The Forty Years’ Peace

Keith Kyle

• The United States and the End of the Cold War: Implications, Reconsiderations and Provocations by John Lewis Gaddis
  Oxford, 301 pp, £19.50, July 1992, ISBN 0 19 505201 3
• Dean Acheson: The Cold War Years, 1953-71 by Douglas Brinkley
  Yale, 429 pp, £22.00, February 1993, ISBN 0 300 04773 8
• The Quest for Stability: Problems of West European Security 1918-1957 edited by Rolf Ahmann, A.M. Birke and Michael Howard
  Oxford, 546 pp, £50.00, June 1993, ISBN 0 19 920503 5

Early in 1983, when the newly founded Social Democratic Party was acquiring policies by holding study groups, one of these was devoted to East-West relations. At its first session a musty-looking gentleman called Sir John Lawrence proposed that we begin from the assumption that the decline of the Soviet economic system had passed the point of no-return. Any policy recommendations must therefore reckon with the consequences of its collapse within the next few years and the implications of its replacement. Either from genuine scepticism or out of a primitive dread of hubris and what follows from it, the panel did not swallow Lawrence neat. We thus lost the full benefit of almost the only accurate prediction then to be heard concerning the future of the Eastern bloc.