From left, Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin at Yalta.
THE WAR OF NERVES: INSIDE THE COLD WAR MIND, by Martin Sixsmith with Daniel Sixsmith (Profile Books, $55 hb)
The War of Nerves is an aptly titled book that aims to explore how the Cold War superpowers instrumentalized psychology to frame their populations' views of the good guy and the bad guy. In doing so, it joins a host of more scholarly books on the subject, such as Robert Jervis' 1979 Perception and Misperception in International Politics, Christopher Simpson's Science of Coercion from 1996, and even Siobhán McEvoy-Levy's later American Exceptionalism and US Foreign Policy, all of which take a more focused view on how identity can be shaped (or misconstrued) with frightening political outcomes.
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