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Cold War The Cold War was a period of global Geopolitics, geopolitical rivalry between the United States (US) and the Soviet Union (USSR) and their respective allies, the capitalist Western Bloc and communist Eastern Bloc, which lasted from 1947 unt ...
" was popularized to refer to postwar tensions between the
United States The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 ...
and the
Soviet Union The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...
, interpreting the course and origins of the conflict became a source of heated controversy among historians, political scientists and journalists.. In particular, historians have sharply disagreed as to who was responsible for the breakdown of
Soviet Union–United States relations Relations between the Soviet Union and the United States were fully established in 1933 as the succeeding bilateral ties to those between the Russian Empire–United States relations, Russian Empire and the United States, which lasted from 1809 ...
after the
World War II World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...
and whether the conflict between the two
superpower Superpower describes a sovereign state or supranational union that holds a dominant position characterized by the ability to Sphere of influence, exert influence and Power projection, project power on a global scale. This is done through the comb ...
s was inevitable, or could have been avoided.. Historians have also disagreed on what exactly the Cold War was, what the sources of the conflict were and how to disentangle patterns of action and reaction between the two sides.. While the explanations of the origins of the conflict in academic discussions are complex and diverse, several general schools of thought on the subject can be identified. Historians commonly speak of three differing approaches to the study of the Cold War: "orthodox" accounts, "revisionism" and "post-revisionism". However, much of the historiography on the Cold War weaves together two or even all three of these broad categories. and more recent scholars have tended to address issues that transcend the concerns of all three schools.


Pro-Soviet accounts

Soviet historiography on the Cold War era was overwhelmingly dictated by the Soviet state, and blamed the West for the Cold War. In Britain, the historian E. H. Carr wrote a 14-volume
history of the Soviet Union The history of the Soviet Union (USSR) (1922–91) began with the ideals of the Russian Bolshevik Revolution and ended in dissolution amidst economic collapse and political disintegration. Established in 1922 following the Russian Civil War, ...
, which was focused on the 1920s and published 1950–1978. His friend R. W. Davies said Carr belonged to the anti-Cold War school of history, which regarded the Soviet Union as the major progressive force in the world, the United States as the world's principal obstacle to the advancement of humanity and the Cold War as a case of American aggression against the Soviet Union. Carr criticized those Anglophone historians, who he felt had unfairly judged the Soviet Union by the cultural norms of Britain and the United States..


Orthodox accounts

The first school of interpretation to emerge in the United States was "orthodox". For more than a decade after the end of the World War II, few American historians challenged the official American interpretation of the beginnings of the Cold War. The "orthodox" school places the responsibility for the Cold War on the Soviet Union and its expansion into Eastern Europe.. For example, Thomas A. Bailey argued in his 1950 ''America Faces Russia'' that the breakdown of postwar peace was the result of Soviet expansionism in the immediate years following World War II. Bailey argued
Joseph Stalin Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (born Dzhugashvili; 5 March 1953) was a Soviet politician and revolutionary who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until Death and state funeral of Joseph Stalin, his death in 1953. He held power as General Secret ...
violated promises he had made at the
Yalta Conference The Yalta Conference (), held 4–11 February 1945, was the World War II meeting of the heads of government of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union to discuss the postwar reorganization of Germany and Europe. The three sta ...
, imposed Soviet-dominated regimes on unwilling Eastern European populations and conspired to spread communism throughout the world. From that view, American officials were forced to respond to Soviet aggression with the
Truman Doctrine The Truman Doctrine is a Foreign policy of the United States, U.S. foreign policy that pledges American support for democratic nations against Authoritarianism, authoritarian threats. The doctrine originated with the primary goal of countering ...
, plans to contain communist subversion around the world and the
Marshall Plan The Marshall Plan (officially the European Recovery Program, ERP) was an American initiative enacted in 1948 to provide foreign aid to Western Europe. The United States transferred $13.3 billion (equivalent to $ in ) in economic recovery pr ...
. Another prominent "orthodox" historian was Herbert Feis, who in his works like ''Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin'' and ''From Trust to Terror: The Onset of the Cold War'' stated similar views. According to him, Soviet aggression in Eastern Europe in the postwar period was responsible for starting of the Cold War. Apart from this, he also argued that
Franklin D. Roosevelt Franklin Delano Roosevelt (January 30, 1882April 12, 1945), also known as FDR, was the 32nd president of the United States, serving from 1933 until his death in 1945. He is the longest-serving U.S. president, and the only one to have served ...
's policies towards Stalin and his "surrender" to Stalin's demands in the Yalta Conference paved the way for Soviet aggression and destabilized balance of power in Europe in Soviet favor. The interpretation has been described as the "official" United States version of Cold War history. Although it lost its dominance as a mode of historical thought in academic discussions in 1960s, it continues to be influential.


Revisionism

The role of the United States in the Vietnam War disillusioned
New Left The New Left was a broad political movement that emerged from the counterculture of the 1960s and continued through the 1970s. It consisted of activists in the Western world who, in reaction to the era's liberal establishment, campaigned for freer ...
historians and created a minority of historians with sympathy towards the
Viet Cong The Viet Cong (VC) was an epithet and umbrella term to refer to the communist-driven armed movement and united front organization in South Vietnam. It was formally organized as and led by the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam, and ...
communist position and antipathy towards American policies. Much more important were the revisionists who argued that both United States and the Soviet Union were responsible for blundering into the war and rejected the premises of "containment". They battled the "orthodox" historians. "Revisionist" accounts emerged in the wake of the
Vietnam War The Vietnam War (1 November 1955 – 30 April 1975) was an armed conflict in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia fought between North Vietnam (Democratic Republic of Vietnam) and South Vietnam (Republic of Vietnam) and their allies. North Vietnam w ...
in the context of a larger rethinking of the United States role in international affairs, which was seen more in terms of American empire or
hegemony Hegemony (, , ) is the political, economic, and military predominance of one State (polity), state over other states, either regional or global. In Ancient Greece (ca. 8th BC – AD 6th c.), hegemony denoted the politico-military dominance of ...
. While the new school of thought spanned many differences among individual scholars, the works comprising it were generally responses in one way or another to William Appleman Williams 1959 volume, ''The Tragedy of American Diplomacy''. Williams challenged the long-held assumptions of "orthodox" accounts, arguing that Americans had always been an empire-building people even while American leaders denied it. The influence of Williams, who taught at the
University of Wisconsin–Madison The University of Wisconsin–Madison (University of Wisconsin, Wisconsin, UW, UW–Madison, or simply Madison) is a public land-grant research university in Madison, Wisconsin, United States. It was founded in 1848 when Wisconsin achieved st ...
, and several of his students who subsequently published works on these themes, was enough to create what became known as the Wisconsin School of American diplomatic history. The Wisconsin School was distinct from the New Left; while members of each found themselves allied at times, New Left critiques tended to be a good deal more radical both in analysis and in proposed solutions. Following Williams, revisionists placed more responsibility for the breakdown of postwar peace on the United States, citing a range of their efforts to isolate and confront the Soviet Union well before the end of World War II. They argued that American policymakers shared an overarching concern with maintaining the market system and capitalist democracy. To achieve that objective, they pursued an " open door" policy abroad, aimed at increasing access to foreign markets for American business and agriculture. Revisionist scholars challenged the widely accepted scholarly research that
Soviet leaders During its 69-year history, the Soviet Union usually had a '' de facto'' leader who would not always necessarily be head of state or even head of government but would lead while holding an office such as Communist Party General Secretary. Th ...
were committed to postwar expansion of communism. They cited evidence that the Soviet Union's occupation of Eastern Europe had a defensive rationale and that Soviet leaders saw themselves as attempting to avoid encirclement by the United States and its allies. In that view, the Soviet Union was so weak and devastated after the end of the World War II to be unable to pose any serious threat to the United States, who maintained a nuclear monopoly until the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb in August 1949. Revisionist historians have also presented the view that the origins of the Cold War date to the
Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War The Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War consisted of a series of multi-national military expeditions that began in 1918. The initial impetus behind the interventions was to secure munitions and supply depots from falling into the German ...
. Some reach back even further as Wisconsin School historian Walter LaFeber in his study ''America, Russia, and the Cold War'', first published in 1972, argued that the Cold War had its origins in 19th century conflicts between Russia and the United States over the opening of East Asia to American trade, markets and influence. LaFeber argued that the United States commitment at the close of World War II to ensuring a world in which every state was open to American influence and trade, underpinned many of the conflicts that triggered the beginning of the Cold War. Starting with Gar Alperovitz in his influential ''Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam'' (1965), revisionists have focused on the United States decision to use atomic weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the last days of World War II. In their belief, the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in effect started the Cold War. According to Alperovitz, the bombs were used not against an already-defeated Japan to win the war, but to intimidate the Soviets by signaling that the United States would use nuclear weapons to stop Soviet expansion, though they failed to do so. New Left historians Joyce and Gabriel Kolko's ''The Limits of Power: The World and U.S. Foreign Policy, 1945–1954'' (1972) has also received considerable attention in the historiography on the Cold War. The Kolkos argued American policy was both reflexively
anticommunist Anti-communism is Political movement, political and Ideology, ideological opposition to communism, communist beliefs, groups, and individuals. Organized anti-communism developed after the 1917 October Revolution in Russia, and it reached global ...
and counterrevolutionary. The United States was fighting not necessarily Soviet influence, but also any form of challenge to the American economic and political prerogatives through covert or military means. In this sense, the Cold War is less a story of rivalry between two blocs, but more a story of the ways by which the dominant states within each bloc controlled and disciplined their own populations and clients and about who supported and stood to benefit from increased arms production and political anxiety over a perceived external enemy.


Post-revisionism

The revisionist interpretation produced a critical reaction of its own. In a variety of ways, "post-revisionist" scholarship before the fall of Communism challenged earlier works on the origins and course of the Cold War. During the period, "post-revisionism" challenged the "revisionists" by accepting some of their findings, but rejecting most of their key claims. Another current attempt to strike a balance between the "orthodox" and "revisionist" camps, identifying areas of responsibility for the origins of the conflict on both sides. For example, Thomas G. Paterson in ''Soviet-American Confrontation'' (1973) viewed Soviet hostility and United States efforts to dominate the postwar world as equally responsible for the Cold War. The seminal work of this approach was John Lewis Gaddis's ''The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1947'' (1972). The account was immediately hailed as the beginning of a new school of thought on the Cold War claiming to synthesize a variety of interpretations. Gaddis then maintained that "neither side can bear sole responsibility for the onset of the Cold War". However, he emphasized the constraints imposed on United States policymakers by the complications of domestic politics. In addition, Gaddis has criticized some revisionist scholars, particularly Williams, for failing to understand the role of Soviet policy in the origins of the Cold War. Gaddis's 1983 distillation of post-revisionist scholarship became a major channel for guiding subsequent Cold War research. An almost immediate move to challenge Gaddis' framework came from Melvyn P. Leffler, who "demonstrated that it was not so much the actions of the Kremlin as it was fears about socioeconomic dislocation, revolutionary nationalism, British weakness, and Eurasian vacuums of power that triggered US initiatives to mold an international system to comport with its concept of security". That provoked "strong rebuttals" from Gaddis and his followers, but Leffler deemed their objections inaccurate and unsubstantiated. However, Leffler himself still falls within the overall post-revisionist camp. Out of the "post-revisionist" literature emerged a new area of inquiry that was more sensitive to nuance and interested less in the question of who started the conflict than in offering insight into United States and Soviet actions and perspectives. From that perspective, the Cold War was not so much the responsibility of either side, but rather the result of predictable tensions between two world powers that had been suspicious of one another for nearly a century. For example, Ernest May wrote in a 1984 essay: From that view of "post-revisionism" emerged a line of inquiry that examines how Cold War actors perceived various events and the degree of misperception involved in the failure of the two sides to reach common understandings of their wartime alliance and their disputes. After the opening of the Soviet archives, John Lewis Gaddis began to argue that the Soviets should be held more accountable for conflict. According to Gaddis, Stalin was in a much better position to compromise than his Western counterparts, given his much broader power within his own regime than Truman, who was often undermined by vociferous political opposition at home. Asking if it would have been possible to predict that the wartime alliance would fall apart within a matter of months, leaving in its place nearly a half century of cold war, Gaddis wrote in his 1997 book ''We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History'' the following: According to Leffler, the most distinctive feature of ''We Now Know'' is the extent to which Gaddis "abandons post-revisionism and returns to a more traditional interpretation of the Cold War".. Gaddis is now widely seen as more "orthodox" than "post-revisionist". The revisionist Bruce Cumings had a high-profile debate with Gaddis in the 1990s, where Cumings criticized post-revisionism generally and Gaddis in particular as moralistic and lacking in historical rigor. Cumings urged post-revisionists to employ modern geopolitical approaches like world-systems theory in their work. Other post-revisionist accounts focus on the importance of the settlement of the German Question in the scheme of geopolitical relations between the United States and the Soviet Union.


21st century scholarship

Since the 2000s, benefiting largely from the opening of Cold War-era archives in the Soviet Union and elsewhere in the world, Cold War historians have begun to move on from questions of blame and inevitability to consider the Cold War in the ''
longue durée The (; ) is the French Annales School approach to the study of history. It gives priority to long-term historical structures over what François Simiand called ("evental history", the short-term time-scale that is the domain of the chronicler a ...
'' of the 20th century, alongside questions of culture, technology and ideology.. Historians have also begun to consider the Cold War from a variety of international perspectives (non-American and non-Soviet) and most especially have stressed the importance of what was then called the "
Third World The term Third World arose during the Cold War to define countries that remained non-aligned with either NATO or the Warsaw Pact. The United States, Canada, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, the Southern Cone, NATO, Western European countries and oth ...
" in the latter half of the Cold War. As Odd Arne Westad, co-editor of the ''Cambridge History of the Cold War'' (2010) has written: Corresponding to the broader "emotional turn" in 21st century historiography, historians have increasingly begun to consider the unfolding of the Cold War in emotional and psychological terms. They have sought emotional explanations for political decisions and developments typically examined from a rational perspective and have analysed interpersonal dynamics between world leaders. Frank Costigliola is a prolific proponent of the role of emotion in historical analysis. For example, he positions the breakdown of the wartime alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union and the hostilities of the early Cold War as being, in part, a result of the heightened strong emotional of key figures in American foreign policy, like Averell Harriman, following the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt. To Costigliola, it was the "attitudes and rhetoric" of key diplomats at the end of World War II that set the tone for future relations between the United States and the Soviet Union. Consistent with the move away from questions of blame to questions of culture and ideology, American historians have also begun exploring the intersection between domestic U.S. political developments and the early years of Cold War outbreak. One such example is Thomas Borstelmann's 2003 work "The Cold War and the Color Line", which defines domestic racial discrimination after 1945 as a foreign as well as a domestic issue: America’s closest allies against the Soviet Union were colonial powers who had interests that needed to be balanced against those of the emerging 'Third World' in a diverse multiracial, anti-Communist alliance. Domestically, at the same time, U.S. racial reform was essential to preserve the national consensus needed to sustain the Cold War struggle.


Revisionism in the 21st century

Despite the overall focus away from the Orthodox vs. Revisionist debates there have been new revisionist works that have emerged in the 21st century. One such example is Norman Naimark's 2019 '' Stalin and the Fate of Europe: The Postwar Struggle for Sovereignty.''. Another work arguing that Stalin in fact sought to avoid the Cold War is the 2006 ''Stalin's Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939-1953'' by Geoffrey Roberts.


Espionage

After 1990s new memoirs and archival materials have opened up the study of espionage and intelligence during the Cold War. Scholars are reviewing how its origins, its course, and its outcome were shaped by the intelligence activities of the United States, the Soviet Union, and other key countries. Special attention is paid to how complex images of one's adversaries were shaped by secret intelligence that is now publicly known.Paul Maddrell, ed. ''The Image of the Enemy: Intelligence Analysis of Adversaries Since 1945'' (Georgetown UP, 2015).


See also

*
Historical revisionism In historiography, historical revisionism is the reinterpretation of a historical account. It usually involves challenging the orthodox (established, accepted or traditional) scholarly views or narratives regarding a historical event, timespa ...
*
Realism (international relations) Realism, in international relations theory, is a Theory, theoretical framework that views world politics as an enduring competition among self-interested State (polity), states vying for power and positioning within an Anarchy (international re ...


Historiography

* Berger, Henry W. ed. ''A William Appleman Williams Reader'' (1992). * Ferrell, Robert H. ''Harry S. Truman and the Cold War Revisionists.'' (2006). 142 pp.
excerpt and text search
* Fitzpatrick, Sheila. "Russia's Twentieth Century in History and Historiography," ''The Australian Journal of Politics and History'', Vol. 46, 2000. * Gardner, Lloyd C. (ed.) ''Redefining the Past: Essays in Diplomatic History in Honor of William Appleman Williams'' (1986). * Garthoff, Raymond L. "Foreign Intelligence and the Historiography of the Cold War." ''Journal of Cold War Studies'' 2004 6(2): 21–56. Fulltext: Project MUSE. * Isaac, Joel; Bell, Duncan, eds. ''Uncertain Empire: American History and the Idea of the Cold War'' (2012
online review by Victoria Hallinan
* Kaplan, Lawrence S. ''American Historians and the Atlantic Alliance,'' (1991
online edition
. * Kort, Michael. ''The Columbia Guide to the Cold War'' (1998). * Matlock, Jack E. "The End of the Cold War" ''Harvard International Review'', Vol. 23 (2001). * Melanson, Richard A.
Revisionism Subdued? Robert James Maddox and the Origins of the Cold War
''Political Science Reviewer'', Vol. 7 (1977). * Melanson, Richard A.
Writing History and making Policy: The Cold War, Vietnam, and Revisionism
' (1983). * Olesen, Thorsten B.Ed. ''The Cold War and the Nordic Countries: Historiography at a Crossroads.'' Odense: U Southern Denmark Press, 2004. Pp. 194
online review
* Suri, Jeremi. "Explaining the End of the Cold War: A New Historical Consensus?" ''Journal of Cold War Studies'' - Volume 4, Number 4, Fall 2002, pp. 60–92 in Project MUSE. * Trachtenberg, Marc. "The Marshall Plan as Tragedy." ''Journal of Cold War Studies'' 2005 7(1): 135–140. Fulltext: in Project MUSE. * Walker, J. Samuel. "Historians and Cold War Origins: The New Consensus", in Gerald K. Haines and J. Samuel Walker, eds., ''American Foreign Relations: A Historiographical Review'' (1981), 207–236. * Watry, David M. '' Diplomacy at the Brink: Eisenhower, Churchill, and Eden in the Cold War.'' Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014. . * Westad, Odd Arne, ed. ''Reviewing the Cold War: Approaches, Interpretations, Theory'' (2000) essays by scholars. * Westad, Odd Arne, "The New International History of the Cold War: Three (Possible) Paradigms," ''Diplomatic History,'' 2000, Vol. 24 in EBSCO. * Westad, Odd Arne, ed. ''Reviewing the Cold War: Approaches, Interpretations, Theory'' (2000
excerpt and text search
* Westad, Odd Arne, '' The Cold War: A World History'', Basic Books, 2017. . * White, Timothy J. "Cold War Historiography: New Evidence Behind Traditional Typographies" ''International Social Science Review'', (2000). * Xia, Yafeng. "The Study of Cold War International History in China: A Review of the Last Twenty Years," ''Journal of Cold War Studies''10#1 Winter 2008, pp. 81–115 in Project MUSE.


References


Bibliography

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Chapter One: "Dividing the World"
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Revisionist works

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Cold War The Cold War was a period of global Geopolitics, geopolitical rivalry between the United States (US) and the Soviet Union (USSR) and their respective allies, the capitalist Western Bloc and communist Eastern Bloc, which lasted from 1947 unt ...