The coming of the Cold War, 1945–57

The Cold War guilt question

As early as 1948 American left-liberals blamed the Truman administration for the icy tone of its relations with Moscow, while rightists blamed the Communists but accused Roosevelt and Truman of appeasement. Moderates of both parties shared a consensus that Truman’s containment policy was, as the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., wrote, “the brave and essential response of free men to communist aggression.” After all, Stalin’s tyranny was undeniable, and his seizure of countries in eastern Europe one by one was reminiscent of Hitler’s “salami tactics.” To be sure, Roosevelt may have helped to foster mistrust by refusing to discuss war aims earlier and then relying on vague principles, and Truman may have blundered or initiated steps that solidified the Cold War. Those steps, however, were taken only after substantial Soviet violation of wartime agreements and in fearful confusion over the motivations for Soviet policy. Was the U.S.S.R. implacably expansionist, or were its aims limited? Was it executing a plan based on Communist faith in world revolution, or reflecting the need of the regime for foreign enemies to justify domestic terror, or merely pursuing the traditional aims of Russian imperialism? Or was it only Stalin’s own paranoia or ambition that was responsible for Soviet aggression?

The fact that Western societies tended to parade their disagreements and failures in public, in contrast to the Soviet fetish for secrecy, guaranteed that historical attention would fix on American motivations and mistakes. In the late 1950s and the 1960s, traditional left-liberal scholars smarting from the excesses of McCarthyism and new leftists of the Vietnam era began publishing revisionist interpretations of the origins of the Cold War. The “hard revisionism” of William Appleman Williams in 1959 depicted the Cold War in Marxist fashion as an episode in American economic expansion in which the U.S. government resorted to military threats to prevent Communists from closing off eastern European markets and raw materials to American corporations. Less rigidly ideological “soft revisionists” blamed the Cold War on the irascible Truman administration, which, they charged, had jettisoned the cooperative framework built up by Roosevelt at Tehrān and Yalta and had dropped the atomic bombs on Japan as a means of frightening the Russians and forcing an “American peace.” These revisionist interpretations were based not so much on new evidence as on new assumptions about U.S. and Soviet motives, influenced in turn by the protest movements against the Vietnam War, nuclear weapons, and the alleged domination of American society by the “military-industrial complex.” Looking back to the years after 1945, the revisionists argued that Stalin was not a fanatical aggressor but a traditional Soviet statesman. After all, the Soviet Union had been brutally invaded and had lost 20,000,000 lives in the war. Stalin could thus be excused for insisting on friendly governments on his borders. He was betrayed, said revisionists, by American militancy and Red-baiting after the death of Roosevelt.

Traditional historians countered that little evidence existed for most of the revisionist positions. To be sure, American hostility to Communism dated from 1917, but the record proved Roosevelt’s commitment to good relations with Stalin, while no proof at all was forthcoming that American policy makers were anxious to penetrate eastern European markets, which were, in any case, of minor importance to the U.S. economy. Williams rebutted that policy makers so internalized their economic imperialism that they did not bother to put their thoughts on paper, but this “argument from no evidence” made a mockery of scholarship. The preponderance of evidence also indicated that the atomic decision was made for military considerations, although isolated advisers did hope that it would ease negotiations with Moscow. These and other examples led most historians to conclude that, while the revisionists brought to light new issues and exposed American aimlessness, inconsistency, and possible overreaction at the end of World War II, they failed to establish their primary theories of American guilt.

Historians with a longer perspective on the Cold War transcended the passions of Vietnam-era polarization and observed that deeper forces must have been at work for the Cold War to have persisted for so long after 1945. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how leaders of the two countries could have sat down agreeably and settled the affairs of the world. The new superpowers were wrenched out of isolationism and thrust into roles of world leadership, they nurtured contrary universalist ideologies, and they mounted asymmetrical military threats (one based on conventional weapons, sheer numbers, and land power; the other on nuclear might, technological superiority, and air and sea power). To these liabilities could be added the fact that both countries had been forced into World War II by sneak attacks and had resolved never again to be seduced into appeasement or to be taken by surprise.

Even such a balanced long-range view should not be taken uncritically. It remains the case that the Cold War grew out of specific diplomatic disputes, among them Germany, eastern Europe, and atomic weapons. Could those disputes have been avoided or amicably resolved? Certainly some prior agreement on war aims might have softened the discord after 1945, but Roosevelt’s policy of avoiding divisive issues during the war, while wise in the short run, enhanced the potential for conflict. It might, without undue exaggeration, be said that the United States entered the postwar period with only a vision of a postwar economic world and few political war aims at all, and thus had little excuse for indignation once Stalin set out methodically to realize his own aims. But this does not justify a Soviet policy bent on denying self-rule to neighbouring peoples and imposing police states as cruel as those of Hitler. Although the Soviets had lost 20,000,000 in the war, Stalin had killed at least an equal number of his own citizens through deliberate famine and purge. American hegemony, if it can be called that, was by contrast liberal, pluralistic, and generous.

The question has been posed: Is it not an expression of American exclusivism, self-righteousness, or cultural imperialism to insist that the rest of the world conform to Anglo-Saxon standards of political legitimacy? Even if so, critics must take care not to indulge in a double standard: excusing the U.S.S.R. for being “realistic” and damning the United States for being insufficiently “idealistic.”