The CIA and the Soviet bloc: political warfare, the origins of the CIA and countering communism in Europe

摘要

In his first book Dr Stephen Long comprehensively examines the US foreign policy toward the Soviet Union between 1947 and 1956 with a particular focus on covert operations carried out by the CIA. The central thesis touches the question if US foreign policy was guided by an overarching policy goal and if the government tried to achieve this with a clear strategy. According to Long, the main characteristics of US policies during the early Cold War were twofold: First, they were formed by bureaucratic disorganization or disunity on the organizational level. Second, they reflected a 'strategic incoherence' meaning that no effective strategy was found to harness political warfare. In accordance with his second main claim, Long suggests that there was no coherent policy goal but only different policy impulses that changed over time - containment, rollback, Titoism, gradualism, and liberation are a few examples. Thus, he sums up his argument as follows: It is the central contention of this book that disorder prevailed over design on the strategic level of US Cold War policy towards the Soviet bloc. [...] This book challenges a prevailing tendency in the scholarship to impart a sense of coherence to American actions against the Soviet Union from the late 1940s onwards.(emphasis added).