| The primary purpose of this dissertation is to provide a more detailed map of U.S. grand strategy during the early Cold War than historians have offered heretofore. A secondary goal is to expose the roots of America's Pyrrhic victory in the Cold War.; This work employed case studies as the most effective and efficient method for achieving these stated aims. In choosing the cases, the author employed the following criteria: (1) cases that scholars commonly regard as significant U.S. foreign policies during the early Cold War period; (2) cases that represent a wide geographical sample of U.S. grand strategy during the Truman administration; and (3) cases that reflect a broad longitudinal sample of U.S. grand strategy during the early Cold War.; This study concludes that: (1) U.S. grand strategy during the early Cold War is best understood as the result of an evolutionary process involving the dynamic relationship between the principles of containment and economic multilateralism; (2) this strategic process, fueled by the act of determining and implementing specific policies, altered the initial and roughly balanced relationship between containment and multilateralism to the point where, by 1950, the former had subordinated the latter; and (3) this evolutionary process also produced enduring features within America's Cold War grand strategy that laid the ground work for imperial overstretch and, ultimately, a Pyrrhic Cold War victory on Washington's part. |
