36.“Acheson Sets Path,” New York Times, September 20, 1945; Tony Smith, America’s Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 155–67.
37.“Meeting of the Secretary of Defense and the Service Chiefs with the Secretary of State 1045 Hours,” October 10, 1948, Box 147, James Forrestal Papers, SMML; Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2006), 145–49.
38.James Reston, “Atlantic Nations Sign Defense Pact,” New York Times, April 5, 1949. Acheson had been out of government during the negotiations in 1948, but returned as secretary in time to preside over the signing.
39.John Lewis Gaddis, The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 63. See also Timothy Sayle, Enduring Alliance: A History of NATO and the Postwar Global Order (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019).
40.See Paraphrase of Telegram from Bevin, April 9, 1948, FRUS 1948, vol. 3, document 67; Second Meeting of Washington Exploratory Talks, July 6, 1948, FRUS 1948, vol. 3, document 113.
41.Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 393.
42.Beisner, Dean Acheson, 161–62; CIA 3–49, “Review of the World Situation,” March 16, 1949, Box 178, NSC Files, Harry S. Truman Presidential Library.
43.William Stueck, The Korean War: An International History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Kathryn Weathersby, “ ‘Should We Fear This?’ Stalin and the Danger of War with America,” Cold War International History Project Working Paper 39, 2002.
44.Harry S. Truman, Years of Trial and Hope (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956), 332–33.
45.Stueck, Korean War; Chen Jian, China’s Road to the Korean War: The Making of the Sino-American Confrontation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).
46.Julian Zelizer, Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security—from World War II to the War on Terrorism (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 102.
47.See Melvyn Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992); Hal Brands, What Good Is Grand Strategy? Power and Purpose in American Statecraft from Harry S. Truman to George W. Bush (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), 47–53.
48.NSC-68, “United States Objectives and Programs for National Security,” April 12, 1950, President’s Secretary’s Files (PSF), Harry S. Truman Presidential Library; “Estimated U.S. and Soviet/Russian Nuclear Stockpiles, 1945–94,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, December 1994, 59; Allan Millett, Peter Maslowski, and William Feis, For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States from 1607 to 2012 (New York: Free Press, 2012), 467–91.
49.Acheson, Present at the Creation, 378.
50.Annual Report of Supreme Allied Commander Europe, April 2, 1952, Box 278, Averell Harriman Papers, LC.
51.Acheson, Present at the Creation, xvii.
52.Beisner, Dean Acheson, 156; Acheson, “Soviet Reaction to Free World’s Growing Strength,” Department of State Bulletin, October 20, 1952, 597.
53.Discussion at the 229th Meeting of NSC, December 21, 1954, FRUS 1952–1954, vol. 2, part 1, document 143. See also Mira Rapp-Hooper, Shields of the Republic: The Triumph and Peril of America’s Alliances (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020).
54.Richard Pells, Not Like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated, and Transformed American Culture since World War II (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 69.
55.Heritage Foundation, “Global U.S. Troop Deployments, 1950–2003,” October 24, 2004, and accompanying dataset; G. John Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 199.
