More Precious Than Peace: The Cold War and the Struggle for the Third World

America's overriding task during the 20th century, in Rodman's view, has been reconciling its moral convictions with its strategic responsibilities. Here he traces the course of the Cold War and charts the interaction of the superpowers with particular attention to U.S.-Soviet rivalry for dominance in the Third World. The author praises President Reagan's efforts to shape a policy toward developing nations that accommodated American idealism with strategic necessity. The Reagan administration's strong policy toward Moscow, he asserts, led to the Soviet retreat from Afghanistan, Angola and Cambodia. An unusually upbeat, hardly objective view of the Cold War in relation to the Third World by a political theorist with government credentials: Rodman served as White House adviser to Henry Kissinger during the Nixon and Ford administrations and as policy-planning director at the State Department during the Reagan years. He is an editor of the National Review. (Nov.)