotism. Explaining this phenomenon, they have pointed to the fact that a vision of national glory lifts poor people out of their miserable, stunted lives, much as their identification with a prominent movie star, member of a royal family, or athlete does. But, as this study, among others, indicates, it is not only the downtrodden who are exhilarated by the romance of war and empire. At bottom, many bankers, businessmen, and bureaucrats may also be bored with their trivial pursuit of wealth and power and crave something more exciting. It's too bad, of course, that to attain this patriotic thrill, they are willing to destroy so many countries and kill so many people.
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