Historiography Perspective of the Cold War - Essay Example

Historiographical Perspective of Cold War "Cold War" was popularized to refer to postwar tensions between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, interpreting the course and origins of the conflict have been 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-U.S. relations after the Second World War; and whether the conflict between the two superpowers 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." Nevertheless, much of the historiography on the Cold War weaves together two or even all three of these broad categories. The first school of interpretation to emerge in the U.S. was "orthodox". 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. This "orthodox" school places the responsibility for the Cold War on the Soviet Union and its expansion into Eastern Europe. Thomas A. Bailey, for example, argued in his 1950 America Faces Russia that the breakdown of postwar peace was the result of Soviet expansionism in the immediate postwar years. 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. U.S. involvement in Vietnam in the 1960s disillusioned many historians with the premises of "containment", and thus with the assumptions of the "orthodox" approach to understanding the Cold War. "Revisionist" accounts emerged in the wake of the Vietnam War, in the context of a larger rethinking of the U.S. role in international affairs, which was seen more in terms of American empire or hegemony. 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 Williams' Apple man landmark 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. Following Williams, "revisionist" writers placed more responsibility for the breakdown of postwar peace on the United States, citing a range of U.S. efforts to isolate and confront the Soviet Union well before the end of World War II. According to Williams and later "revisionist" writers, U.S. policymakers shared an overarching concern with maintaining capitalism domestically. In order to achieve that objective, they pursued an "open door" policy abroad, aimed at increasing access to foreign markets for U.S. business and agriculture. From this perspective, a growing economy domestically went hand-in-hand with the consolidation of U.S. power internationally. "Revisionist" scholars challenged the widely accepted notion that Soviet leaders were committed to postwar "expansionism". 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 this view, the Soviet Union was so weak and devastated after the end of the Second World War as to be unable to pose any serious threat to the United States; moreover, the U.S. maintained a nuclear monopoly until the USSR tested its first atomic bomb in August 1949. Revisionist historians have also challenged the assumption that the origins of the Cold War date no further back than the immediate postwar period. Notably, Walter LaFeber in his landmark 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 America over the opening of East Asia to U.S. trade, markets, and influence. LaFeber argued that the U.S. commitment at the close of World War II to ensuring a world in which every state was open to U.S. 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), "revisionist" scholars have focused on the U.S. decision to use atomic weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the last days of World War II. In their view, the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, in effect, started the Cold War. 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 U.S. would use nuclear weapons to structure a postwar world around U.S. interests as U.S. policymakers saw fit. According to former State Department employee William Blum and others, Japan had tried to surrender for several months, but the U.S. wanted to test nuclear weapons in war and, most importantly, show its power to the Soviet Union. Joyce and GabrielKolko's The Limits of Power: the World and U.S. Foreign Policy-1954 (1972) has also received considerable attention in the historiography on the Cold War. The Kolkos argued U.S. policy was both reflexively anticommunist and counterrevolutionary. The U.S. was not necessarily fighting Soviet influence, but any form of challenge to the U.S. 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. 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, and some American academics continue to deny the existence of an American empire. During the period, "post-revisionism" challenged the "revisionists" by accepting some of their findings but rejecting most of their key claims. Another current attempted 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), for example, viewed Soviet hostility and U.S. 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." He did, however, emphasize the constraints imposed on U.S. policymakers due to the complications of domestic politics. Gaddis has, in addition, criticized some "revisionist" scholars, particularly Williams, for failing to understand the role of Soviet policy in the origins of the Cold War. 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 U.S. and Soviet actions and perspectives. From this 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: 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, propinquity, and convenience ... all combined to stimulate antagonism, and almost no factor operated in either country to hold it back. From this 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. But after the opening of the Soviet Archives, while Gaddis does not hold either side entirely responsible for the onset of the conflict, he has now argued that the Soviets should be held clearly more accountable for the ensuing problems. 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 were 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 a 1997 essay, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History: Geography, demography, and tradition contributed to this outcome but did not determine it. It took men, responding unpredictably to circumstances, to forge the chain of causation; and it took [Stalin] in particular, responding predictably to his own authoritarian, paranoid, and narcissistic predisposition, to lock it into place. For Stalin, Gaddis continues, "World politics was an extension of Soviet politics, which was in turn an extension of Stalin's preferred personal environment: a zero-sum game, in which achieving security for one meant depriving everyone else of it." Naive's approach to studying the cold war was perhaps not the most important thing that happened during the last half of the twentieth century. He says that there is often a gap between how contemporaries and subsequent chronicles see particular ages. One possibility, counter- intuitive now but less so with each passing year is that the cold war will be remembered, not so much as a clash among superpowers, but the point at which the long ascending of the state reached its peak and began to wane. The difference between war and peace can be a matter of trust. States that trust each other can cooperate and remain at peace. States that mistrust each other enough can wage preventive wars, attacking now in fear that the other side will attack in the future. In this groundbreaking book, Andrew Kydd develops a theory of trust in international relations and applies it to the Cold War. Grounded in a realist tradition but arriving at conclusions very different from current realist approaches, this theory is the first systematic game theoretic approach to trust in international relations, and is also the first to explicitly consider how we as external observers should make inferences about the trustworthiness of states. Kydd makes three major claims. First, while trustworthy states may enter conflict, when we see conflict we should become more convinced that the states involved are untrustworthy. Second, strong states, traditionally thought to promote cooperation, can do so only if they are relatively trustworthy. Third, even states that strongly mistrust each other can reassure each other and cooperate provided they are trustworthy. The book's historical chapters focus on the growing mistrust at the beginning of the Cold War. Contrary to the common view that both sides were willing to compromise but failed because of mistrust, Kydd argues that most of the mistrust in the Cold War was justified, because the Soviets were not trustworthy. 1. Andrew H. Kydd, Trust and Mistrust in International Relations (Princeton University Press, 2005), 156. International relations have assumed many forms throughout history, and the cold war of 1946-1990 has arguably not been the first or only "Cold war". It was certainly not the first major political conflict to have combines ideological and geopolitical elements. More important, it was first to dominate global politics in a bipolar confrontation, with clearly defined major protagonists in the Soviet Union and the United States and the alliances they led for nearly half a century. It also was the first major conflict in the nuclear age, but while that factor may have helped to keep if a cold war rather than a hot one, it was neither the cause of the conflict nor of its conclusions. 3 Raymond L. Garthoff, The International Dimension of Post- Communist. (ME.Sharpe-1997), 13. The end of cold war thus stemmed above all forms the manifest failure of the Soviet Communist world view. It also, however represented a successful conclusion to the western policy of containment, which had as its foremost exponent George Kennan had predicted, contained Soviet aggressive impulses until they were spent. In a deeper sense the failure of the Soviet system internally also soon led to the collapse of communist rule and disintegration of the Soviet. In the first year or so of the Post-war world, from November 1990 to august (or even December) 1991, it remained the general expectation that the Soviet Union would continue as part of the new world order. Indeed, during the decisive final year of the dismantling of the confrontational structure of the cold war, from the demolition of the wall in Berlin and communist rule in Eastern Europe in Nov-Dec 1989 to the Paris Summit meeting of the conference on security and cooperation in Europe (CSCE) issuance of a European charter, and signature of a treaty reducing conventional forces in Europe (CFE) in Nov 1990, it was assumed by all that the new post- cold war world order would include the Soviet Union as a partner. The new partnership was demonstrated in 1990-91 by the Soviet Cooperation in the successful United Nations(UN) mandated roll back of Iraqi aggression against Kuwait, as well as the continuing liquidation of Cold- war - sustained Civil wars in Nicaragua, and Ethiopia(and the earlier Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan). As late as October 1991, the United States and Soviet Union jointly convened the long dormant Arab- Israeli peace conference in Madrid. To the contrary, the united State and other western powers supported Gorbechev's efforts to constitute a voluntary union of the Soviet republics President George Bush, it will be recalled, the late as, Aug 1991, deliberately sought to dampen sentiment for independence in Ukraine and other republics by stating in Kiev that "freedom is not the same as independence" and by praising Gorbechev's achievements including explicitly the pending conclusions of a new Union Treaty, thus a democratic, voluntary union of soviet republics. The stimulating collection of essays assembled by Allen Hunter also rejects the "vindicationist" frame, which argues that the Cold War was an essential and ultimately victorious response to the threat posed by international Communism. As Hunter argues in the introduction to Rethinking the Cold War, vindicationist is indistinguishable from the Cold War orthodoxy long trumpeted by the foreign policy establishment and flag-waving historians. Despite idealistic claims to the contrary, most historians have long understood that contemporary politics impacts historical scholarship. Certainly the historiography of the post World War II period bears the scars of Cold War political dialogue. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of the Cold War brought a dramatic change in the international political situation. It seemed likely that the political collapse of the Soviet Union would also usher in a less politically defined historical literature. Many historians who embraced the orthodox bipolar interpretation of the Cold War (essentially defending U.S. policies as necessary, just, and a defensive reaction to Soviet aggression), instead, boast that the demise of the Soviet Union proved that the U.S. policies of the previous 45 years were correct and that the orthodox historians had been right all along. It was time for the revisionists to repent their unpatriotic historical acts. In a sharp introductory essay to this volume, Editor Allen Hunter refers to this as "vindication's scholarship." According to this recent literature there was, therefore, no need to reconsider old paradigms or to rethink Cold War historiography: the results of the Cold War "vindicated" the traditional orthodox interpretation. 4. Allen Hunter, Rethinking the Cold War, (Temple University Press, 1998) 84. Carol Reardon frames one of Professor Roland's early articles within contemporary Historiographical, tactical, and logistic perspective and explains its relevancy within the context of the cold war." The Generalship of Robert (1964), Roland argued that Lee's military legacy was complex yet timely. Looking back to two world wars, Roland remarked:" Armies of the future must be composed of semi-independent, self-contained units capable of operating over great distances on a field, battle field and minimum of control from higher headquarters. Unknowingly, to be sure, Roland prefigured the military tactics of the victorious North Vietnamese Reardon notes prudently that, viewed from the perspective of modern military history, "we can see that asserted that the great Southern leader's (Lee's) career still held relevant lessons for modern soldiers" 5. John David Smith, Thomas H. Appleton, Charles Pierce Roland, A Mythic Land Apart: Reassessing Southerners (Greenwood Publishing Group, 1997), 4. In "Explaining Auschwitz and Hiroshima, "Richard Bosworth explores the ways in which the main combatant societies of the Second World War have historicized their experience. He argues that in Britain, France, Italy, the USSR and Japan, as well as in Germany, the traumatic history of the "long Second World War" has remained crucial to the culture and politics of their post-war societies. Each has felt a compelling need to interpret these events and thus try to "explain" Auschwitz and Hiroshima. 6. R.J.B. Bosworth, Explaining Auschwitz and Hiroshima: History writing,(Rutledge, 1993)42. Although the Cold War now belongs to history, it still casts a long shadow over the present. It is remarkable that the author considers how the analysis of his book can be brought to bear on more current issues. During the 1990s there was a strong element of continuity in policy from the end of the Cold War. Some realists predicted that the institutional structures built up during the Cold War to link the United States to Europe and the European states to each other would collapse after the threat that led to their creation evaporated. Instead, these structures flourished. However, strengthening European institutions sometimes had an unfortunate side effect. US-Russian relations were harmed by the decision to expand the NATO alliance to include former Warsaw Pact members Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary, and by the campaign against Serbia (a Russian ally) to secure autonomy for the Kosovo Albanians. The chief purpose of expanding NATO was to enlarge the zone of peace and mutual trust to Eastern Europe in hopes of preventing future wars there. The chief drawback was that it violated implicit pledges to Russia that NATO would not move closer to its borders, and, hence, fostered distrust on the part of a Russia that was left in the cold. In the twenty-first century, US policy has shifted dramatically from this post-Cold War pattern as the administration of George W. Bush began pursuing a policy of unilateral neglect and then shifted to a policy of unilateral engagement. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the US administration formally abandoned containment in favoured of preventive war in the 2002 National Security Strategy. The United States would now attack potential threats before they could strike the United States, particularly states that were suspected of developing weapons of mass destruction or of having ties to terrorist groups. The invasion of Afghanistan and especially Iraq most clearly highlight the new trends in US foreign policy. In the case of Afghanistan, the Taliban's harbouring of Al Qaeda provided a rationale for war that was credible to other nations. The case of Iraq was much more controversial. Kydd argues that the United States, with its high minimum trust threshold, favoured preventive war while the Europeans and the rest of the world, with much lower minimum trust thresholds, favored a continuation of the inspections regime and deterrence. The US and British invasion of Iraq without broader institutional backing has resulted in a serious weakening of international trust for the United States. This decline in trust is one of the most serious problems the US faces in its efforts to protect itself against terrorism. The US therefore should address the roots of this mistrust. In order to counteract world suspicions about US foreign policy, Kydd thinks that US needs to implement a policy of reassurance by taking actions that a more expansionist US would reject. Work Cited Jonathan Nashel, "Cold War (1945-91): Changing Interpretations" The Oxford Companion to American Military History. John White clay Chambers II, ed., Oxford University Press 1999. Brinkley, Alan (1986).American History: A Survey. New York: McGraw-Hill, pp. 798-799. Boot Max (November 2003)."Neither New nor Nefarious: The Liberal Empire Strikes Back". Current History 102. Bookman, Jay. "Let's Just say it's not an empire", Atlanta Journal- Constitution, June 25.2003. Read More