On-Site Inspections under the CFE Treaty by Joseph P. Harahan; John C. KuhnReview by: Eliot A. CohenForeign Affairs, Vol. 76, No. 4 (Jul. - Aug., 1997), p. 153Published by: Council on Foreign RelationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20048144 .

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Recent Books

those that were not. That understood,

the book has more coherence than most

edited collections, and some of its indi

vidual essays are outstanding.

On-Site Inspections under the CFE Treaty. BY JOSEPH P. HARAHAN AND JOHN

c. k?hn, in. Washington: On-Site

Inspection Agency, U.S. Department of Defense, 1996,369 pp.

The chances that this dense work will

become a best-seller are nil. It is, how

ever, a thoroughly documented account

of the considerable bureaucratic labors

required to administer the complex

Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in

Europe, concluded in 1990 just as the

Cold War was evaporating?and with it

the rationale for the treaty. With great effort and ingenuity, American and

European militaries have devised and

operated a system for tracking deploy ments of weapons in Europe, a process that witnessed the removal of tens of

thousands of pieces of Russian equipment to the east and the smashing, cutting, and

crushing of much obsolete hardware on

both sides. For those interested in the mechanics of conventional arms control,

however, this will prove an interesting

work, subject to the qualification that

CFE monitoring took place under unusu

ally favorable political conditions.

The United States DAVID C. HENDRICKSON

We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War

History, by john lewis gaddis.

New York: Oxford University Press,

1997, 425 pp. $30.00. This brilliant study?Gaddis' fifth book on the Cold War?provides an exhaustive

and ever-quizzical approach to the early

years of the superpower conflict. Gaddis

has a knack for asking large and interesting

questions, and he brings a lively style to his answers. Despite the promise of startling revelations from newly opened archives,

what "we now know" turns out to bear an

uncanny resemblance to what we thought

then; never has "post-revisionism" seemed

so indistinguishable from the original or

thodoxy. Much ofthat orthodoxy, as Gad

dis insists, saw the issues at stake in Europe more clearly than the revisionists, appalled

by Vietnam, later would. It was the

tragedy of the postwar epoch, as the author

would perhaps acknowledge, that the

moral and strategic certainties persuasively reared in the pivot of the Soviet-American

confrontation in Europe got pilloried and

sundered in Southeast Asia. Gaddis dis

counts Kennan's warning: "The greatest

danger that can befall us in coping with

this problem of Soviet communism, is that

we shall allow ourselves to become like

those with whom we are coping." That

danger, Gaddis insists, "never materialized."

With this and other judgments one wishes

to quarrel, even as one admires the author's

ability to bring fresh curiosity and invigo rating judgments to this tired old subject.

Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara,

the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies that Led to Vietnam, by h. r. mcmaster.

New York: HarperCollins, 1997, 464 pp. $27.50.

This angry book, by a former instructor

To order any book reviewed or advertised in Foreign Affairs, call 800-255-2665.

FOREIGN AFFAIRS - July/August 1997 [*53]

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