Curt Cardwell. NSC 68 and the Political Economy of the Early Cold War

While reading this provocative book I was reminded of a conversation that I had many years ago with an old friend—a retired British general. I informed him that I was moving to Bologna, Italy, and asked if he had ever been there. “Been there?” he responded. “Why, I liberated it.” I decided not to challenge my friend on that occasion, but I was pretty sure that he was not the only actor, or factor, involved in this historical event. Curt Cardwell's subject is the “dollar gap,” which the author describes as “an international balance-of-payments crisis that emerged in full force in the postwar era, threatening to destroy the nascent global economy” (pp. 58–59). He correctly observes that this subject is an underappreciated part of the complex history of the formative period of the Cold War, and his book is a welcome corrective. But the author has two converging agendas that undermine the reliability and utility of his arguments. First, he wants to convince readers that the United States bears most of the responsibility for the Cold War. Second, and more important, he wants to overturn the dominant national security explanation for American actions and replace it with an economic argument. At various points in his narrative Cardwell attempts to take alternative interpretations into account. For example, in his introduction he admits that “U.S. foreign policy officials in this time period were undoubtedly concerned with the Soviet threat, and to argue otherwise would be foolhardy” (p. 6). Unfortunately, most of the book disregards these considerations in an effort to hammer home the author's thesis. As a result, Cardwell frequently commits the venial sin of exaggeration and occasionally commits the mortal sin of monocausal explanation.

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