The best edition of Thucydides is Robert B. Strassler (ed.), The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War, revised edition of the Richard Crawley translation (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). For modern accounts, see Donald Kagan, The Peloponnesian War (New York: Viking, 2003), and Victor Davis Hanson, A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and the Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War (New York: Random House, 2005). Louis J. Halle, in his The Cold War as History (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), was one of the first Cold War historians to draw on ancient analogies, including Thucydides.
Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939-1933 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), stresses Iosif Stalin's grand strategic skills, but is thin on the Cold War years. For these, see Vojtech Mastny, The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity: The Stalin Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), and Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). See also, on Nikita Khrushchev, William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York: Norton, 2003), and Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary (New York: Norton, 2006). The best overall history of Soviet grand strategy during the Cold War is now Vladislav M. Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union from Stalin to Gorbachev (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
Patrick O. Cohrs, The Unfinished Peace after World War I: America, Britain and the Stabilisation of Europe, 1919-1932 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), explains the failure to shape an effective peacetime grand strategy after World War I. For Franklin D. Roosevelt, see Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932-1943 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), and, for Harry S. Truman, Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992). John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), covers the origins and evolution of the Cold War through 1962. For containment, see John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy during the Cold War, rev. and exp. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Marc Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945-1963 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), shows why the post-World War II settlement in Europe proved more durable than its post-World War I predecessor. For the expansion of the Cold War to Asia, see Thomas J. Christensen, Useful Adversaries: Grand Strategy, Domestic Mobilization, and Sino-American Conflict, 1947-1958 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), and McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival: Choices about the Bomb in the First Fifty Years (New York: Random House, 1988), trace the development of Soviet and American strategy regarding nuclear weapons. For superpower strategies in the Third World, see Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Detente (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), shows how protest movements of the 1960s encouraged Soviet, American, and Chinese efforts to formalize the Cold War stalemate. Margaret MacMillan, Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2007), documents the Sino-American rapprochement that was part of this process. Aaron L. Friedberg, In the Shadow of the Garrison State: America’s Anti-Statism and Its Cold War Grand Strategy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), discusses domestic mobilization for the Cold War inside the United States, while Matthew J. Ouimet, The Rise and Fall of the Brezhnev Doctrine in Soviet Foreign Policy (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), examines economic and geopolitical crises within the Soviet Union during the era of detente. For the emerging issue of human rights, see Daniel C. Thomas, The Helsinki Effect: International Norms, Human Rights, and the Demise of Communism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
Little has as yet been written on the role of grand strategy in ending the Cold War, but some preliminary attempts to consider these issues include Raymond Garthoff, The Great Transition: American-Soviet Relations and the End of the Cold War (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1994), Philip Zelikow and Condoleezza Rice, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), Don Oberdorfer, From the Cold War to a New Era: The United States and the Soviet Union, 1983-1991, updated ed. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), as well as John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (New York: Penguin, 2005), and the final chapters of Gaddis, Strategies of Containment.
John Patrick Diggins, Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History (New York: Norton, 2007), seeks to place Reagan's strategy within a broad historical context, while Paul Lettow, Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (New York: Random House, 2005), focuses on that particular aspect of it. William Taubman is preparing the definitive biography of Mikhail Gorbachev; until it appears, the best sources for Gorbachev's strategy are his Memoirs (New York: Doubleday, 1995), and Anatoly
S. Chemyaev, My Six Years with Gorbachev, trans. and ed. by Robert D. English and Elizabeth Tucker (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000).
For Clausewitz's classic work, the only reliable edition is Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), which also contains informative essays by the editors and Bernard Brodie. Brodie's own analysis of Clausewitz's relevance to the Cold War - and that of Thucydides - is in his War and Politics (New York: Macmillan, 1973).
World History
