[Sigaba]

The purpose of this post is to discussion objective (b) outlined in the first post in this thread. Before proceeding, I urge readers to review the caveats offered in post #1. The comments presented below are merely thumbnails of complex debates and sophisticated works of scholarly inquiry.

A very short list of recommended readings on the origins of the Cold War will be the subject of a subsequent post. (The list of recommended readings is delayed while I work through my ambivalence towards a specific work and the historian who wrote it.)

Summary of Two Approaches: Core Arguments

"Orthodox"

The "orthodox" interpretation essentially argues that the Soviet Union was responsible for the Cold War.

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. provided a usable summary of this approach and its dominant themes.

The orthodox American view, as originally set forth by the American government and as reaffirmed until recently by most American scholars, has been that the Cold War was the brave and essential response of free men to communist aggression. Some have gone back well before the Second World War to lay open the sources of Russian expansionism. Geopoliticians traced the Cold War to imperial Russian strategic ambitions which in the nineteenth century led to the Crimean War, to Russian penetration of the Balkans and the Middle East and to Russian pressure on Britain's "lifeline" to India. Ideologists traced it to the Communist Manifesto of 1848 ("the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat"). Thoughtful observers (a phrase meant to exclude those who speak in Dullese about the unlimited evil of godless, atheistic, militant communisim) concluded that classical Russian imperialism and Pan-Slavisism, compounded after 1917 by Leninist messianism, confronted the west at the end of the Second World War with an inexorable drive for domination."

While each sentence indicates a different thread of the tapestry of the "orthodox" approach, the following quotations from a representative work by Thomas Bailey published in the 1950s indicates how they can be woven together to present the Soviets as responsible for the Cold War.

American attitudes toward Communist Russia, from 1917 to 1941, ran through cycles of hysteria, ignorance, indifference, and wishful thinking. During the war years, from 1941 to 1945, we tried to clasp our standoffish ally to our bosoms, but there was no warmth of response. Then came the era of disillusionment since 1945, when our eyes were opened to the nature of Russian communism.

Bailey proceeds to lay out "a number of disagreeable truths about the Soviet Union." These truths point to a basic incompatibility of views between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. that are ultimately rooted in the ideological agenda of communists as well as racial defects. In regards to the latter, Bailey states:

The Soviet leaders were unable to view mutual difficulties through the spectacles of Anglo-Saxons or even western Europeans. With their Oriental-Byzantine-Muscovite background, they have never really known the essence of democratic institutions, of the give and take of open debate, and of compromise and adjustment.

In case anyone is misreading Bailey on this point of racial differences, Bailey elaborates in his summary of the Russian in his historical experience.

...[T]he Russian as an individual is still largely and basically the child of his ancestors. Not even the iron hand of Communism has been able to remold his genes. Traits noted in Russians of the nineteenth centry by American observers have also been noted in Soviets of the twentieth century. Most commonly mentioned have been antiforeignism, secretiveness, suspicion, duplicity, evasiveness, procrastination, crudeness, callousness, ruthlessness, and brutality. Also observed have been resignation to absolutism; dependence on bureaucrats and centralized authority; toleration of censorship and the secret police; tehe Oriental attributes of patience and docility ("scratch a Russian and you will find a Tartar"); the tendency toward expansionism and imperialism; and the missionary impulse of Pan-Slavism and communism.**

Works in this group include George F. Kennan, American Diplomacy, 1900-1950 (1951); Norman A. Graebner, Cold War Diplomacy: American Foreign Policy, 1945-1960 (1962), and Herbert Feis, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin: The War They Waged and the Peace They Sought (1957).

When considering works in this school, it is imperative that readers understand that many of these works were offered within the charged political context of post-World War II America in which citizens, politicians, and statesmen sought to understand why the international climate seemed increasingly unstable. So, within the "Orthodox" school, there were additional groups that clustered around political ideology (conservative versus liberal) as well as theories of international relations (realist versus ideological.)***

"Revisionism"

The second major "school" of interpretation is known as "Revisionism" and its practitioners are known collectively as "revisionists."

It is important to understand that the terms "revisionism" and "revisionist" are ahistorical. Scholars in this group did not get together and say "Let's refer to ourselves as 'revisionists' and our arguments as Cold War 'revisionism'."

It is also important to understand that revisionism is an outgrowth of a larger historiographical project: the debate over the nature of American expansion both in the Western hemisphere (including North America) and in Asia. At the heart of this debate is the question: Is America an empire? The pioneers of this trajectory of inquiry include Richard Van Alstyne, William A. Williams and Walter LaFeber.****

In a nutshell, this school of thought turns the Orthodox interpretation on its head by arguing that the United States, not the USSR, was responsible for the Cold War. The following summary of the revisionist argument comes from John Lewis Gaddis.

1. That postwar American foreign policy approximated the classical Leninist model of imperialism-that is, that an unwillingness or inability to redistribute wealth at home produced an aggressive search for markets and investment opportunities overseas, without which, it was thought, the capitalist system in the United States could not survive.
2. That this internally motivated drive for empire left little room for accommodating the legitimate security interests of the Soviet Union, thereby ensuring the breakdown of wartime cooperation.
3. That the United States imposed its empire on a mostly unwilling world, recruiting it into military alliances, forcing it into positions of economic
4. dependency, maintaining its imperial authority against growing opposition by means that included bribery, intimidation, and covert intervention.
5. That all of this took place against the will of the people of the United States, who were tricked by cynical but skillful leaders into supporting this policy of imperialism through the propagation of the myth that monolithic communism threatened the survival of the nation.#

A representative work of this school is Gar Alperovitz's Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam (1965). In this book and his subsequent scholarship, Mr. Alperovitz argues that America's use of nuclear weapons during the Second World War reflected a desire to shape the post-war world by sending a message to the Soviet Union rather than military considerations.

At the crux of the Revisionist interpretation is the argument that, regardless of its political ideology, the USSR had legitimate security interests that the U.S. failed to acknowledge or to accommodate. Moreover, this school of thought contends that the Soviet leadership (i.e. Stalin) was capable of negotiating in good faith and in holding to his agreements.

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* This is Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Cycles of American History, 166. The full citation is in post #1, above. Note that this piece is the cojoining of an important article he wrote for Foreign Affairs in 1967 -- when the brawl between Orthodox and Revisionist historians was especially heated.
** Thomas A. Bailey, America Faces Russia: Russian-American Relations from Early Times to Our Day (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1950), 348-349.
*** See J. Samuel Walker, "Historians and Cold War Origins," 206-209. The full citation for this article is in post #1.
**** On this point, see Richard H. Immerman, Empire for Liberty: A History of American Imperialism from Benjamin Franklin to Paul Wolfowitz (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010), 1-2. While this work and others like it, may be difficult for some members of this BB to stomach, I urge those with a strong interest in historical scholarship to spend some time with it. In addition to providing an episodic overview of this school of thought, it also provides a powerful critique of the current president that--as it happens--supports my contention that the current resident of the White House is not as far to the left as some of his critiques believe.
# John Lewis Gaddis, "The Emerging Post-Revisionist Synthesis," 172-173. The full citation for this article is also in post #1, above.