No. 063
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John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History. First edition, Penguin Press, 2005.
The Cold War organized global politics for nearly half a century under the possibility of nuclear annihilation. Gaddis offers a concise interpretive history, asking why the conflict began, why it remained cold between the superpowers, why their systems evolved differently, and why the Soviet order ended with relatively little violence. The book matters as both history and an example of synthesis: it turns a vast archive into an argument about power, ideas, fear, autonomy, and legitimacy.
John Lewis Gaddis is an American diplomatic historian whose career spans several phases of Cold War scholarship. Earlier historians worked with limited Western records and often argued over which side caused the conflict. Gaddis later drew on archives opened after the Soviet collapse. He became closely associated with a post-revisionist approach that emphasizes ideology, security, and asymmetries between the systems. His long study of containment and grand strategy gives the book clarity, but also produces a leader-centered narrative that critics regard as too favorable to American strategy.
The Cold War began when incompatible postwar systems confronted one another under nuclear fear, endured through managed rivalry and growing autonomy, and ended because the Soviet system could not match the West's adaptability, legitimacy, and capacity for self-correction.
Gaddis frames the history with George Orwell's dark expectation of permanent totalitarian rivalry and the surprising peacefulness of the actual ending. Seven thematic chapters are broadly chronological but organize events around problems: fear, nuclear danger, command, autonomy, justice, individual agency, and hope. The United States and Soviet Union possessed unequal forms of power. Stalin secured territory but damaged legitimacy. Western institutions gradually converted economic strength, alliances, and consent into durable influence. Nuclear weapons made total war irrational while proxy conflicts remained devastating.
The book is interpretive, not encyclopedic. It foregrounds statesmen, dissidents, strategic turning points, and ideological contrasts. It gives less sustained attention to social history and to people in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East who experienced the Cold War through empire, civil war, coups, and development campaigns.
Orwell imagined a world in which totalitarian blocs used permanent war to extinguish freedom. Gaddis begins with the fears visible in 1945, not with knowledge of the outcome. The method restores contingency: nuclear destruction and authoritarian expansion seemed plausible. Remember: history must recover what actors could not yet know.
The Grand Alliance defeated the Axis but did not erase incompatible aims. The Soviet Union sought security through control of its borders and Eastern Europe, while the United States favored an open international economy and self-determination, applied inconsistently. Stalin's dictatorship, wartime devastation, the atomic bomb, and mutual suspicion hardened division. Containment and the Marshall Plan joined power to the reconstruction of Western confidence. Remember: the settlement of one war created a rivalry over the shape of peace.
Nuclear weapons made great-power war potentially suicidal. Strategy therefore combined deterrence with horrifying vulnerability. Crises over Berlin, Korea, and especially Cuba revealed both recklessness and restraint. Gaddis uses lifeboats for institutions and arrangements that helped adversaries avoid catastrophe, including alliances, communication, and tacit limits. Proxy wars show the moral inequality of the long peace: restraint at the center did not prevent mass death elsewhere. Remember: nuclear stability protected superpowers while exporting danger.
The Soviet model trusted centralized command; the Western order allowed more decentralized adaptation. Stalin's control produced rapid mobilization and terror but suppressed information and initiative. Capitalist societies were disorderly yet better able to correct mistakes, innovate, and generate wealth. The Sino-Soviet split also exposed the difficulty of commanding an ideological bloc. Remember: apparent discipline can conceal brittleness, while pluralism can create resilience.
Neither bloc remained fully obedient. De Gaulle pursued French independence, China broke with Moscow, and smaller states learned to manipulate superpower competition. Decolonization multiplied actors whose priorities did not fit a simple East-West map. Even clients gained bargaining power because credibility and alliance cohesion mattered. Remember: bipolar structure never meant total superpower control.
Power alone could not settle questions of justice. Civil rights struggles exposed the gap between American claims and racial reality. Dissent in Eastern Europe exposed the gap between socialist promises and Soviet domination. The Prague Spring, Vietnam, protest movements, and human-rights language shifted legitimacy. Gaddis argues that the West's ability to criticize and reform itself became a strategic advantage. Remember: systems gain strength when they can acknowledge contradictions.
Individuals matter when structures create openings. Pope John Paul the Second, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Lech Walesa, and Mikhail Gorbachev brought different convictions and risks to the final phase. Gorbachev's refusal to preserve empire by massive force changed the possible ending. Gaddis resists both great-man mythology and structural determinism. Remember: agency matters most when leaders alter the rules by which power has been used.
By the 1980s the Soviet economy stagnated, ideology inspired little confidence, and the costs of empire were high. Gorbachev attempted reform through glasnost and perestroika, but openness revealed failures and weakened the controls holding the system together. Eastern Europeans seized autonomy in 1989, Germany reunified, and the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. Remember: reform can destabilize a system whose coherence depends on enforced silence.
The feared Orwellian future did not arrive. Nuclear weapons made war more dangerous but also encouraged caution. Authoritarian command proved less durable than adaptable institutions and aspirations for freedom. Gaddis closes with humility about prediction. Remember: outcomes that later appear inevitable were assembled from choices, accidents, and moral courage.
Fear explains the initial confrontation, but asymmetry explains much of its development. The Soviet Union controlled more directly and paid a legitimacy cost. The United States led a consent-based alliance while often violating its own principles. Nuclear deterrence restrained direct war without creating peace. Autonomy grew inside both blocs. Open systems possessed stronger error-correction. Individuals accelerated change when Soviet coercion ceased to be automatic.
Gaddis begins from an alliance held together by a common enemy. The United States, Soviet Union, and Britain could postpone disputes while defeating Germany and Japan. Victory removed that constraint. Soviet forces occupied much of Eastern Europe, American economic and military power was immense, and European states were exhausted. Each side described its aims defensively, but measures taken for security appeared threatening to the other.
The asymmetry matters. The Soviet Union had suffered catastrophic invasion and sought buffers, yet Stalin defined a buffer as political control. Local communist regimes, police power, and suppression of opposition converted Soviet security into insecurity for neighboring peoples and Western governments. The United States spoke of self-determination and open markets, but it also sought a world compatible with American economic and strategic interests. Neither side entered the settlement without power ambitions, though their internal systems and methods differed greatly.
The atomic bomb intensified uncertainty. American possession offered a temporary monopoly but not an easy instrument for converting victory into political control. Soviet leaders accelerated their own program. Once both sides could retaliate, military power acquired a paradoxical character: the weapons were most useful when their use remained incredible enough to avoid but credible enough to deter.
Containment developed as a long-term response. George Kennan's analysis treated Soviet power as cautious, ideological, and sensitive to resistance. The Truman Doctrine framed assistance in global moral terms, while the Marshall Plan used economic reconstruction to stabilize Western Europe. The Berlin blockade and airlift tested resolve without direct battle. NATO institutionalized the American commitment. Gaddis interprets these arrangements as a coalition built increasingly through consent, recovery, and shared interest rather than territorial coercion.
The Cold War did not remain a European confrontation. The Chinese Communist victory in 1949 created a major revolutionary state that was aligned with Moscow but never simply controlled by it. The Korean War turned division into mass violence. North Korea's invasion, United Nations intervention, Chinese entry, and eventual armistice demonstrated both escalation and limitation. The United States did not use nuclear weapons, and the war ended without reunification.
Korea strengthened Western alliances and militarized containment. It also showed the danger of reading local conflicts only through superpower categories. Korean actors pursued their own visions of national unity, and Chinese leaders made choices shaped by border security and revolution. A strictly bipolar account can reduce these actors to proxies.
Vietnam deepened this problem. American leaders interpreted communist gains through credibility and domino theories, while Vietnamese communists also fought a national and postcolonial struggle. The enormous human cost, bombing, political distortion, and eventual American withdrawal damaged claims of strategic competence and moral leadership. Gaddis uses Vietnam partly to show how open societies expose and correct errors. That correction came late, and it did not restore those killed or displaced.
Deterrence depends on an adversary believing that aggression will produce unacceptable cost. It also depends on communication, command systems, and avoidance of accidental escalation. A first-strike capability might tempt one side to attack or cause the other to launch in fear. Survivable retaliatory forces can make deterrence more stable, even while increasing the destructive capacity held ready.
The Cuban missile crisis is the clearest test. The Soviet placement of missiles in Cuba changed the political and perceived strategic balance. Kennedy chose a naval quarantine rather than an immediate strike. Public confrontation combined with private bargaining, including the withdrawal of American missiles from Turkey. Both leaders faced pressure not to appear weak. The resolution depended on restraint, communication, and concessions that could be politically concealed.
Later evidence revealed how close local events came to uncontrolled escalation. The crisis therefore supports two lessons. Leaders can manage danger through time and empathy, but systems containing nuclear weapons also produce risks no leader fully controls. Hotlines, arms-control agreements, surveillance, and tacit rules became lifeboats because survival could not rest on good fortune alone.
Gaddis's contrast between command and spontaneity operates at several levels. Centrally planned economies can mobilize resources toward specified goals, as Soviet industrialization and wartime production demonstrated. Yet command suppresses prices, criticism, and local information that reveal mistakes. Political terror magnifies the distortion because reporting failure becomes dangerous.
The Western system was not laissez-faire. It combined markets with welfare states, regulation, alliances, and public investment. Its comparative advantage lay in plural centers of decision and the capacity to revise policy. Elections could replace leaders, journalism could expose failure, firms could experiment, and allies could negotiate. These processes were noisy and often unjust, but they generated correction unavailable to a dictatorship that equated criticism with disloyalty.
The Sino-Soviet split challenges the idea of a unified communist bloc. Ideology did not erase national interest, leadership rivalry, or differing revolutionary strategies. China's opening to the United States under Nixon later altered the triangular balance. Command proved difficult not only within economies but across alliances whose members had their own histories and ambitions.
Dozens of newly independent states entered world politics during the Cold War. Leaders sought development, sovereignty, and security, sometimes accepting aid from both blocs. The Non-Aligned Movement asserted that independence should not require joining either camp. In practice, superpowers often interpreted local struggles through their rivalry and supported governments or insurgencies with poor regard for local freedom.
Clients could exploit this competition. A small state might threaten to switch patrons, exaggerate an opponent's ideological alignment, or draw a superpower into a regional contest. Assistance therefore did not equal control. Cuba pursued policies that sometimes exceeded Soviet preferences. Egypt shifted relationships. North Vietnam and other revolutionary movements used external support for projects grounded in local politics.
This autonomy helps explain why proxy war was so persistent. Superpowers had enough involvement to supply weapons and raise stakes, but not enough control to dictate every decision. Afghanistan became a costly example for the Soviet Union after its 1979 invasion met local resistance backed by outside powers. The conflict weakened Soviet legitimacy and resources while producing consequences that outlasted the superpower contest.
Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East reveal the moral cost of containment and revolution. Coups, covert operations, civil wars, and authoritarian allies complicate any simple story of a free West defeating tyranny. A global history asks not only which bloc prevailed but what political options local people lost when reform, nationalism, or social conflict was forced into Cold War categories.
Gaddis uses equity to describe the growing importance of moral consistency and legitimacy. The United States claimed to lead a free world while maintaining racial segregation and tolerating disenfranchisement. Civil-rights activists pursued justice for its own sake, not merely as an instrument of foreign policy. Their success nevertheless improved American credibility and demonstrated that an open system could be compelled to narrow the gap between ideals and practice.
The Soviet Union claimed equality and antifascism while dominating Eastern Europe and suppressing dissent. The Hungarian uprising in 1956 and Prague Spring in 1968 showed the limits of reform under Soviet power. Tanks could restore political control, but each intervention depleted ideological authority. Dissidents used the regime's own constitutional and human-rights language to expose contradiction.
The Helsinki Final Act of 1975 is an example of an arrangement whose effects exceeded immediate intentions. The Soviet leadership valued recognition of European borders. Human-rights provisions gave activists a standard around which to organize and document violations. Ideas became operational when networks and institutions allowed citizens to compare official promises with conduct.
Detente belongs in this mixed story. Arms control and diplomatic engagement reduced certain risks, but critics feared that stability would legitimize repression. Gaddis treats human rights as a source of pressure that eventually made stability harder to separate from legitimacy.
Structural weakness alone does not specify when or how a system ends. By the late 1970s and early 1980s the Soviet Union faced stagnation, technological gaps, imperial costs, and ideological exhaustion. Similar weakness could have produced harsher repression, prolonged decline, or war. Individual leaders affected which path became possible.
Pope John Paul the Second's visit to Poland helped citizens recognize the scale of a community not defined by the party. Solidarity, led by Lech Walesa and sustained by workers, intellectuals, and religious networks, showed organized civil society surviving martial law. Thatcher and Reagan combined ideological confidence with negotiation, though assessments of military pressure and rhetoric remain contested.
Gorbachev is central because he rejected habitual coercion. Glasnost widened openness; perestroika attempted restructuring; “new thinking” reduced the assumption that Soviet security required domination of Eastern Europe. These reforms interacted destructively with the old system. Openness revealed historical lies and current failures. Partial economic reform disrupted coordination without quickly producing a functioning alternative. National movements gained room to organize.
The revolutions of 1989 unfolded through local agency and Soviet restraint. Poland's negotiated transition, Hungary's opening, East German protests, the breach of the Berlin Wall, and Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution followed different paths. The fall of the wall was not a planned superpower settlement. It emerged from protest, migration pressure, policy confusion, and the refusal to shoot.
German reunification required diplomacy among states that remembered earlier German power. The Soviet Union accepted an outcome that placed united Germany in NATO, an extraordinary sign of altered priorities and weakness. In 1991, failed hard-line resistance, republican nationalism, and institutional collapse ended the Soviet Union. Gaddis presents the peacefulness as a triumph of hope, but wars around the Soviet dissolution remind readers that the ending was not peaceful everywhere.
The book combines material, institutional, ideological, and personal explanations. Materially, the United States and its allies generated greater wealth and technological capacity. Institutionally, the Western coalition tolerated autonomy and corrected errors more effectively. Ideologically, claims of freedom proved more attractive and more capable of self-revision than enforced orthodoxy. Personally, leaders and dissidents used openings in ways that structures did not predetermine.
These causes interact. Wealth without legitimacy might not sustain alliances. Ideals without institutions might remain rhetoric. Soviet weakness without Gorbachev might provoke violence rather than retreat. The model is strongest when read as a layered explanation, not as a claim that one superior trait mechanically won.
The model also carries a normative judgment. Gaddis sees asymmetry between a flawed open order and a dictatorship rooted in Stalinist terror. Recognizing that asymmetry need not excuse Western abuses. A rigorous reader can hold both propositions: Soviet domination was more systematic, and American power repeatedly violated the freedom it claimed to defend.
Gaddis organizes by theme, which creates clarity but rearranges chronology. The reader should maintain a parallel timeline to avoid treating developments in different decades as simultaneous. Thematic synthesis selects representative events, and selection itself expresses interpretation.
Archives opened after 1991 changed knowledge of Soviet intentions and internal debate. They strengthened accounts of Stalin's responsibility and revealed limits on Soviet control. Archives remain uneven, and state records privilege officials. Memoirs can reveal perception but are shaped by hindsight and self-defense. Social history, oral testimony, and local archives are needed to recover experiences absent from summit diplomacy.
Westad's global interpretation places Third World revolution, development, and intervention closer to the center. That perspective does not simply add more countries. It changes the meaning of the conflict by showing how universal projects collided with decolonization. Leffler's work gives greater weight to threat perception and national security on both sides while preserving moral differences. Reading these approaches together makes historical disagreement productive.
Create an event matrix for the Cuban crisis. Rows should list the United States, Soviet Union, Cuba, Turkey, and local military commanders. Columns should list objectives, known facts, false beliefs, available actions, and escalation risks. The matrix reveals why a two-player story is incomplete.
Choose one proxy war and write two narratives. The first uses superpower strategy; the second begins with local political history. Mark facts that appear important in only one narrative. The exercise tests whether the phrase “proxy” has concealed agency.
Audit a claim that an adversary is a new Soviet Union or that a current rivalry is a new Cold War. Compare ideology, alliance structure, economic interdependence, nuclear posture, domestic legitimacy, information systems, and regional autonomy. Require at least three disanalogies before using the analogy for policy.
Build a contingency tree for 1989 with branches for Soviet intervention, reform survival, violent revolution, and negotiated transition. Attach evidence available before the outcome. This counters the tendency to treat collapse as obvious once it has occurred.
Finally, conduct a perspective audit of any Cold War chapter. Count pages or paragraphs devoted to leaders, institutions, soldiers, workers, women, colonized peoples, dissidents, and victims. Absence does not automatically invalidate an argument, but it identifies which conclusions the evidence is equipped to support.
A learner should attach the thematic argument to a small chronological spine. In 1945, the defeat of Germany and Japan left the wartime coalition without its common enemy. From 1947 to 1949, containment, the Marshall Plan, the Berlin crisis, NATO, the Soviet atomic test, and communist victory in China hardened rivalry. The Korean War began in 1950 and ended in armistice in 1953, the year Stalin died.
The mid-1950s brought decolonization, the Warsaw Pact, and Khrushchev's partial repudiation of Stalin, alongside Soviet suppression in Hungary. The Berlin Wall rose in 1961, and the Cuban missile crisis followed in 1962. The later 1960s combined Vietnam, Sino-Soviet conflict, civil-rights change, and the crushing of the Prague Spring.
The 1970s included détente, arms control, the opening between the United States and China, Helsinki, and eventually renewed tension. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 marked a costly expansion. During the 1980s, Solidarity, renewed military competition, and leadership changes preceded Gorbachev's reforms after 1985. Eastern European communist regimes fell in 1989, Germany reunited in 1990, and the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991.
This spine does not explain the history. It lets the reader test Gaddis's themes against sequence. Autonomy, equity, and nuclear restraint developed over decades rather than arriving in separate blocks.
One counterargument emphasizes overextension rather than institutional superiority. The Soviet economy bore military, imperial, and technological burdens it could not sustain. Another emphasizes contingency: without Gorbachev's specific choices, decline might have continued or ended violently. A third emphasizes transnational movements, including labor, religion, dissident networks, and human rights, rather than Western state strategy.
A fourth challenges the geographic accounting. If the Cold War's outcome is judged from Berlin, peaceful liberation dominates. If judged from Vietnam, Afghanistan, Angola, Guatemala, or the Horn of Africa, the conflict appears as prolonged intervention and civil violence. These views need not negate Gaddis's claim about the end of superpower rivalry. They change the moral balance sheet and the explanation of global change.
A fifth asks whether market adaptability alone explains Western strength. Public investment, welfare institutions, labor compromise, and regulation helped sustain legitimacy. The West that prevailed was not a pure opposite of planning. It was a mixed order capable of revising the boundary between state and market.
Ask five learners to represent power, institutions, ideas, individuals, and contingency. Each must explain the start, persistence, and end of the Cold War using only that factor, then identify an event the factor cannot explain alone. The exercise shows why monocausal accounts fail.
Next, stage a 1947 policy meeting using only information available then. One group advocates patient containment, another accommodation, another military pressure, and another European reconstruction without global doctrine. After the debate, reveal later events and mark which expectations were reasonable but wrong. This separates decision quality from outcome luck.
Finally, teach one event from three scales: a leader's decision, an institution's incentives, and a local community's experience. For the Berlin Wall, for example, compare superpower strategy, East German regime survival, and families divided by the border. A history becomes more accurate when scales inform rather than erase one another.
Gaddis writes with exceptional clarity and connects strategy to political legitimacy. His post-1991 perspective makes Soviet internal weakness and Stalin's role harder to minimize. Yet the compression has costs. The account is centered on Europe and high politics, with the Global South often appearing as terrain for superpower competition rather than a source of projects and agency. Critics of triumphalism argue that American interventions, racial hierarchy, and economic coercion receive less weight than Soviet repression. The contrast between command and spontaneity can simplify mixed economies and obscure coercion within Western systems. Later scholarship by Odd Arne Westad and others more fully globalizes the conflict. The book is best treated as a powerful interpretation, not a neutral total history.
The command-versus-spontaneity theme connects with Friedman's account of decentralized markets, though history complicates any clean institutional binary. The discussion of cognitive uncertainty connects with Kahneman: leaders relied on analogies and misread signals under pressure. Gaddis also invites comparison with Thucydides on fear, honor, interest, alliance entanglement, and the danger of assuming that structural rivalry makes every outcome inevitable.
Build a two-column timeline for one crisis, recording what each side knew at the time and what later became known. Mark three moments at which a different choice was plausible. This tests hindsight bias. For a current rivalry, map military power, economic networks, alliance consent, internal legitimacy, and client autonomy. Write one indicator that could falsify each judgment.
When studying an intervention, add voices from the affected country and measure local outcomes, not merely superpower objectives. Do not transfer Cold War analogies mechanically to present conflicts. Similar rhetoric does not establish similar institutions, technology, or escalation dynamics.
Close the guide and reconstruct the sequence fear, nuclear constraint, command, autonomy, equity, actors, hope. Explain why nuclear weapons could both stabilize and terrorize. Name one example of autonomy in each bloc. State Gaddis's explanation for the Soviet collapse and two objections.
Review after one day, three days, one week, two weeks, one month, three months, and six months. Retrieve the seven themes first. At one month, compare Gaddis with a Global South history. Teach the book as a debate: one side argues that open systems won through adaptability, the other that contingency and Soviet choices dominate the explanation.
Thesis: The Cold War ended peacefully because nuclear fear limited direct war while the Soviet command system lost legitimacy and adaptability against a more open coalition.
Five ideas: contingency, deterrence, asymmetric institutions, growing autonomy, and consequential agency. Three applications: reconstruct information at the time, map multiple forms of power, and test analogies. Strongest limitation: a compressed, Western, leader-centered field of view.
Final questions: Why begin with Orwell? What broke the wartime alliance? What did containment combine? Why did nuclear weapons restrain war? Where did violence continue? What does spontaneity mean? How did clients gain autonomy? Why did equity matter? What did Gorbachev change? What perspectives does the book underrepresent?
The book's deepest invitation is to resist inevitability. Institutions shape choices, but people still decide whether fear will harden into catastrophe or be contained by restraint and reform.
Names and acronyms are expanded or punctuated for clear narration. The narration text contains no citations, URLs, or voice-engine instructions.
For concise histories, preserve the author's interpretive architecture, then add a perspective audit covering geography, social groups, violence, and later scholarship. Applications should counter hindsight bias.
Add a chronological spine beside the thematic structure and label claims as event, interpretation, or counterfactual inference. For every superpower decision, ask which local actors possessed independent goals. For every peaceful outcome, inspect where violence was displaced. These checks retain Gaddis's explanatory clarity while preventing compression from erasing decolonization, proxy-war victims, mixed institutions, or plausible paths not taken.
End each historical application clearly, carefully, and explicitly by naming the relevant archive, testimony, or comparison that could disprove the preferred account. A history guide should teach readers to revise explanations, not merely remember a confident narrative.
The base text is John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History, first edition, Penguin Press, 2005. The complete structure was checked against the Penguin edition record and the Library of Congress catalog. Biographical context was checked against Yale University's John Lewis Gaddis faculty profile. Interpretive comparison used Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War, Cambridge University Press, 2005, and Melvyn P. Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind, Hill and Wang, 2007. Publication and chapter boundaries include the Prologue, seven numbered chapters, and Epilogue.
Paste any of these into an AI assistant to keep exploring this book.
Explain Gaddis's idea that open, error correcting institutions, what he calls spontaneity, outcompeted centrally commanded systems over the long run of the Cold War. Give two or three modern examples, in business, technology, or governance, where a rigid top down system lost ground to a messier but more adaptable one.
Gaddis credits Gorbachev's individual choices with ending the Cold War peacefully. Make the strongest case that this gives too much credit to one man, that Soviet economic collapse and Eastern European civil society would have produced a similar ending regardless, and help me see what is gained and lost by each view.
Gaddis describes small states and clients gaining real bargaining power by exploiting rivalry between two much larger powers rather than acting as simple pawns. Help me think through a situation in my own work where I feel squeezed between two bigger forces, and find where I actually hold more leverage than I have been giving myself credit for.
Compare Gaddis's account of the Cold War with Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War on the roles fear, honor, and interest play in a long rivalry between two powers. Where does the nuclear age change that old pattern, and where does it simply repeat it?
Gaddis argues that a society's willingness to admit its own contradictions, like the American civil rights movement exposing the gap between its ideals and its practice, became a source of strength rather than weakness. Help me apply that idea to an organization or community I am part of, naming one contradiction we tend to avoid and what it might cost us to keep avoiding it.