Cold War Revisionism

COLD WAR REVISIONISM. In the early 1950s, Cold War assumptions dominated American public life. Almost unnoticed, three books appeared, one by a young unknown academic, one by a jailed Communist, and one by a maverick reporter. These books began the effort to break through the closed-mindedness of American public opinion about the “struggle for freedom” against the Soviet Union. They marked the first appearance of Cold War Revisionism, an argument against the virtually unanimous view that Soviet expansionism and worldwide subversion had necessitated a defensive military buildup by the United States and its allies and even defensive wars in Greece, Korea, and French Indochina.

William A. Williams’s American-Russian Relations, 1787–1947 (1951) placed the beginning of the Cold War in the broad historical context of US imperial assumptions. The US government had tried to reverse the revolution in Russia after 1917 and was aggressively opposing Soviet interests in Eastern Europe. The book offered a strong scholarly rejoinder to the George Kennan school of “Containment.” In the era of the Truman Doctrine and Korean War, even such a measured critique was too much for the scholarly and diplomatic establishment. The publisher submitted the chapter on Kennan to Foreign Affairs, the magazine of the foreign policy elite, but they returned it to Williams stating it was interesting and provocative but too personal in its rebuttal of Kennan. The book made no apparent impact in academia but was approvingly reviewed in the badly reduced left-wing press of the McCarthy Era.

Carl Marzani, serving a prison sentence for contempt of Congress, wrote We Can Be Friends (1952) from published sources available in the prison libraries. This book showed that a careful reading of US government documents, speeches of politicians, memoirs like those of Winston Churchill, and the New York Times could cast doubt on the consensus about Soviet blame for the Cold War. Meanwhile, journalist I. F. Stone, no supporter of Stalin, had discovered that the Korean War may very well have been caused by intra-Korean issues and not by the Soviet Union. Furthermore, he argued that the intervention of the Chinese was a result of legitimate Chinese security concerns. With no one willing to publish his book, Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman of the Monthly Review took his manuscript as the first Monthly Review Press book. Stone’s Hidden History of the Korean War (1953) provided a useful summary of evidence suggesting that the Korean War was not necessarily a case of unprovoked aggression.

In historiography, revisionism signified a reconsideration of previously accepted interpretations, thus a challenge to “received doctrine,” on the basis of new evidence, previously ignored evidence, new interpretations of agreed-upon evidence, or some combination thereof. New material becomes available revealing the bias of earlier historians that may have blinded them to some evidence. The passage of time permits perceptions of events to become more detached and the issues of succeeding eras to shed new light on those of the past. Thus, our understanding of historical events changes quite drastically as time passes. In the case of judgments about the origins and course of the Cold War, this is particularly important because one’s beliefs about the history of the Cold War can lead to two possible conclusions. Either the United States was dragged into its role as the defender of the “free world” due to the imperial ambitions of Stalin’s Soviet Union. Or the United States has always had imperial ambitions and the Soviet Union, likewise nationalist movements in the Global South after World War II, were challenges to global domination.

I. F. Stone went on to found I. F. Stone’s Weekly, which regularly picked holes in the various balloons of disinformation loosed onto an unsuspecting public. Williams expanded his investigations to include US foreign policy in general. After publishing a number of articles, he put out a book-length interpretation, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959). In 1960 Professor D. F. Fleming published a two-volume work, The Origins and History of the Cold War. These books mark the upsurge of post-McCarthy Cold War revisionism, with different emphases. Whereas Williams put the Cold War in the context of long-term US economic and political expansionism, i.e., imperialism, Fleming believed the Cold War was a serious departure from the more cooperative policy with the Soviets that had been followed by Franklin Roosevelt during the wartime alliance. In the early 1960s, domestic opposition emerged to US moves against the fledgling Cuban Revolution. This was a break from the virtual silence around the US overthrow of governments in Iran and Guatemala during the early 1950s and provided a context in which such revisionism could resonate. Williams brought out a second, expanded edition of Tragedy in 1962 and published The United States, Cuba, and Castro with the Monthly Review Press in the same year. In 1964 Gar Alperovitz wrote Atomic Diplomacy, which interpreted the decision to use the atom bomb at the end of World War II as the opening salvo in the post-war struggle against the Soviet Union.

The intellectual anti-interventionism of the early 1960s grew with opposition to the Vietnam War into a fuller critique. Writing in the revisionist tradition expanded. Williams’s colleagues and students even constituted a “school” within Cold War revisionism, emphasizing the concept of an “open door” empire that had been implanted into the ideology of American leaders at least as early as the late nineteenth century. By 1968, Cold War revisionism was so successful in challenging “received doctrine” that no less a luminary than Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., published an angry article saying “it’s time to call a halt” to this subversive, revisionist doctrine. Meanwhile, the Fleming and Williams strands of Cold War revisionism were joined by a third in 1969 when Gabriel Kolko published The Politics of War, which opposed Fleming’s interpretation by tracing US hostility to the Soviets and radical nationalist movements back into the years of the wartime alliance. Kolko eschewed the Williams “open door” imperialism interpretation. He gave no credence to the rhetoric of idealism sounded by individuals like Woodrow Wilson. To Kolko, such verbalizations merely represented the most cynical of manipulations and not a genuine contradiction of ideals and practices as they were for Williams. This approach was also taken by that meticulous foreign policy critic Noam Chomsky, as in American Power and the New Mandarins (1968) and Turning the Tide (1987).

In 1973, Princeton University Press published an outright attack on Williams, Kolko, Fleming, and others by James Maddox, in his The New Left and the Origins of the Cold War, for supposedly committing fraud by basing their arguments on deliberate misquotations. Sponsored in effect by Schlesinger, Jr., the book received a favorable front-page review in the New York Times Book Review. Soon it appeared that Maddox himself was the perpetrator of misinformation. Notwithstanding such attacks, revisionism continued to develop. Graduate students and even undergraduates were increasingly aware of an alternative interpretation to the role of the United States as an alleged “defender of the Free World.” Writers who did not accept revisionism felt compelled to respond. Scholarship in the revisionist tradition informed the movement against intervention in Central America in the 1980s and the “No War for Oil” arguments against the first and second Gulf Wars.
Williams had argued that when the expansionist impulse contradicted our supposed national commitment to self-determination, the United States sacrificed that alleged commitment. As congressional hearings during the 1980s indicated, pursuit of certain imperial aims in Central America caused collaboration with drug runners. Meanwhile, followers of the Chomsky/Kolko school argued that this is evidence for their view that our nation’s idealistic commitments are the rhetoric of imperial self-justification and nothing more.

With the collapse of governments in Eastern Europe and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the Cold War effectively ended or seemed to end. Cold War Revisionism appeared at first to have lost its political immediacy and apart from continued disputes over Russia, China, and Cuba, to have become mostly a dispute among historians. The most significant long run effect of decades of revisionist scholarship was the infiltration into American intellectual life of the view that the United States was an empire rather than an anti-imperialist republic. This large and vital insight was at least as valuable to scholars working outside the United States as those within.

Many influenced by Williams, Kolko and others in the first generation of Cold War Revisionists continued to analyze the persistence of American imperial ambitions even when the supposed “danger” of Soviet expansionism had disappeared. Chomsky continued his personal struggle to expose US imperial activities in the decades after the end of the Cold War, as in World Orders Old and New (1994).

For the moment, leading lights of the historical profession seemed smitten by the victory of the United States and the West. The essays collected by Ellen Schrecker in Cold War Triumphalism (2004) offer valuable insights into the hubris of the time. Despite the disasters of American imperial overreach in the Middle East as a result of the First and Second Gulf Wars and the world-wide “war on terror” launched by the G.W. Bush administration and its messianic intellectual gurus, Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, the history profession itself mostly did not seem to immediately defend the lasting value of revisionism. A popularized celebration of President Harry Truman’s launching of the Cold War in 1947 by television personality Joe Scarborough Saving Freedom: Truman, the Cold War and the Fight for Western Civilization. (2020) asserts without qualification that the United States got involved in the cold war to prevent Stalin from taking over Western Europe. Many popular and semi-popular accounts on US misdeeds abroad continued to appear, however, and among the outstanding scholars would certainly be Gregory Grandin, in Kissinger’s Shadow (2015).

Outside of the usual academic networks, scholarship by Andrew Bacevich, Chalmers Johnson and other analysts of American military over-reach in the era since the fall of the Soviet Union have continued to document the continued “tragedy” of American diplomacy and militarism. Bacevich, a retired military officer and West Point graduate, has identified the Naval Academy graduate Williams as one of his major influences, as in his American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of US Diplomacy (2004). Johnson, who served with the CIA in Korea and called himself a Cold Warrior, began writing in opposition to America’s overreach in the post 9-11 world. He has argued: "A nation can be one or the other, a democracy or an imperialist, but it can't be both. If it sticks to imperialism, it will, like the old Roman Republic on which so much of our system was modeled, lose its democracy to a domestic dictatorship,” in Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (2004).

In an ironic twist, the foreign policy of President Donald J. Trump became popular in some circles, especially among embittered military veterans, because he claimed to be pulling the United States back from world-wide military commitments. Future historians would continue to produce studies about the persistent efforts of American leaders to preserve, protect and defend, not the Constitution of the United States but the backstory to the unraveling American empire.

Noble, David W. “William Appleman Williams and the Crisis of Public History”; Bradford Perkins, “‘The Tragedy of American Diplomacy’: Twenty-Five Years After”; and William G. Robbins, “William A. Williams, ‘Doing History Is Best of All. No Regrets.’” In Redefining the Past: Essays in Diplomatic History in Honor of William Appleman Williams, edited by Lloyd C. Gardner. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1986.

Buhle, Paul and Edward Rice-Maximim, William Appleman Williams: The Tragedy of Empire, New York: Routledge, 1996.

Bacevich, Andrew. The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory. New York:Metropolitan Books, 2020.

Johnson, Chalmers. The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004.