Fearing the Worst

Samuel F. Wells, Jr, is a Cold War Fellow in the History and Public Policy Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He is the coauthor of The Ordeal of World Power: American Diplomacy Since 1900 (Little, Brown, 1975), and coeditor of Economics and World Power: An Assessment of American Diplomacy Since 1789 (Columbia University Press, 1984), Limiting Nuclear Proliferation (Ballinger, 1985), and Strategic Defenses and Soviet-American Relations (Ballinger, 1987).Samuel F. Wells Jr. is a Cold War Fellow in the History and Public Policy Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, where he founded the International Security Studies Program and served as associate director and deputy director. His publications include The Strategic Triangle: France, Germany, and the United States in the Shaping of the New Europe (2006).

Chen Jian, author of Mao's China and the Cold War:
How did the global Cold War come into being and remain cold? With the support of extensive, multi-archival, and insightful research, Samuel Wells has written an extremely important and nuanced book on the subject. It powerfully and convincingly demonstrates that the Korean War formed a critical turning point, redefining the actual trajectory or even essence of the Cold War that would engulf the two superpowers and prevail in the world in the ensuing four decades.

Richard K. Betts, author of American Force: Dangers, Delusions, and Dilemmas in National Security:
Wells tells the seldom understood story of how revolutionary the impact of Korea was on the nature and scale of the four-decade Cold War, and he does so with a masterful and definitive combination of detail, insight, new sources from both sides, and page-turning readability.

Alexander R. Vershbow, former U.S. Ambassador to Russia and South Korea and Deputy Secretary General of NATO:
This excellent book offers new insights into how the Korean War laid the basis for today’s military competition with Russia, China, and North Korea. Wells analyzes how decisions taken during the Korean conflict dramatically expanded NATO into the central institution that protected the West through the four decades of the Cold War.

Graham Allison, Harvard University:
A masterful study of one of America’s most consequential and most forgotten wars. Samuel F. Wells Jr. weaves together astonishing stories of nuclear strategy and cut-throat bureaucracy in this must-read for anyone eager to understand how the Korean War changed the Cold War—and made the world what it is today.