Marc Trachtenberg
Biographic Data
| ID | 975763 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Marc Trachtenberg |
| GIVEN NAMES | Marc |
| FAMILY NAME | Trachtenberg |
| SIGNATURE | TRACHTENBERG M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Los Angeles |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 48 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 174 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 48 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1977 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
The Rules-Based International Order: A Historical Analysis
There has been a good deal of talk in recent years about the “rules-based international order”—the system of laws, agreements, principles, and institutions that, many observers say, lay at the heart of the international system that came into being after World War II. It is often argued that maintaining the rules-based order—and extending it if possible—should be a fundamental goal not just for the United States but for Western countries more gene…
The United States and Strategic Arms Limitation during the Nixon-Kissinger Period: Building a Stable International System
The Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) played a key role in U.S.-Soviet relations in the early 1970s. This article reassesses some aspects of the SALT process in the light of important evidence that has become available in recent years. The key question is whether U.S. policy in the SALT negotiations was rooted in strategic stability theory—that is, in the idea that both major powers should work out an arrangement that would guarantee the sur…
A Self-Inflicted Wound? Henry Kissinger and the Ending of the October 1973 Arab-Israeli War
Claims about Soviet policy at the end of the October 1973 Arab-Israeli war played a key role in discrediting détente in the mid- and late 1970s. This analysis considers the part that Henry Kissinger played in triggering the Soviet actions at the end of the war to which the critics of détente pointed. Contrary to what Kissinger claimed, he essentially reneged on the agreement he had reached with the Soviet leadership to end the war and instead dir…
The United States and the Nato Non-extension Assurances of 1990: New Light on an Old Problem
The Russian government has claimed that the Western powers promised at the end of the Cold War not to expand NATO, but later reneged on that promise. Most former officials in the West, and many scholars as well, have denied that this was the case; but other scholars, along with a handful of former officials, believe that promises to that effect were, in fact, made in 1990. So who is right? The question still has political importance: how it is an…
The de Gaulle Problem
Four distinguished analysts of French foreign policy under Charles de Gaulle provide in-depth assessments of the new book edited by Christian Nuenlist, Anna Locher, and Garret Martin, Globalizing de Gaulle: International Perspectives on French Foreign Policies, 1958–1969, published by Lexington Books. The commentators praise the book's wide scope and many of its essays and broad themes, but they raise questions about Garret Martin's contention (s…
A Comment on the Comments
Audience Costs: An Historical Analysis
This article examines the argument that the ability of a government to generate “audience costs”—to create a situation, that is, in which it would pay a domestic political price for backing down—plays a key role in determining how international crises run their course. It does this by looking at a dozen great power crises to see how well various aspects of the audience costs argument hold up in the light of the historical evidence. The audience c…
The French Factor in U.S. Foreign Policy during the Nixon-Pompidou Period, 1969–1974
President Richard Nixon and his chief foreign policy adviser, Henry Kissinger, sought to build a close relationship with the new French President Georges Pompidou, who had replaced the testy Charles de Gaulle in mid-1969. Initially, Pompidou and his ministers warmly welcomed the new U.S. policy. But by the end of the Nixon-Pompidou period in 1974, U.S.-French relations were in a tailspin. This article explores what went wrong, showing that numero…
France and Nato, 1949–1991
The United States and Eastern Europe in 1945: A Reassessment
This article reassesses U.S. Cold War policy in 1945, with particular emphasis on Eastern Europe. The article considers how the U.S. government proposed to deal with the Soviet Union in the postwar period more generally. The article looks closely at U.S. policy toward Poland and toward Romania and Bulgaria and sets these policies into context in order to determine whether U.S. leaders had “written off” the East European countries by the end of th…
Preventive War and US Foreign Policy
This chapter discusses US policy on preventive war. Following September 11, 2001, the Bush Administration established a new national security policy that was no longer based on the principle of deterrence, but based on pre-emption. It is shown that the Bush strategy is anomalous and has really broken with American tradition. This is done by considering the policies pursued by other American governments, and in particular by looking at how the Tru…
Preventive War and U.S. Foreign Policy
This article examines the claim that the Bush strategy of dealing with developing threats “preemptively” marked a total break with American tradition. It turns out that preventive war thinking played a much greater role in shaping u.s. policy than most people realize. During the early Cold War period, this sort of thinking was by no means limited to the lunatic fringe. Could the United States simply sit back and allow first the Soviets and then t…
The Atlantic Alliance Under Stress: US-European Relations after Iraq
Can the political institutions of the transatlantic alliance endure the demise of the Soviet enemy? Did the Iraq crisis of 2002–3 signal the final demise of the Atlantic partnership? If so, what are the likely consequences? In this book a distinguished group of political scientists and historians from Europe and the United States tackle these questions. The book examines the causes and consequences of the crisis in Atlantic relations that accompa…
The Marshall Plan as Tragedy
Five distinguished scholars offer separate commentaries on the article by Michael Cox and Caroline Kennedy-Pipe. All of the commentators reject the broad interpretation and many of the specific arguments put forth by Cox and Kennedy-Pipe. They point out several crucial issues that are omitted from the article and raise questions about the authors' sources, use of evidence, and selective invocation of secondary literature. They regret that Cox and…
France and the German Question, 1945–1955
This article challenges the traditional view that France was “obsessed” with the German threat in the decade after World War II and that French leaders only grudgingly accepted the policy that the United States and Britain had decided to pursue. The official rhetoric of the postwar period should not to be taken at face value. In reality, French leaders understood the logic of the “western strategy” for Germany and at a basic level endorsed it. Ev…
New Light on an Old Issue
Michael Creswell and Marc Trachtenberg reply to the three commentaries, emphasizing the conflicting points raised therein. Addressing each of the respondents in turn, Creswell and Trachtenberg contend that their article accurately depicts French concerns in the late 1940s and 1950s, that it goes beyond existing “revisionist” works on the topic, that it debunks the traditionalist view of French policy, and that it makes use of the best evidence to…
The Origins of the Historical Society: A Personal View
June 2003 · Historically Speaking47 1980 and 1992 El Salvador, with U.S. aid provided under the Reagan Doctrine, defeated the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN). In all these instances the U.S. strategy called for carrots and sticks—aggressive militaryoperations againstthe rebels combined with liberalizing reforms to win over the uncommitted populace. And in all these cases the U.S. and its allies were successful. The glaring except…
The Question of Realism
New light on the Cold War
The Cold War has traditionally been interpreted in moral terms, but it turns out that statesmen were less ideological and far more sensitive to the logic of power than we had been led to believe. It thus makes sense to interpret that conflict in a new way — or really in much the same way as international politics has traditionally been interpreted: as a political conflict, in which power factors loomed large, and about which moral judgements are …
A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement 1945-1963
De Gaulle, Moravcsik, and Europe
The responses to Andrew Moravcsik's article discuss the main substantive and methodological points raised in it. Although most of the respondents agree that Moravcsik has properly highlighted the importance of commercial concerns for de Gaulle's policy on European integration, they question the validity of his sharp separation between de Gaulle's political and economic goals for France. Several commentators argue that political and commercial con…
Versailles revisited
Manfred Boemeke, Gerald Feldman, and Elisabeth Glaser, The Treaty of Versailles: A Reassessment after 75 Years (New York: Cambridge University Press; and Washington, D.C.: German Historical Institute, 1998)
A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945-1963
A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945-1963
The Arming of Europe and the Making of the First World War. David G. Herrmann
Audience Costs: An Historical Analysis
This article examines the argument that the ability of a government to generate “audience costs”—to create a situation, that is, in which it would pay a domestic political price for backing down—plays a key role in determining how international crises run their course. It does this by looking at a dozen great power crises to see how well various aspects of the audience costs argument hold up in the light of the historical evidence. The audience c…
The Influence of Nuclear Weapons in the Cuban Missile Crisis
"A "Wasting Asset: American Strategy and the Shifting Nuclear Balance, 1949-1954
Preventive War and U.S. Foreign Policy
This article examines the claim that the Bush strategy of dealing with developing threats “preemptively” marked a total break with American tradition. It turns out that preventive war thinking played a much greater role in shaping u.s. policy than most people realize. During the early Cold War period, this sort of thinking was by no means limited to the lunatic fringe. Could the United States simply sit back and allow first the Soviets and then t…
The Meaning of Mobilization in 1914
Strategic Thought in America, 1952-1966
In the 1950s, strategy emerged in the United States as a new field with a distinct intellectual personality. A small group of men -Bernard Brodie, Thomas Schelling, Albert Wohlstetter, and a handful of others working mainly at the RAND Corporation, had moved into an intellectually barren no-man's land traditionally neglected by both military officers and students of international politics.I The body of thought they created was very different from…
The Question of Realism
The United States and Eastern Europe in 1945: A Reassessment
This article reassesses U.S. Cold War policy in 1945, with particular emphasis on Eastern Europe. The article considers how the U.S. government proposed to deal with the Soviet Union in the postwar period more generally. The article looks closely at U.S. policy toward Poland and toward Romania and Bulgaria and sets these policies into context in order to determine whether U.S. leaders had “written off” the East European countries by the end of th…
Mobilization and Inadvertence in the July Crisis
Versailles after Sixty Years
The historiography of the Paris Peace Conference has always been highly political. One of the first works to appear on the subject was a little book that Ray Stannard Baker published in 1919, What Wilson Did at Paris. Baker, who had headed the Press Bureau of the American delegation at the peace conference, said the book had been 'written chiefly to help along the League of Nations'.' President Wilson himself encouraged Baker to write a more wide…
Reparation at the Paris Peace Conference
A New Economic Order: Etienne Clementel and French Economic Diplomacy during the First World War
ranging that the country would inevitably face a severe and complex problem of reconstruction. What kind of solution did the French government have in mind? Traditional historiography had a simple answer: the government hoped that German reparations would solve the whole problem. But, in fact, during the war the French government had worked out an economic policy in which reparation played a very subordinate role. Instead, the government basicall…
The de Gaulle Problem
Four distinguished analysts of French foreign policy under Charles de Gaulle provide in-depth assessments of the new book edited by Christian Nuenlist, Anna Locher, and Garret Martin, Globalizing de Gaulle: International Perspectives on French Foreign Policies, 1958–1969, published by Lexington Books. The commentators praise the book's wide scope and many of its essays and broad themes, but they raise questions about Garret Martin's contention (s…
The French Factor in U.S. Foreign Policy during the Nixon-Pompidou Period, 1969–1974
President Richard Nixon and his chief foreign policy adviser, Henry Kissinger, sought to build a close relationship with the new French President Georges Pompidou, who had replaced the testy Charles de Gaulle in mid-1969. Initially, Pompidou and his ministers warmly welcomed the new U.S. policy. But by the end of the Nixon-Pompidou period in 1974, U.S.-French relations were in a tailspin. This article explores what went wrong, showing that numero…
France and the German Question, 1945–1955
This article challenges the traditional view that France was “obsessed” with the German threat in the decade after World War II and that French leaders only grudgingly accepted the policy that the United States and Britain had decided to pursue. The official rhetoric of the postwar period should not to be taken at face value. In reality, French leaders understood the logic of the “western strategy” for Germany and at a basic level endorsed it. Ev…
The transformation of European politics, 1763–1848
Melvyn Leffler and the origins of the cold war
The United States and the Nato Non-extension Assurances of 1990: New Light on an Old Problem
The Russian government has claimed that the Western powers promised at the end of the Cold War not to expand NATO, but later reneged on that promise. Most former officials in the West, and many scholars as well, have denied that this was the case; but other scholars, along with a handful of former officials, believe that promises to that effect were, in fact, made in 1990. So who is right? The question still has political importance: how it is an…
A Comment on the Comments
France and Nato, 1949–1991
The Marshall Plan as Tragedy
Five distinguished scholars offer separate commentaries on the article by Michael Cox and Caroline Kennedy-Pipe. All of the commentators reject the broad interpretation and many of the specific arguments put forth by Cox and Kennedy-Pipe. They point out several crucial issues that are omitted from the article and raise questions about the authors' sources, use of evidence, and selective invocation of secondary literature. They regret that Cox and…
New Light on an Old Issue
Michael Creswell and Marc Trachtenberg reply to the three commentaries, emphasizing the conflicting points raised therein. Addressing each of the respondents in turn, Creswell and Trachtenberg contend that their article accurately depicts French concerns in the late 1940s and 1950s, that it goes beyond existing “revisionist” works on the topic, that it debunks the traditionalist view of French policy, and that it makes use of the best evidence to…
The Origins of the Historical Society: A Personal View
June 2003 · Historically Speaking47 1980 and 1992 El Salvador, with U.S. aid provided under the Reagan Doctrine, defeated the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN). In all these instances the U.S. strategy called for carrots and sticks—aggressive militaryoperations againstthe rebels combined with liberalizing reforms to win over the uncommitted populace. And in all these cases the U.S. and its allies were successful. The glaring except…
Poincaré's Deaf Ear: The Otto Wolff Affair and French Ruhr Policy, August-September 1923
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The End of French Predominance in Europe: The Financial Crisis of 1924 and the Adoption of the Dawes Plan
A New Economic Order: Etienne Clementel and French Economic Diplomacy during the First World War
ranging that the country would inevitably face a severe and complex problem of reconstruction. What kind of solution did the French government have in mind? Traditional historiography had a simple answer: the government hoped that German reparations would solve the whole problem. But, in fact, during the war the French government had worked out an economic policy in which reparation played a very subordinate role. Instead, the government basicall…
Reparation at the Paris Peace Conference
Reparation at the Paris Peace Conference, and Political Economy versus National Sovereignty: Reply
Poincaré's Deaf Ear: The Otto Wolff Affair and French Ruhr Policy, August-September 1923
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Versailles after Sixty Years
The historiography of the Paris Peace Conference has always been highly political. One of the first works to appear on the subject was a little book that Ray Stannard Baker published in 1919, What Wilson Did at Paris. Baker, who had headed the Press Bureau of the American delegation at the peace conference, said the book had been 'written chiefly to help along the League of Nations'.' President Wilson himself encouraged Baker to write a more wide…
Economics
Les relations franco-sovietiques, 1917-1924 . Anne Hogenhuis-Seliverstoff
Europe
The Influence of Nuclear Weapons in the Cuban Missile Crisis
Revolution and Intervention: The French Government and the Russian Civil War 1917-1919. Michael Jabara Carley
The Genoa Conference: European Diplomacy, 1921-1922 . Carole Fink
"A "Wasting Asset: American Strategy and the Shifting Nuclear Balance, 1949-1954
Strategic Thought in America, 1952-1966
In the 1950s, strategy emerged in the United States as a new field with a distinct intellectual personality. A small group of men -Bernard Brodie, Thomas Schelling, Albert Wohlstetter, and a handful of others working mainly at the RAND Corporation, had moved into an intellectually barren no-man's land traditionally neglected by both military officers and students of international politics.I The body of thought they created was very different from…
Commentary: New Light on the Cuban Missile Crisis
Over the past few years we have learned a good deal about the Cuban missile crisis. But almost all of the new information has come from the American side. Soviet sources, even in this era of glasnost, have not provided us with much hard evidence. This I think is on the whole true even of Bernd Greiner's interview with Sergo Mikoyan. The text did little to change my own thinking about the crisis. When Mikoyan said something that I already believed…
The Meaning of Mobilization in 1914
History and Strategy
This work is a powerful demonstration of how historical analysis can be brought to bear on the study of strategic issues, and, conversely, how strategic thinking can help drive historical research. Based largely on newly released American archives, History and Strategy focuses on the twenty years following World War II. By bridging the sizable gap between the intellectual world of historians and that of strategists and political scientists, the e…
The Future of War
Journal Article The Future of War Get access Mueller John. Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War. New York: Basic Books, 1989. vii + 327 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $20.95. Marc Trachtenberg Marc Trachtenberg MARC TRACHTENBERG, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of a number of works on twentieth-century international politics, including a book on the reparation question after World War I and…
Mobilization and Inadvertence in the July Crisis
The Origins of U. S. Nuclear Strategy, 1945-1953
We All Lost the Cold War
Melvyn Leffler and the origins of the cold war
The transformation of European politics, 1763–1848
The Arming of Europe and the Making of the First World War. David G. Herrmann
A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945-1963
Political science (46 works) · Law (33 works) · History (26 works) · Politics (25 works) · Law (24 works) · Political economy (21 works) · Sociology (21 works) · History (17 works) · Economic history (16 works) · Economics (14 works)