The overall population of the German Democratic Republic…

“It’s not a very nice solution,” Kennedy acknowledged, “but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.”54 The president could…

— John Lewis Gaddis

The United States came out of the 1990s, if anything, in an even greater position of hegemony and preeminence than it was at the…

— John Lewis Gaddis

I don't think there is necessarily a contradiction between being a hegemonic power on the one hand and functioning multilaterally on the other.

— John Lewis Gaddis

George W. Bush has much to evaluate: he has presided over the most sweeping redesign of U.S. grand strategy since the presidency of Franklin…

— John Lewis Gaddis

“Stalin’s first move, uncharacteristically, was to apologize to the Chinese comrades for having underestimated them: “Our opinions are not always correct,” he told a…

— John Lewis Gaddis

I think the way to think about the impact of Hiroshima is to think about it as a sudden shift in the balance of…

— John Lewis Gaddis

“Thanks to an ingenious constitution, their geographical isolation from potential rivals, and a magnificent endowment of natural resources, the Americans managed to build an…

— John Lewis Gaddis

Second terms in the White House open the way for second thoughts.

— John Lewis Gaddis

“I can’t take communism nor can you, but to cross this bridge I would hold hands with the Devil.”

— John Lewis Gaddis

“From 1957 through 1961, Khrushchev openly, repeatedly, and bloodcurdlingly threatened the West with nuclear annihilation. Soviet missile capabilities were so far superior to those…

— John Lewis Gaddis

“Historical consciousness therefore leaves you, as does maturity itself, with a simultaneous sense of your own significance and insignificance. Like Friedrich's wanderer, you dominate…

— John Lewis Gaddis

“His months of teaching experience were now a lost age of youth and innocence. He could no longer sit in his office at Fort…

— John Lewis Gaddis

If there is one great power, and the great power has taken upon itself the right to preempt and is choosing for itself when…

— John Lewis Gaddis

“[I]n the interests of our common tasks, we must sometimes overlook their stupidities,” one Soviet official explained in 1973.”

— John Lewis Gaddis

“This is where the capitalists got it right: they were better than the communists at learning from history, because they never bought into any…

— John Lewis Gaddis