Overview
From Central America to Iran, from Poland to Lebanon, both the United States and the Soviet Union have in recent years shown a growing confusion and unpredictability. Michael A. Ledeen, drawing on his first-hand experience as a foriegn correspondent and Special Advisor to Secretary of State Alexander Haig, offers an original and challenging analysis of the current East-West crisis, explaining what went wrong and why.
"Instead of a direct confrontation between the two power blocs," Ledeen writes, "we now witness striking indecision on both sides." The failures of Soviet and American leadership, he contends, have encouraged leaders elsewhere—in Cuba and Israel, for example—to take risks and embark on international adventures they would never have attempted a decade ago, thereby increasing the risk of conflict between the superpowers. Ledeen looks at the reasons behind the super-powers' confusion and finds markedly different explanations in each case. The Soviet Union, he says, faces an internal structural crisis of potentially explosive magnitude, while the United States seems unable to produce a policy-making elite equal to the challenge of the modern world.
As he isolates the specific factors in the increasingly dangerous world situation, Ledeen also considers "ways out" of the quandary, and suggests that the United States should pull together talent from throughout the Western world in its effort to construct sensible and durable approaches to foreign policy.
About the Author:
Michael A. Ledeen is Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Consultant to the Undersecretary of State for Political affairs and the the office of the secretary of Defense. He is the co-author of the widely acclaimed book Debacle, former editor of the Washington Quarterly, and author of five works on twentieth-century Europe.