Marc Trachtenberg has a good subject that challenges and provokes. He is a very well established historian of Cold War strategy, and, in passing, he brings this expertise to the post-Cold War debate. His is diplomatic history that focuses on the secrets and the maneuvering, rather than upon the domestic sources of policy, party-political debates, bureaucratic disputes, or the pressures of interest groups. His linguistic skills mean that he can also draw from an impressive and international range of archives. Trachtenberg begins the book by telling his readers that he wishes to “tell the story of how peace came to the world of the great powers.” In fact, the book is not merely a multiarchival story. Rather, it is a long, provocative, and complex argument based upon his defining themes, and it requires considerable pre-knowledge of the period to follow the twists and turns of events.

A Constructed Peace has two principal themes, both of which are, perhaps surprisingly, traditional ones. The first theme is that Germany lay at the core and heart of the Cold War. Trachtenberg is, unashamedly – and in my view, correctly – Eurocentric in his analysis. The German problem of the twentieth century has been one of power and powerlessness, but more, much more, of the former. For a very few years after 1945, the German problem was what to do with Germany, not what would Germany do. The wartime Allies occupied the country, altered its borders, sought compensation (reparations), and invented new political systems for the defeated power. Even as the Allies stumbled from decision to decision about Germany and Europe, it became clear that constructing a German peace settlement was also about the creation of an international system that reflected wider and different issues. The specifically German questions about central or local controls, ideology, armed forces, and territorial control became part of the broader East-West reconfiguration of power in the international system. At the same time, the two emerging superpowers also imported more issues of conflict into the German question, including those of control over Germany’s neighbors, competing perspectives about markets, reconstruction, economic recovery and growth, technology, and military power.

The book’s second theme is that it was military, and specifically nuclear weapons, issues that determined outcomes and shaped the making of a stable peace by the end of 1963. The date is not surprising. Until the probably mistakenly entitled Second Cold War of the early 1980s, and then the ending of the Cold War between 1989 and 1991, the period after the nasty scare of the Cuban missile crisis was generally considered to be that in which détente began, and when the rules of the Cold War game had been learned.

Trachtenberg’s argument begins with Germany, and the division of Europe. Although NATO had been created in 1949, the balance of power was precarious, as the United States was weakened by postwar cutbacks of troop levels. Containment was “more honored in the breach than in the observance” (p. 87), although the Americans could, if they had wished, still “go about destroying their enemy in a more or less leisurely fashion” (p. 97) until August of that year, when the Soviets broke the American nuclear monopoly. From 1950 to 1955, East-West, and West-West, relations were in an almost permanent state of crisis, until the European Defense Community was torpedoed and German rearmament within NATO was achieved. That 1955 did not bring structural peace was largely the responsibility of U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower. His personal commitment was to an American pullout from Europe “in the not too distant future” (p. 145), leaving a Europe strong enough to stand up to the USSR on its own (p. 147), even if that meant giving the Germans a nuclear role (p. 210), not least through “the most important initiative ever undertaken by the Eisenhower administration” (p. 194), the stockpile plan. All this meant that the world would have to undergo another great period of crisis before a stable system came into being. It was the second Berlin crisis of 1958–1962, “the central episode of the Cold War” (p. 247), that brought the German question, as well as the nuclear question, to a head. These questions were partially resolved through the texts of the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963, but, more important, through the “general sense of connectedness” (p. 389), or sub-rosa collusion that diplomacy achieved, linking together Berlin, Cuba, the end of the Multilateral Force, and the question of Germany’s non-possession of nuclear weapons.

Where does this place Trachtenberg as a historian of the Cold War? His view is Americocentric, and he sees American policy as essentially defensive, status quo, benign and non-hegemonic in intention (p. 119). Americans sought, and by 1963, had “bought,” a system “in which free nations could live in peace” (p. 401). But this was, Trachtenberg argues, an unnecessarily long process. The simple Yalta division of 1945 had unravelled by 1946 (pp. 29, 39–40). The Americans should not have allowed their conventional forces to be so reduced by 1949 that they were badly exposed to the strategic shock of the Soviet nuclear bomb (pp. 90–91). Then, having secured the outline of a settlement by 1955, Eisenhower exposed its Achilles’ heel with his personal commitment to European Third Forcism and the possibility of German control over nuclear weapons, which outraged the British and French, terrified the Soviets, and undermined the Paris Agreements of 1954–55 (p. 145). Only after the crisis of 1958–1962 was a constructed peace then possible. When taken with Trachtenberg’s remarks at the end of the book that the collusion of the Cold War continued between James Baker and Mikael Gorbachev in their efforts to control German post-Cold War aspirations in 1990, his remarks about the non-bipolar nature of the Cold War system (p. viii) become clearer. A fundamental distrust of Germany underpinned, and ironically cemented, Soviet-American relations even as West Germany recovered and started, skilfully, to play its limited cards. This is an important and provocative argument that carries forward the common wartime thinking of the United States and the Soviet Union during the Second World War, right into the Cold War, and beyond.

Is there a European dimension to this story? Trachtenberg acknowledges that he cannot cover everything that happened over his period. But he also argues that to ignore an issue is “a way of saying that no matter how much attention it got at the time and still gets in standard historical accounts, it did not play an important role in the central story” (p. ix). In A Constructed Peace, the Europeans generally get short shrift, except for Pierre Mendès-France, who receives good marks for ensuring that the European Defense Community collapsed in 1954 (p. 123). The British are largely reduced to bit-part players. They lurk on the sidelines, obsessively – if not narcissistically – preoccupied with their great power past and with the “special relationship,” and always fretting about their own domestic politics. Trachtenberg paints a picture of continued American exasperation with the French president, Charles de Gaulle, though sometimes it is not clear whether he is describing the thoughts of decision makers, or his own feelings. The behavior of German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer over the Berlin crisis tests Trachtenberg’s patience as it tested the patience of two U.S. presidents. It is refreshing to read an account that draws heavily upon French, German, and British sources, but puts the West Europeans in a place well below the salt, but perhaps the reality was more nuanced. West Europeans of course wanted American military backing, but the United States also needed West Europe. There are two aspects to this European dimension that merit elaboration.

First is the issue of whether the West Europeans mattered as players, and whether they had much of a role in determining both how the constructed peace was reached, and the nature of that peace. The work of Thomas Risse-Kappen, for example, takes a totally different perspective from Trachtenberg’s, and, although the two scholars publish through the same publishing house, Trachtenberg does not mention Risse-Kappen’s work.’ This is unfortunate, as Risse-Kappen argues not only that the European powers in the Atlantic Alliance played important roles at key moments beyond the power to say no – and the second Berlin crisis and the Cuban missile crisis are two such moments that he examines, but also that the Alliance was an ongoing and developing community of the like-minded, not simply a strategic defense grouping. Trachtenberg’s views on this interpretation would have been very much welcomed. Likewise, at least for Britain, the work of Ian Clark and Jan Melissen both take a more rounded (and Anglocentric) approach to inputs into the development of nuclear politics. Beatrice Heuser’s remarkable studies on nuclear planning and politics also present these issues in more of an Alliance, than an American, perspective. Trachtenberg argues that much of what the Americans said and did reflects something of a double game: the depth of American commitment and engagement, as well as the doubts that existed, could not always be communicated to the West Europeans. But the West Europeans were also past masters of the ambiguous: how much of the European-American dialogue was also bluff, or competitive rivalry for the Americans’ attention, or even shadow-boxing by the Europeans within the Alliance? This is not to detract from Trachtenberg’s overall argument, but simply to argue that the importance of American and European perceptions, and the opaqueness of diplomatic language that was actually used, particularly in the nuclear domain, must surely lead the reader to enquire how far the events leading up to the 1963 settlement were an American, or a American plus European, affair.

The second issue concerning the European dimension was whether the 1963 peace really had the narrow base that Trachtenberg gives it. His argument is based upon an assumption that hard power, and particularly nuclear power, shaped decisions. It is entirely right to factor in the importance of hard, military power. But any peace that the Americans and Europeans found for themselves was also to do with integration, economic growth, and political security, and was not just a high politico-military bargain. The other playing field apart from the Atlantic Alliance in which the European powers interested themselves was that of the European Economic Community (EEC). Founded in 1957, and based largely upon the strategic Franco-German bargain of 1950 (the European Coal and Steel Community), the EEC cannot be ignored in a general assessment of how the West secured a modicum of stability by the early 1960s. Indeed, the Americans – and not just Eisenhower – attached considerable importance to the EEC project, seeing the EEC not only as a mechanism to prevent war but as a potential player if not a partner, in the context of the rounds of negotiations that established a world trading system. So the two-way relationship between the shell of military alliances and the political-economic input of integrative politics also goes a long way toward explaining the nature of that peace, although the nature of this relationship is still unclear. By the 1960s, other powers were knocking at the door of the EEC, which of itself helped to legitimize and consolidate this sui generis institution. Further, the relationship between hard and soft power played directly into the politics of the early 1960s, as Trachtenberg himself indicates. The linkage between nuclear politics and Britain’s hoped for entry into the EEC has been the object of considerable research interest in Europe. This type of concern blurs the hard power/soft power divide, but also reflects the practical realities of decision making.

By 1962, the Americans were impatient, and were now determined to lead Europe, to play hardball, whatever their West European allies thought (p. 376). When the Americans decided to take the bull by the horns, they could indeed make things happen in Europe, although this was acknowledged to be a dangerous game. Nineteen sixty-three did bring the end of one phase of Europe’s Cold War history, and Trachtenberg puts up a good case for the importance of the linkage among Berlin, Cuba, West Germany, and the politics of nuclear weaponry. After 1963, the politics of the Cold War in Europe did indeed change, but this was also true for the politics of the United States itself. It was now increasingly absorbed by the problems of Vietnam, of China, of the Middle East, and of the global economy.

The dividing line between Cold War and constructed peace in Europe itself was never that clear: a divided Germany in a divided Europe with both the United States and the Soviet Union as key European players was to remain a source of tension for several decades after 1963. While the departure of West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer did make diplomatic life easier, Ostpolitik was to keep Germany as the major West European power, and German international politics at center stage. The Berlin Agreement was yet to come. Charles de Gaulle remained in office for six more years, sniping at the NATO and European Community systems. The British hovered on the margins of an integrated Europe for nearly ten more years, and again used nuclear diplomacy to facilitate their entry into the European Community. Indeed, while caution about West Germany as a great power remained, so also did – and does – the complex West European-American power relationship.