About as enlightening as a head injury. Gaddis is purportedly the "dean of Cold War history" but poorly makes that case in this short and deliberately-confusing history of the Cold War.

For one, there's the strange way he structures the narrative for most of the book: in four odd thematic chapters that overlap in time and often elide any inconvenient fact or consideration that would get in the way of Gaddis' thesis. So we get weird stuff like insisting until LBJ/Nixon, presidents couldn't see their presidencies hampered by foreign wars—wholly ignoring the whopping case of Truman not running for re-election in 1952 due to the Korean War! Most of the time he'll ignore domestic political constraints and pressures, just treating political decisions as sui generis.

Worse yet is his hagiography of Reagan, treating the man's delusions around the SDI as heartfelt and respectable, and totally whitewashing blunders like Iran-Contra or his failure at Reykjavik. Wasn't until later that I looked up Gaddis' bio and found out he advised GWB during his administration, which makes sense: the dude loves the tough man vibes. Too bad it drags down the book into the ravings of a dolt.

Read America's Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity (2nd edition) instead. So much better.