Quote:
Originally Posted by Red Flag 1
I have to wonder if Obama is getting too much credit for having "thought this through"?
Given the history of this administration's overreaching itself, and lack of depth, IMHO, I expect a simpler reason.
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The questions of what classes he took as an undergraduate and the marks he received remain more than a matter of intellectual curiosity.
IIRC, the president was in college between 1979 and 1983 and majored in political science with an emphasis on international relations. Access to his academic transcripts would lead to copies of course syllabi which would reveal his exposure to the historiography of the Cold War and (perhaps) allow us to understand that exposure within the context of contemporaneous debates over the ongoing American-Soviet rivalry.
My
guess is that the future president was influenced by so-called revisionist interpretations of the Cold War. This interpretative approach argued that the U.S. provoked the Soviet Union towards a defensive posture towards the West and was therefore responsible for causing the Cold War. (This line of reasoning considered Stalin a person open to reasoned dialog and condemned millions of Eastern Europeans--including Poles--to live as slaves under the heel of Communism.) The future president may have also taken to heart contemporaneous arguments that personal diplomacy was a better way to conduct international relations under the shadow of nuclear annihilation, and that opportunities for disarmament should be seized.
From a chronological perspective, unless the future president was immensely curious intellectual as an undergraduate (a trait of which I see no evidence) he probably did not have the opportunity to observe the incubation of what one scholar has clumsily labeled 'the post revisionist synthesis' of Cold War historiography.*
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* John Lewis Gaddis, “The Emerging Post-Revisionist Synthesis on the Origins of the Cold War”
Diplomatic History 7:3 (Summer 1983): 171-190. Gaddis wrote a number of works during the 1970s and early 1980s that presaged this important article.