Improbable Dangers

Reviews of the Hardcover 'This important book not only makes a real contribution to understanding the recent past, but also alerts us to a tendency that affects our view of the post-Cold War world today.' - Raymond L. Garthoff, Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution 'There is much good sense in this book, a useful antidote to the scaremongering and implausible scenarios that still accompany calls for US intervention.' - Foreign Affairs 'Johnson offers a convincing and well-reasoned analysis of the way American policy makers exaggerated threats from their enemies throughout the Cold War.' - Choice Why did U.S. policy makers so regularly exaggerate the Soviet threat during the Cold War? With the disappearance of the Soviet Union, is the tendency toward threat exaggeration likely to persist? Robert Johnson examines these questions employing a combination of psychological and political analysis and focusing upon U.S. conceptions of threat in the European, nuclear, and Third World arenas of conflict. This is a different kind of Cold War revisionism, concentrating on mistaken ideas about threats while accepting the reality of threat and the need for a policy of ontainment.
The book offers a theory about threat exaggeration based upon the human needs for order and control and the necessities of American politics, advances a cyclical view of U.S. alarmism in the Cold War, and includes numerous case studies. Against this background, it looks to the future, critiquing emerging views of the threat and suggesting broad guidelines for future U.S. policy.