BUTTER AND GUNS: America's Cold War Economic Diplomacy (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Kunz, an assistant professor of history at Yale, demonstrates that the long-term perceived threat posed by the Soviet Union legitimated government intervention in the U.S. domestic economy. Furthermore, she contends, that intervention provided both a good life for most Americans and the basis of national security, as the defense industry promoted long-term economic growth that nurtured decades of material prosperity and social stability. Economic diplomacy was the core of a foreign policy that linked participants in the Western economic order while binding them to a U.S. that was able and willing to assume the primary responsibilities of leadership because, for the first time in the country's experience, events abroad directly affected these shores. American economic dominance of the Western sphere, Kunz explains, depended on a non-zero-sum approach facilitating development without creating an overt client system. On the other hand, command economies on the Leninist model proved spectacularly unable to provide both butter and guns-a failure that sentenced them to oblivion. Meanwhile, far from creating "imperial overstretch" along the lines described by Paul Kennedy, the national security state created by the Cold War, Kunz says, provided prosperity at home and peace abroad. She argues provocatively that the subsequent decoupling of foreign and domestic policy is combining with free-market triumphalism to weaken the synergies that generated affluence and security. One need not accept her argument to appreciate this as a clear and well-researched analysis of a revolutionary period in U.S. history.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Kunz (history, Yale Univ.) examines the Cold War from a different perspective, focusing on economic diplomacy rather than examining in traditional fashion the political and diplomatic events. Briefly, she recounts political and diplomatic issues in terms of how they affected the economic situation. Kunz concentrates on the evolution of our economic policy from the inception of Bretton Woods to its collapse in the late 1970s. One problem is her shallow discussion of diplomacy, particularly during the 1980s, which she barely mentions. Moreover, her explanations of the charts and graphs are weak, leaving readers unsure of their meaning. Despite these problems, her book adds immeasurably to our knowledge of the Cold War era, especially from an economic perspective. Recommended for scholars and specialists in the field.?Richard P. Hedlund, Ashland Community Coll., Ky.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: Free Press (January 9, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684827956
• ISBN-13: 978-0684827957
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.5 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 1.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #760,911 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Good on diplomatic history, bad on economics, March 30, 2000

By	Excerpt from "The Independent Review" (Oakland, CA) - See all my reviews

To what did Americans owe their postwar prosperity? In "Butter and Guns: America's Cold War Economic Diplomacy," Yale University professor of history Diane B. Kunz argues: the defense spending policies of the national security state....

If military spending indeed "continually primed the pump of the American economy" (p. 63), as Kunz asserts, she might have wondered where the pump-priming dollars came from. What is missing from her analysis is a sensitivity to the notion of opportunity cost. As historians Thomas G. Paterson ("On Every Front: The Making and Unmaking of the Cold War") and Paul Kennedy ("The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers") have noted, the Cold War saddled America with enormous material costs in terms of forgone socioeconomic well-being, in terms of lost consumer-oriented production, and in terms of overburdened government finances. Moreover, even in the areas of education and infrastructure spending (GI Bills and the interstate highway act), where contemporary liberal economists claim that government spending contributed positively to economic growth, it hardly stands to reason that the Cold War was a prerequisite to such spending. The Cold War did allow America to play a preponderant role in the postwar world, particularly while the economies of Europe and Japan still lay in ruins. Yet the enormous demands that the Cold War placed on the American economy saddled it with costs that became quite apparent by the 1970s. Even NSC-68, the postwar "blueprint" of the national security state, recognized the enormousness of those costs. Kunz does not.

Because Kunz misinterprets the mainsprings of economic growth in the postwar period, she can only lament the passing of the Cold War. Having demonstrated little faith in the workings of free markets, she can only look to the future with a sense of foreboding, as her chapter entitled "Free Trade Forever?" suggests. She concludes, absurdly (but consistently), that "Josef Stalin rescued American fifty years ago" (p. 334) and wonders who is to rescue America now, because "the free market cannot solve every ill" (p. 335).

4 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Obviously has no idea what economics is all about., May 21, 2003

By	Jeffrey M. Cavanaugh (Champaign, IL) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is, frankly, a poor book. It is a mediocre history of US economic diplomacy since WWII, but it is episodic in nature and fails to really tie together the ebb and flow of international diplomacy over economic issues. It also entirely fails to discuss the economic theory that governs politics in this area such as rent-seeking, two-level games, and even the Ricardo-Viner or Stophler(sp?)-Samuelson models of international trade. Moreover, in stressing the importance of the US military-industrial complex as a source of economic growth and job creation during this period, she totally ignores concepts basic to economics and economic analysis -- opportunity and transaction costs -- and so wrongly argued that the vast amount of capital spent on the military was GOOD for the US economy. She also, to add to the poor analysis everywhere evident in this book, fails to show any real correlation between military spending and economic growth.

BAD BOOK!