The whole field of Strategic Studies bears the crippling legacy of having abstracted question of war and peace from their embeddedness in historically produced relations of social movements, political economy and culture. The very objects of strategic analysis—states and their mutual security alliances—are presumed to have been there from the start. And the principles underpinning their interactions are likewise construed as consistent with the rules governing a state system first made evident in Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War.

Contemporary discussions about the West having "won' the Cold War are framed within a conventional strategic discourse in which one politicalmilitary alliance, NATO, demonstrated its staying power and integrity in the face of its rival alliance, the Warsaw Pact. NATO's strategic practices, long the object of criticism on the part of revisionist historians and critical peace researchers, have apparently been vindicated. This paper draws upon a variety of post-realist approaches to global politics to examine NATO as a set of practices by which the West has constituted itself as a political and cultural identity. By turning our attention from the external, foreign, and defense policies of NATO and its member states to the domestic social and cultural dimensions of Western security politics, we can illuminate a side of security policy overlooked in conventional debates. NATO's success resides in having provided a network of intertextual representations for the articulation of global political space. Traditional security concerns, including the nature of the Soviet/Warsaw Pact "threat," can thereby be seen not as existing externally out there on their own, but as circulating within a broader set of social practices. In the wake of recent developments within the Warsaw Pact and between the two alliance systems, the critical perspective outlined here enables us to analyze contemporary security issues in ways that transcend prevailing strategic discourse. Theoretically, we can see the outlines of a post-realist approach to security. For Europe, such an approach accords dignity to alternative, post-statist, post-modern security arrangements. Conventional Accounts Western strategists can be proud of having "won" the Cold War. The editorial columns of newspapers and the pages of manyjournals are crammed these days with words of heady self-confidence proclaiming the demonstrable superiority of the First World to the Second. The great ideological battles of history are now apparently over. Communism, once so virile, lies tattered and beaten, whether in the streets of Prague or in the ballot boxes of East Germany and Hungary. With the waning of the East-West military standoff across the German-German border and the gradual incorporation of a divided Europe into something like a regional community, the historic need for NATO and the Warsaw Pact will alter dramatically.

In this 1994 book Bradley Klein draws upon debates in international relations theory to raise important questions about the nature of strategic studies. He argues that post-modern critiques of realism and neorealism open up opportunities for new ways of thinking about nuclear deterrence. In clear and uncluttered language, he explores the links between modernity, state-building and strategic violence, and argues that American foreign policy, and NATO, undertook a set of dynamic political practices intended to make and remake world order in the image of Western identity. Klein warns against too facile a celebration of the end of the Cold War, concluding that it is even more imperative today to appreciate the scope and power of the Western strategic project. The book will be of interest to students of international relations theory, strategic studies, peace studies, and US foreign policy.

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