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America's Strategic Blunders: Intelligence Analysis and National Security Policy, 1936-1991. By Willard C. Matthias. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001. ISBN 0-271-02066-0. Notes. Index. Pp. 367. $35.00.
Willard Matthias spent over twenty years working on national intelligence estimates for the Central Intelligence Agency. Not surprisingly, his book argues that "America's strategic blunders" have resulted from political decisions to ignore those estimates. American national security policy during the Cold War, he contends, was dominated by conflict between "a rational approach, with its commitment to keeping Soviet behavior under review," and an ideological approach "that simply identified the USSR as an implacable and changeless enemy determined to enslave the world" (p. 315).
The strengths of this book lie in the author's...