HISTORY CAMBRIDGE A2PAPER 3

PRESENTATION 3COLD WAR

THE MAIN INTERPRETATIONSOF THE COLD WAR AND A LITERATURE REVIEW

RESEARCH BASED ON • John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History. NY: Penguin Press, 2005.• John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History. Oxford:

Clarendon Press ; New York: Oxford University Press, 1997• Margot A. Henriksen, Dr. Strangelove's America: Society and Culture in the

Atomic Age. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. • Jeremy Issacs, et. al., Cold War: An Illustrated History, 1945-

1991. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1998.• Robert J. McMahon, The Cold War: A Very Short Introduction. New York:

Oxford University Press, 2003.• And many more… THIS IS HOW YOU REFERENCE!

THE ORIGINS OF THE COLD WAR• No issue in recent American and Russian history has produced more

controversy than that of the origins of the Cold War, between the United States and the Soviet Union.

• Historians have disagreed, often sharply, over the question of who was responsible for the breakdown of American-Soviet relations, and on whether the conflict between the two superpowers was inevitable or could have been avoided.

• VERY GOOD START FOR ANY ANSWER IN PAPER 3!!!

ORTHODOX TRADITIONAL INTERPRETATION

• The traditional or orthodox interpretation attributes responsibility for the Cold War to the Soviet Union.

• Writing primarily from the viewpoint of the 1950s and 1960s, historians cited Soviet ideology and aggression as the primary factors responsible for igniting the conflict.

• American leaders, faced with communist aggression in Europe and Asia, had no choice but to stand firm against Soviet belligerence.

ORTHODOX TRADITIONAL HISTORIANS – THOMAS BAILEY

• This was the first school of interpretation to emerge in the U.S. For more than a decade after the end of the Second World War, few U.S. historians challenged the official U.S. interpretation of the beginnings of the Cold War.

• 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 Stalin violated promises he had made at Yalta, imposed Soviet-dominated regimes on unwilling Eastern European populations, and conspired to spread communism throughout the world. From this view, U.S. officials were forced to respond to Soviet aggression with the Truman Doctrine, plans to contain communist subversion around the world, and the Marshall Plan.

ORTHODOX TRADITIONAL HISTORIANS – HERBERT FEIS

• Historian Herbert Feis stated similar views in his work "Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin“. According to him, Soviet aggression in Eastern Europe in the post-war period was responsible for starting of the Cold War. He also argued that President Roosevelt'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 favour. He focused exclusively on the White House, the State Department, and state-to-state relations in his effort to assign responsibility for the origins of the Soviet-American confrontation.

• This interpretation has been described as the "official" U.S. 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.

• Feis wrote at least 13 published books and won the annual Pulitzer Prize for History in 1961 for one of them, Between War and Peace: The Potsdam Conference (Princeton University Press, 1960).

• It features the Potsdam Conference and the origins of the Cold War.

ORTHODOX TRADITIONAL HISTORIANS – GEORGE KENNAN

• Believed that the origins of the Cold War lay in the Marxist-Leninism’s class struggle leading to revolution on a world scale. Soviet behaviour on the international stage, argued Kennan, depended chiefly on the internal necessities of Joseph Stalin's regime; according to Kennan, Stalin needed a hostile world in order to legitimize his own autocratic rule.

• Stalin thus used Marxism-Leninism as “a justification for the Soviet Union's instinctive fear of the outside world, for the dictatorship without which they did not know how to rule... for sacrifices they felt bound to demand... Today they cannot dispense it. It is the fig leaf of their moral and intellectual respectability.

REVISIONIST INTERPRETATION• Revisionist or new left historians placed responsibility for the Cold War on

the United States. These writers suggest that American policies, including a desire to spread capitalism and democracy, caused the Cold War. The United States used military power to forge a world market dominated by American trade goods.

• The Soviet Union did nothing more in Eastern Europe than the United States had done in Western Europe. In seeking to protect their security interests and create a defensive protective buffer, the Soviets created a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. The Soviets had no option but to react to the United States, viewing the U.S. as an aggressive imperial power determined to expand its political and economic systems around the globe.

REVISIONIST INTERPRETATION – WILLIAM APPLEMAN• U.S. involvement in Vietnam in the 1960s disillusioned New Left historians

and created sympathy towards the Viet Cong position and antipathy towards American policies. Revisionist accounts emerged in the wake of the Vietnam War, in the context of a larger rethinking of the US role in international affairs, which was seen more in terms of American empire or hegemony.

• William Appleman Williams' 1959 volume “The Tragedy of American Diplomacy” challenged the long-held assumptions of orthodox accounts, arguing that Americans had always been an empire-building people. Revisionists placed more responsibility for the breakdown of postwar peace on the US, citing a range of efforts to isolate and confront the Soviet Union before the end of World War II. They argued that American policymakers shared concerns with maintaining the market system and democracy.

REVISIONIST INTERPRETATION – WALTER LA FEBER

• Revisionist historians have also contradicted the work that proves that the origins of the Cold War date no further back than the immediate postwar period.

• Walter La Feber, in his 1972 landmark study “America, Russia, and the Cold War”, argued that the Cold War had its origins in 19th century conflicts between Russia and America over the opening of East Asia to U.S. trade, markets, and influence.

• La Feber argued that the US commitment at the close of World War II to ensuring a world in which every state was open to US influence and trade, underpinned many of the conflicts that triggered the beginning of the Cold War.

REVISIONIST INTERPRETATION – GAL ALPEROVITS• According to Alperovitz, the bombs were not used on an already defeated

Japan to win the war, but to intimidate the Soviets, signaling that the US would use nuclear weapons to structure a postwar world around US interests as US policymakers considered this approach doable.

• He blames the Cold War on the dropping of the atomic bomb.

REVISIONIST INTERPRETATION – GABRIEL KOLKO

• Kolko argued that US policy was both reflexively anticommunist and counterrevolutionary. The US was not necessarily fighting Soviet influence, but any form of challenge to the US economic and political prerogatives through either covert or military means.

• In this sense, the Cold War is less a story of rivalry between two blocs, and 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-REVISIONIST INTERPRETATION• Post-revisionist historians writing during the 1980s and 1990s concluded

that both the United States and the Soviet Union shared responsibility for the conflict. They claim misunderstandings and mutual suspicions by both nations fueled the conflict.

• Post-revisionists accept the earlier interpretation of Stalin as a leader interested more in Soviet security than world domination.

• They also argue that American leaders, unsure of Stalin’s motivations, viewed the Soviet dictator’s actions in Eastern Europe as a threat to their own political and economic objectives.

• Both the United States and the Soviet Union, in seeking to promote their country’s interests, caused the Cold War.

POST-REVISIONIST INTERPRETATION – THOMAS PATERSON

• The revisionist interpretation produced a critical reaction of its own. “Post-revisionism" challenged the "revisionists" by accepting some of their findings but rejecting most of their key claims. It was 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.

• Thomas G. Paterson, in Soviet-American Confrontation (1973), viewed Soviet hostility and U.S. efforts to dominate the postwar world as equally responsible for the Cold War.

POST-REVISIONIST INTERPRETATION – LEWIS GADDIS

• 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." He did emphasize the constraints imposed on U.S. policymakers due to the complications of domestic politics.

• Gaddis has criticized some revisionist scholars, particularly Williams, for failing to understand the role of Soviet policy in the origins of the Cold War.

POST-REVISIONIST INTERPRETATION – ERNEST MAY

• After the Second World War, the United States and the Soviet Union were doomed to be antagonists.

• There probably was never any real possibility that the post - 1945 relationship could be anything but hostility verging on conflict.

• Traditions, belief systems and convenience, they were all combined to stimulate antagonism, and there was almost no factor operated in either country to hold it back hence the inevitability of the Cold War.