Document created: 11 December 03
Air University Review, March-April
1973
Revisionism and the Cold War
Herman S. Wolk
. . .even if, as the revisionists suggest, American
officials had enjoyed a completely free hand in seeking a settlement with the
Soviet Union, it seems unlikely that they would have succeeded. Accomplishment
of this task required not only conciliatory actions by Washington but a
receptive attitude on the part of Moscow. The latter simply did not exist.
—John Lewis Gaddis
The “father” of post-World War II American revisionist historiography is
William Appleman Williams. His The Tragedy of American Diplomacy set the
standard for his contemporaries. Now come Joyce and Gabriel Kolko with a
massive revisionist tome, The Limits of Power.*
* Joyce and Gabriel Kolko, The Limits of Power: The World and
United States Foreign Policy, 1945-1954 (New York: Harper and Row, 1972,
$15.00), xii and 820 pages.
It has become increasingly clear that the cold war—Walter Lippmann’s term—holds
a fascination for Americans perhaps equal to the fading appeal of the American
Civil War. Now we even hear mention of “cold war buffs.” How to explain this
powerful appeal of the post-World War II years for the historian and the
public? I believe there are two major reasons. First, there is increasing
awareness that, on its own merits, the transformation of American foreign
policy after the Second World War constitutes one of the most important epochs
in modern American diplomacy. The second reason is the Vietnam war.
The fact that the Vietnam war has turned out to be the longest and most
unpopular conflict in American history has generated a vast amount of research
and writing. Much of this is concerned with how the United States got involved
in Indochina. This search has naturally gone back through the decade of the
1950s and into the immediate post-World War II period, the years that mark the
origins of the cold war.
Some American writers and historians, in major works on the subject, have
argued that the post-World War II foreign policy imposed by American leaders
basically is responsible for the nation’s being sucked into the Southeast Asian
quagmire. To these “revisionists,” Dean Acheson and Harry S. Truman (in that
order) have become almost the demons of twentieth century American diplomacy.
Acheson has been turned into a manipulator of the President he served. The
former Under Secretary of State—appointed Secretary of State by Truman in
January 1949—has been portrayed as suave, arrogant, and the man who, by
himself, structured America’s postwar foreign policy. President Truman,
according to some revisionists, merely took whatever policy advice Acheson
offered.
This is a false scenario. Among American historians, there seems genuine
agreement now that Franklin D. Roosevelt papered over the basic, evolving
differences between the Soviet Union and the United States. Despite the fact
that Roosevelt became frustrated and bitter at the Soviets in the last few
months of his life, the general thrust of his thinking and policies reveals his
misunderstanding of Stalin’s motivations and the basic drives of Soviet foreign
policy, primarily the Russian concern with security on the western borders. It
then fell to President Truman to reform American foreign policy. Truman and
Acheson did work well together, their personalities complementing each other
nicely. But Truman had his own ideas on foreign policy. He learned fast. He had
talked to Stalin and had even berated Molotov, admonishing the Soviets to keep
their promise to hold free elections in eastern Europe.
Harry S. Truman faced a difficult choice. In the wake of Germany’s collapse,
the Russians had gained control over eastern Europe, fomented rebellion in
Greece, and attempted to overthrow the Iranian government. Truman determined
that America had a direct interest in what happened elsewhere in the world. As
one historian put it: “American leaders did not want a Cold War, but they
wanted insecurity even less.”1 Consequently, the President
promulgated the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan was established, and the
United States determined to draw the line at the risk of war.
To understand what motivated the postwar leaders of the United States to
structure an internationalist foreign policy, overturning the historic American
isolationism, one must attempt to recreate the postwar years. It is not good
enough to begin with Vietnam and then work backwards. Such an approach usually
results in more polemics than history.
Given Stalin’s goals in east-central Europe and his understandable obsession
with preventing Germany’s rearming, it was President Truman’s fate to lead this
nation during a period when events were shattering America’s postwar dreams. By
1946, just months after the end of the most destructive war in history, it had
become clear that the world situation was far different from what many had
visualized at the close of the war. Western Europe faced an economic and
political crisis, and Communist guerrillas were fomenting rebellion in Greece.
China was torn by civil war. This was not the scenario that American leaders
and citizens had hoped to find after the war.
Nonetheless, Truman and Acheson gave strong support to the United Nations.
The Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the Berlin airlift in 1948, and the
birth of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949 were all formulated
against a backdrop of essential optimism that, once these crises were over,
things would get better. Stuart Symington, after becoming Secretary of the Air
Force, put it this way:
Two years ago we were hopeful that many of these
problems would have been solved by now. We must still be hopeful. The lack of
progress is discouraging but we must not give way to despair.
We must realize that the building and the
maintenance of peace, requires more patience, more perseverance, and perhaps
even more moral courage than does the conduct of war itself, for the issues
involved are less clearly defined, and less dramatic, than the objectives of
war.2
Truman and Acheson (also Symington), though they distrusted the Soviet
Union, did not believe war either necessary or inevitable. The best chances for
peace lay in helping Europe to regain its economic and political stability and
in building an American atomic deterrent force to prevent general war.
Successful diplomacy, Acheson felt, had to be backed by military power. The
actions of nations could be restricted only by a balance of power. But the
objective of statecraft was to avoid atomic war. President Truman and his
Secretary of State were confident of the public’s understanding, and in
retrospect—despite a rocky journey—they carried the day.
As to postwar military policy, the Kolkos’ treatment proceeds from their
conviction that President Truman had all along planned for military superiority
to buttress his postwar global foreign policy. According to this thesis, by the
summer of 1945 American leaders had come to the conclusion that the Soviet
Union was the potential enemy and that a strong military establishment would be
required to deal with the Russians.
“The preeminent strategic doctrine,” the authors note, “was that air power
would determine the future of modern warfare.” This idea, they allege,
which was not laid to rest for well over a decade,
meant that despite demobilization, the elimination of the mass of the navy, or
the like, so long as the United States retained a far superior air arm,
equipped with atomic weapons, it could relax its efforts to maintain what it
considered to be partially obsolescent land and sea forces. (p. 92)
The Kolkos then proceed on the basis that by the summer of 1946 (Bikini
atomic bomb tests) the United States had “overwhelming offensive air power”
based on the atomic weapon. They fail to mention that between the end of the
war and the summer of 1948 the United States had few atomic bombs and
atomic-modified B-29 long-range bombers.3
All of this fits their contention that in the postwar world the U.S.
attempted to substitute military power for diplomatic initiatives: “The almost
continuous American strategy crisis after World War II, with its tortured,
unresolved effort to substitute the power of machines for the appeals of
revolutionary ideology, ultimately ended in disaster.” (p. 477) From July 1946
until late 1949, they say, American defense expenditures were “probably almost
twice Soviet expenditures.” (p. 479) The fact was that during this period Russian
defense spending outstripped the American.4 The Soviets, during this
period, attempted “to lower the international temperature, pursuing what the
Kolkos term a “conservative course.” (p. 482)
The difficulty with the Kolkos’ treatment is their attempt to fit military
policy and force structures into their central contention that the United
States was at war with “the Left” on a global scale because of the requirements
of the American capitalist system. Consequently, the flow of cold war events is
downgraded. Thus, the authors think the term “cold war” imposes a burden on “comprehension
of the postwar era with oversimplifications and evokes the wrong questions. At
best, that unfortunate phrase describes United States-Soviet diplomacy in the
narrowest context, as if the relationship subsumes most that is crucial in the
history of our times.” (p. 6) What is most crucial is the manner in which
America pursued world capitalism and the defeat of the Left (including Russia).
This, contend the authors, “is one of the major dimensions of postwar history.”
(p. 6)
To the Kolkos, the primary American aim was to remold the world so that
American business could profit everywhere. “On this,” they say, “there was
absolute unanimity among the American leaders.” Political and business leaders
wanted to foster capitalism on a worldwide scale so the United States would
have free access to raw materials.
As so-called revisionists, clearly the Kolkos do not accept the standard
version of the origins of the cold war, which holds that Soviet-American
distrust basically grew out of conflicting interests and views of the two
nations after World War II. The fact is that the origins of the cold war are
complex and surely include what Stalin considered an unexplained delay in
opening a second front in western Europe and then the Soviets’ hegemony in
eastern Europe after the vacuum left by the destruction of Germany.
Publication of many revisionist books—the Kolkos’ being the most recent—has
prompted scholars to take a fresh look at the cold war. This is a timely
development, all to the good. It seems reasonable to conclude that as a result
of revisionism we are going to get a number of well-documented and remarkably
objective books on this subject, a kind of backlash against the excesses of
revisionism. As an example, John Lewis Gaddis has recently published his The
United States and the Origins of the Cold War 1941-1947, which concludes
that revisionists have relied too heavily on economics, ignoring the influence
of domestic politics on the conduct of American foreign policy.
In summary, a consensus has evolved in the American historical community,
which posits that American economic determinism was not the primary cause of
the cold war, revisionism to the contrary notwithstanding. Men and events make
history. The origins of major historical events and epochs are complex.
Basically, historians have rejected the revisionist thesis because it relies on
a simplistic explanation. One might conclude that for a historian to be charged
with constructing a simplistic argument is surely paradoxical—and perhaps also
rather uncomfortable.
The search for profits does not explain the cold war. It might be some part
of the explanation. For centuries, historians have studied the interaction of
men and events. Which makes history? It is a complex combination. As for the
cold war, the flexibility of both Stalin and Truman was severely limited. The
Soviet Union had been invaded from the west twice in a quarter century. Russia
had been decimated in the Second World War. It would not happen again. The
western borders would be secured, and Soviet hegemony would be won in
east-central Europe. American leaders had not planned on this. After the war,
with an idealistic belief in the dawn of world peace and freedom, they felt
betrayed. Their choices were limited by the consequences of World War II—the
destruction, chaos, and economic collapse—and by the restrictions imposed by
America’s own history and ethos.
Men do not operate in a vacuum. The United States and the Soviet Union were
swept into a cold war, primarily because of the burden of history. In
retrospect, one speculates as to whether it could have been otherwise. Probably
not. But the fact remains that it was, after all, a cold war. America
and Russia, the two rivals, still have outstanding differences. Nevertheless,
an American president recently went to Moscow. It is anticipated that soon the
Soviet leader will come to the United States.
One suspects things could have been a great deal worse.
Silver Spring, Maryland
Notes
1. John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War
1941-1947 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972, paper), p. 353.
2. Address by Secretary of the Air Force Stuart Symington, Navy Day,
Manchester, New Hampshire, 27 October 1947.
3. See George H. Quester, Nuclear Diplomacy: The First Twenty-Five Years
(New York: Dunellen, 1970).
4. Ibid. p. 293.
Contributor
Herman S. Wolk (M.A., American International College) has been with
the Office of Air Force History since 1966. For seven years he was a historian
for Hq Strategic Air Command. During the Korean War he served in the U.S. Army
information and education program. Mr. Wolk has taught history and lectured on
strategic nuclear deterrence and matters related to the cold war. His articles
have appeared in Air Force and Space Digest, Military Review, and Air
University Review, among others.
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this
document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression,
academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official
position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air
Force or the Air University.
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