Description: The Soviet empire entered its steepest decline and fall in the very years that Washington was captivated by the spectre of a rising Soviet threat. How did American elites get it so wrong? In this important book, Dana Allin combines a masterful narrative of the Cold War with a fascinating dissection of the fallacies upon which its surreal pessimism was based. He focuses on the so-called "second Cold War" that followed the detente of the early 1970s, and on Europe, which remained the central battlefield and prize of that ideological struggle. By suggesting that Western Europe was on the verge of being neutralized, or "Finlandized", by Soviet blackmail, American conservatives were able to create a picture of Soviet strength and Western weakness that was, in fact, the very reverse of reality. Drawing on a rich variety of sources, Allin analyzes the military, political and economic errors that distorted this picture.

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