This entry is a subentry of Cold War (1945 – 91).
The Cold War generated two often indistinct battles: the first being the actual struggle between the West and Communism; the second being the continuing battles among historians, political scientists, and journalists—not to mention laymen—as to the origins and nature of, as well as the blame for, the Cold War. At the core of debates has been the contention that one side, either the Soviet Union or the United States (depending on one's interpretation), was primarily responsible for beginning the Cold War and the havoc it wreaked. The debates first focused on the origins of the Cold War, but the stakes were soon raised. Scholars would also blame the responsible party for the arms race and the proliferation of nuclear weapons, as well as apportioning an overriding share of the blame for a series of local wars around the world.
Since scholars immediately after World War II did not have access to top‐secret documents from American and Soviet policymakers, almost all Western writers took as their cue Winston S. Churchill's famous declaration in 1946 that the Soviet Union had dropped an “iron curtain” over Eastern Europe, and that the West needed to do everything in its power to prevent further loss of liberty. To almost all American commentators at the time—with the noticeable exception of the journalist Walter Lippmann—the United States had no choice but to challenge this new enemy; after fighting the Nazis, the United States then had to take on the Soviet Union, now compared to the Nazis by the common use of the terms Red fascism and increasingly totalitarianism.
Scholars who argued from this perspective came to be known as the “orthodox” (or “traditional”) school and generally viewed U.S. actions as being virtuous and sincere. George F. Kennan, in his Long Telegram to the State Department and later writing as “Mr. X” in his article The Sources of Soviet Conduct” in Foreign Affairs (July 1947), remains the classic formulator of this argument. He noted that Soviet actions were inexorably expansionist, antidemocratic, and posed a very real threat to the United States and its allies. The United States therefore needed to adopt a policy of “containment” toward the Soviet Union. Kennan expanded upon this argument in his American Diplomacy (1951). To Kennan and other traditionalists, the United States was facing a new type of enemy and had to adapt accordingly. Hans Morgenthau, Jr., continued this form of interpretation in his classic In Defense of the National Interest: A Critical Examination of American Foreign Policy (1951). Herbert Feis's Roosevelt‐Churchill‐Stalin (1957) remains the best summary of this position, with its unapologetic championing of the West and its hysterical condemnation of Soviet premier Josef Stalin.
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., is another renowned historian who worked within this framework. His influential essay The Origins of the Cold War” (Foreign Affairs, October 1967) built on Kennan's and Morganthau's apportioning of blame, and further, argued that the Cold War emanated not only from Soviet imperialism but from Stalin's paranoid psychological profile. To Schlesinger, Stalin's adherence to Communist doctrine and his alleged mental illness combined to make the Soviet state both imperialistic and unstable. Unlike other members of this school of thought, Schlesinger acknowledged that the United States had global economic interests and was not always sensitive to the needs of peoples in the Third World. Yet he was at pains to note that the United States had almost single‐handedly ensured economic and political freedoms throughout the postwar world. In sum, the orthodox perspective viewed the United States as innocent of any political nefariousness and simply acting at the invitation of beleaguered nations. An updated version of this interpretation is Geir Lundestad's “Moralism, Presentism, Exceptionalism, Provincialism, and Other Extravagances in American Writings on the Early Cold War Years” in Diplomatic History (Fall 1989).
The orthodox interpretation remained the dominant mode of historical thought until the 1960s—and it continues in various forms to this day. Beginning in 1959, though, an alternative approach appeared when William Appleman Williams published The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. This work challenged a number of long‐held assumptions made by the orthodox interpretation and American Cold War policies in general. Williams's work became an instant classic (or a notorious act of disloyalty, depending upon one's politics). Williams argued here and later in revised editions of the book that Americans had been far from innocent actors upon the world stage and in fact had always been an empire‐building people, even as they fiercely denied it. So incendiary was this charge that Williams was accused of disloyalty and even treasonous behavior by those who saw U.S. actions in the Cold War as just. However, Williams's work deeply influenced others, and within ten years' time it generated an entire school of historical thought known as revisionism—one that sought to reexamine all aspects of American foreign relations, but was especially concerned with defining the nature of the Cold War.
One of the intriguing qualities of Williams's work was his use of lengthy quotes from American policymakers to support his interpretation. To Williams, these statements were the documented proof that these people were far more honest when they spoke among themselves about an “American Empire” than in the explanations of policy to the public. Leaders like Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman and their advisers were therefore seen as far‐sighted and lacking any naïveté in considering American foreign policy objectives. According to Williams and many of his followers, these policymakers shared an overriding desire to maintain capitalism at home; in order to ensure this goal, they advocated the “open door” policy abroad, which would therefore increase access to foreign markets for American business and agriculture. This in turn would create a healthy economic climate at home and the propagation of American power abroad.
Williams's overall argument gained currency throughout the 1960s as a new group of historians sought to explain the roots of American foreign policy, especially as it related to the origins of American involvement in the Vietnam War. Though a school of thought invariably contains differences between individual scholars, one of the most intriguing claims of the revisionist school is that the classic definition is mistaken in claiming that the Cold War began after World War II. Historians in such works as N. Gordon Levin's Woodrow Wilson and World Politics: America's Response to War and Revolution (1968), Walter LaFeber's America, Russia, and the Cold War (1972), and David Foglesong's America's Secret War Against Bolshevism: U.S. Intervention in the Russian Civil War, 1917–1920 (1995), point to the century‐old conflicts between the two powers, and especially to the conflict after the Bolshevik triumph in the 1917 Russian Revolution. It was the domestic policy of the United States—visceral anticommunism dating from the early twentieth century—that helped shape American Cold War policy as much as any foreign event.
Other revisionists have pointed out provocative Soviet actions such as installing puppet regimes in Eastern Europe. Yet Gar Alperovitz in his influential Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam (1965) places much of the blame on the Cold War on President Truman's calculated use of the atomic bomb. Alperovitz's updated version, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth (1995) extends his argument, while Michael Hogan's edited collection, Hiroshima in History and Memory (1996), finds problems with his analysis. According to Alperovitz, the bomb was unnecessary in defeating Japan, and was intended instead as a provocative signal to the Soviets that the United States would use such a weapon to fashion a postwar world accessible to American interests. A more moderate revisionist view of this position was put forth by Lloyd Gardner. His Architects of Illusion (1970) offered a slight modification of Williams's and Alperovitz's insistent critique of U.S. foreign policy, but still found America's overarching belief in economic expansion the key to understanding America's hostile view of the Soviet Union. An even harsher indictment of U.S. foreign policy appealed in Joyce and Gabriel Kolko's The Limits of Power: The World and U.S. Foreign Policy, 1945–1954 (1972), in which the United States's Cold War policy was seen as both reflexively anti‐Communist and counterrevolutionary. Any form of challenge to the American form of politics or economics was controlled by either covert or military means.
Not surprisingly, each new historical interpretation of the Cold War begat another—one that built on the earlier findings even as it contradicted them. For an early but still cogent breakdown of these historical camps, see
The battles over the origins of the Cold War continue; but they are not as fierce, given the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Selective releases from Soviet archives have, however, continued to fuel debates. Many of these documents have been translated and can be found in the volumes of the Cold War International History Project. For a survey of differing interpretations, see
