HIST103: World History (1600–Present)

Three distinct periods have existed in the Western scholarship of the Cold War: the traditionalist, the revisionist, and the post-revisionist. For more than a decade after the end of World War II, few American historians saw any reason to challenge the conventional "traditionalist" interpretation of the beginning of the Cold War: that the breakdown of relations was a direct result of Stalin's violation of the accords of the Yalta conference, the imposition of Soviet-dominated governments on an unwilling Eastern Europe, Soviet intransigence and aggressive Soviet expansionism. They would point out that Marxist theory rejected liberal democracy while prescribing a worldwide proletarian revolution and argue that this stance made conflict inevitable. Organizations such as the Comintern were regarded as actively working for the overthrow of all Western governments.

Later, "New Left" revisionist historians were influenced by Marxist theory. William Appleman Williams, in his 1959 The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, and Walter LaFeber, in his 1967 America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945–1966, argued that the Cold War was an inevitable outgrowth of conflicting American and Russian economic interests. Some New Left revisionist historians have argued that the U.S. policy of containment, as expressed in the Truman Doctrine, was at least equally responsible, if not more so, than the Soviet seizure of Poland and other states.

Some date the onset of the Cold War to the Atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, regarding the United States’ use of nuclear weapons as a warning to the Soviet Union, which was about to join the war against the nearly defeated Japan. In short, historians have disagreed as to who was responsible for the breakdown of United States-Soviet relations and whether the conflict between the two superpowers was inevitable. This revisionist approach reached its height during the Vietnam War when many began to view the United States and the USSR as morally comparable empires.

In the later years of the Cold War, there were attempts to forge a "post-revisionist" synthesis by historians. Prominent post-revisionist historians include John Lewis Gaddis. Rather than attribute the beginning of the Cold War to the actions of either superpower, post-revisionist historians have focused on mutual misperception, mutual reactivity, and shared responsibility between the leaders of the superpowers. Gaddis perceives the origins of the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union less as the lone fault of one side or the other and more as the result of a plethora of conflicting interests and misperceptions between the two superpowers, propelled by domestic politics and bureaucratic inertia.

Melvyn Leffler contends that Truman and Eisenhower acted, on the whole, thoughtfully in meeting what was understandably perceived to be a potentially serious threat from a totalitarian communist regime that was ruthless at home and that might be threatening abroad. Borrowing from the realist school of international relations, the post-revisionists essentially accepted U.S. policy in Europe, such as aid to Greece in 1947 and the Marshall Plan. According to this synthesis, "communist activity" was not the root of the difficulties of Europe but rather a consequence of the disruptive effects of the Second World War on the economic, political, and social structure of Europe, which threatened to drastically alter the balance of power in a manner favorable to the USSR.

The end of the Cold War opened many of the archives of the Communist states, providing documentation that has increased the support for the traditionalist position. Gaddis has written that Stalin's "authoritarian, paranoid and narcissistic predisposition" locked the Cold War into place. "Stalin alone pursued personal security by depriving everyone else of it: no Western leader relied on terror to the extent that he did. He alone had transformed his country into an extension of himself: no Western leader could have succeeded at such a feat, and none attempted it. He alone saw war and revolution as acceptable means with which to pursue ultimate ends: no Western leader associated violence with progress to the extent that he did".^[2]