Beyond the Thaw

This is the first comprehensive examination of the U.S. national security situation in all of its dimensions since the dramatic events that began in 1989. The Soviet-initiated truce in the Cold War signified a major victory for the United States and its allies in the great twentieth-century competition between systems of human governance. But the victory was not without cost to the United States, which expended tremendous material, human, and psychic resources to forge and maintain the worldwide military and economic forces that protected its own national security and that of its allies. As a result, Deitchman argues, we are a less secure nation now than we were at the height of the Cold War. The United States is struggling to find its way through a new set of daunting economic and strategic challenges: the growth of powerful, competing economies in Europe and Japan at the same time that the military threat that united those countries with the United States is subsiding; the rise of Third World threats to vital U.S. interests; and the implications of uncertain success in attempts by the Soviets to change their own society and role in the world. This book reviews the recent changes in the world situation and in the U.S. strategic posture after nearly a half-century of conflict. It redefines the national security of the United States to encompass the economic, the political, and the human factors as well as the military problems we face. The book puts forward a new national security strategy for the coming generation of Americans, an armed force structure to support it, and steps to revitalize the U.S. economy and create the human capital necessary to implement it Deitchman estimates the cost of this new strategyand shows it to be beyond any current comprehension, even after the "peace dividend" is subtracted. But he shows it to be supportable if people have the will to seek the new level of security it offers.