Recent American Diplomatic History: A Mouse's Eye View

Abstract

Gregg Herken. The Winning Weapon : The Atomic Bomb in the Cold War, 1945-1950. New York: Knopf, 1980.425 + xiv pp. Timothy P. Ireland. Creating the Entangling Alliance: The Origins of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981.264 pp. Akira Iriye. Power and Culture : The Japanese-American War, 1941-1945. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981.336 pp. William W. Stueck. The Road to Confrontation : American Policy Toward China and Korea, 1947-1950. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1981. 337 pp. Of all the forms of contemporary historiography, diplomatic history has had the worst press over the past decade. Scorned as an elitist preoccupation with personalities and mere chronology, diplomatic history has receded from the consciousness of many of today's graduate students, making way for vast, quantifiable waves of oppression, violence and crime. While facing this assault from the front, diplomatic historians have found that their flanks have been turned by the disappearance of their political-science auxiliaries into a wonderland of computerology, word counts (disguised as "opera- tional codes"), graphs and jargon—opaque and splendidly costly, if some- what baffling and fruitless. Compared to the heuristic mansions in which political science's international relations specialists now dwell, diplomatic historians labor, or slumber—according to choice—in hovels better suited to the cottage industry that is their specialty.