Revisionist Historians & the Cold War
Pachter, Henry
NOT ONLY THE EAST has its revision ists. In this country, too, and even more insistently in Western Europe, honest research has led to a thorough and often painful re-appraisal of recent...
...Most of it was shouting.36 Ideologies rarely are the cause of action...
...April 26, 1945, where he accused the Western powers of complicity with Hitler...
...But the Tatars had come through the inhospitable Urals...
...An important function of the Cold War is to keep the bloc allies in line...
...Rusk's cold-war generalizations— which they denounce in another context—they should analyze each of these wars in terms of its particular condition, its weapons and conduct, its particular ideology, and above all—its particular enemy...
...Fortunately, United States opinion had abandoned isolationism and America now was ready to assume its responsibilities as a great world power dedicated to the principle of collective security...
...Taylor's title The Struggle for the Mastery of Europe 18481914...
...On such notions radical revisionism builds its case against the U.S...
...Professor Williams, the most influential writer in this field, ostensibly follows the classical lead of Scott Nearing, 20 in his attempt to reduce U.S...
...how possession of the bomb made the AngloSaxons feel much more "confident" that they might be able to negotiate from strength...
...Nor is he content with giving merely his own interpretation to known facts...
...Only twice were we unfortunate enough to be drawn into military actions—in Korea and in Vietnam, both places where we had to fight under conditions not of our own choosing—and on two occaI John Lukacz, A History of the Cold War (Garden City: Doubleday, 1961...
...The 6 million Jews were so wicked as not to see that Hitler was merely trying to do them a favor...
...I am not contending, of course, that the "Open Door" policy was disinterested or that it was morally superior: in fact, the U.S...
...Therefore he ordered the bombing of Hiroshima—in order to gain room for maneuver in Eastern Europe...
...The country was able, therefore, to play a role in world politics only if armed with a righteous ideology...
...than others were in resolving to stop them...
...25 Foreign Affairs, July 1947...
...House warned Woodrow Wilson that "an Entente victory would mean domination of Russia on the Continent, "24 and 30 years later George Kennan expressed the same fear in the now famous "long telegram...
...He knows what each of the acting governments should have done...
...Mr...
...Mr...
...The examples of revisionist writers exculpating Soviet policies by psycho-sociological explanations, or even by doing a touch-up job on the events, are as numerous as the apologetic somersaults of our Establishment champions...
...On the other hand, Russia's open frontiers permitted the Cossacks to invade Poland-Lithuania and to conquer Asia...
...Halle carefully says that in such a great conflict where two historic forces meet, it really does not matter "who started it...
...These two themes were intimately linked with each other since the fascist governments were by nature and ideology aggressors, and to resist them was tantamount to the creation of international police forces against the disturbers of the peace...
...In real history nothing ever hap an excuse for having no policy...
...Since we agree that the use of the bomb was heinous, we are tempted to grant Mr...
...he never distinguishes between opinion and document, as he will triumphantly exhibit a silly Letter to the Editor of the Ashville Courier as though its author were speaking for the U.S...
...Russia's open plains indeed were invasion roads for Napoleon and Hitler...
...The statesman must act from a conviction of righteousness...
...Even without resorting to Stalin's paranoia one must understand his desire for a protective glacis...
...yielded in her turn to that taste for intervention in which the instinct for domination cloaked itself...
...These seem to me quite sufficient to explain Truman's action, given his background and position...
...Ronald Steel gives his book the angry title "Pax Americana —The Cold War Empire, 12 and begins by " quoting de Gaulle to the effet that the U.S...
...X." article...
...It said "hands off" to Stalin, and so did Eisenhower in his first inaugural, as had F.D.R.'s "Quarantine Speech": irrespective of the expansionist's philosophy, the U.S...
...Louis Halle's magisterial study of The Cold War as History that diametric labels such as "wicked and virtuous," or "aggressor" and "peace-loving nation" have little meaning in a conflict that on both sides was experienced as an irreducible dilemma...
...the letter has been quoted frequently because it denounced the wartime truce between the Allies, deposed Earl Browder as leader of the CP, U.S.A., and reinstated the slogan of fighting capitalism in all its forms...
...As George Kennan has shown, 19 Wilson's decision to intervene had no coldwar motivation...
...Regrettably, language difficulties and lack of access to Russian documents bar him from attempting a similar study of the cold-war climate in the Kremlin...
...but he was called out of the meeting by a telegram from Moscow and never returned...
...Nor do his documents reveal the anxieties of contemporaries 85 Professor Taylor can calmly assure us that we only needed to give Hitler one more country to have eternal peace—he does not choose to remember the anxious moments when Hitler's, Mussolini's, and Hirohito's ultimatums followed each other with the inexorable regularity of a military march...
...Rather, his dispassionate view of both sides is a matter of interpretation, and whatever new insight is gained by his method is due to his attitude: having participated in many coldwar decisions as a member of the State Department's Policy Planning staff, he now sits 2 Louis Halle, The Cold War as History (New York: Harper & Row, 1968...
...Fleming misses every point...
...Why did Secretary of State Byrnes publicly concede that the "Soviet Union has a right to friendly governments along its borders" and Under-Secretary, later Secretary, Acheson even speak of "a Monroe doctrine for Eastern Europe"?' 1 10 New York Times, January 14, 1968...
...This conflict arose out of the postwar situation: Russia had just emerged from her most excruciating trial...
...The New Left, which accepts the arguments of radical revisionism, sees the similarities between the cold-war ideology and the ideologies which were used to bring America into both world wars: 29 New York Review of Books, June 6, 1968...
...He concluded armistices in Korea and Vietnam and seemed reasonably happy with a world divided between "theirs" and "ours": his rhetoric was no guide to his politics, which were defensive and unimaginative...
...But as a serious historical work the Fleming book is beneath discussion...
...Fontaine and Fleming suggest, and not to the Pan-Slav agitation that led to World War I. No, we must go back to the Day of . Creation when Nature failed to endow Russia with frontiers that can easily be defended...
...I do not think the Russians had to march into Czechoslovakia because they were afraid of internal reform—after all, the Czech economy is still 100 per cent socialist and Czech agriculture is the most collectivized of all the satellites...
...As Engels said, no border is ever strategically safe...
...La Feber neither quotes the European promoters and critics of the coldwar policies nor does he analyze the European interests and forces that drew or pushed the United States into the Cold War...
...In each case the notion of collective security was propagated to justify American involvement in alliances which allegedly were contrary to its interests and which perhaps overtaxed its power...
...He is no Marxist, however, but a Christian populist who became a convert to mercantilism...
...capital made it necessary for Dr...
...was defending the status quo against challengers who attacked the traditional power of the Western, colonialist states...
...By searching for the sources of the Cold War, revisionists might contribute to the thawing-out process, to loosen up the ideological rigidities, and on the whole to deideologize the antagonisms...
...What the Russians were unable to tolerate was the softening of Czech relations with West Germany, and for that reason they had to insist on ideological conformity throughout the satellite empire, too...
...In this country, too, and even more insistently in Western Europe, honest research has led to a thorough and often painful re-appraisal of recent history...
...Viewing a confrontation of two righteous causes makes tragedy and history close neighbors...
...We shall see that on the contrary, the revision of our views on the Cold War is no academic exercise—like admitting that George III was a fool rather than a tyrant—but a passionate matter of partisanship...
...The view that Mr...
...Moreover, if Fleming is right, William Appleton Williams must be wrong: if the United States interventions antedate the October Revolution, as Mr...
...28 A. J. P. Taylor, The Origins of World War II (New York: Atheneum, 1962...
...10 La Feber, op...
...34 No part of history, not even 31 Ronald Steel, op...
...but instead of concluding, like Mr...
...With the exception of Professor Genovese's contribution, the scholarship in Mr...
...they have dispelled the world political dream of the liberals that peace can be won by power...
...Nor has Professor Williams been very fortunate in the quality of his followers...
...New York: McGraw-Hill, 1949...
...In the Cold War, too, the economic tools of propaganda and of diplomacy are often mistaken for ends or motivations...
...These efforts must be strongly resisted—if only for the practical reason that one may disagree with U.S...
...But on the whole we managed to keep the war "cool" in spite of tempting provocation, as in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Sinai...
...But a dispassionate view of our own and a compassionate view of the other side naturally appeal to intellectuals, who not only are more immune to propaganda but also disgusted by its methods and distrustful of its aims...
...The finger of God driving men into mad confusion and conflagration...
...Liberals usually know that this is not possible...
...Cold-war ideologists, of course, like to subsume all the post-1945 wars under the heading of anti-Communism or of the "SinoSoviet bloc...
...No one seemed to have planned a crusade, many wondered later on how they came to be in one...
...It is regrettable that the revisionists here do not go far enough...
...What with the understandable reaction of their neighbors the Russians un 513 happily acquired, over the centuries, that feeling of insecurity and the resulting ferocity which can be appeased only by giving them mastery over other nations...
...Unfortunately, most revisionists are doing the exact opposite: instead of understanding how the ideologies were first manipulated and then began in turn to manipulate the manipulators, the revisionists have become victims of the ideological impact...
...and must not be conducted in the name of one ideology against the other...
...Not the murderer but the victim is guilty...
...He does not claim that newly unearthed evidence changed his mind...
...1967...
...Mr...
...In a conquered country," Stalin said after Machiavelli, "each of the hegemonial powers must install its system...
...the statesmen reacted to situations into which they tumbled...
...Halle, that both sides lie, many seem to feel that if we lie, the other side must be telling the truth...
...Radical revisionism, we see, is not content with suggesting that wrong may be evenly distributed over both sides...
...to show that U.S...
...sb There is no more dangerous trap for the inexperienced historian, nor any more dangerous weap on in the hands of the experienced propagandist, than the pseudo-fact: a well-documented record of irrelevant events...
...interests coincided with Chineseinterests...
...But the entire deduction is fantastic...
...Halle pleads for an understanding of the Kremlin's motives and concludes that Stalin was as much afraid of us as we were afraid of him...
...finding documents which disprove Western propaganda claims and prove the claims of Soviet peacefulness...
...Alperowitz smothers the reader, we do not find a shred of evidence for his contention which is based on pure conjecture...
...Professor Spanier's book is a conventional history...
...In fact, every experienced historian will agree that this is a question for nursery-school teachers...
...If Acheson needed proof for his theory of "positions of strength," it is here...
...In each case ideology was used more or less deliberately to proclaim a "crusade" against a militant force of change...
...government in the first phase of the Korean War32—but all share the contempt for "idealism": He [Rusk] is a meliorist, a liberalist and moralist ...the heir to the Wilsonian tradition...
...La Feber begins his book with the statement that in October 1945 the magazine Bolshevik and President Truman more or less simulta neously ("meanwhile") sounded warlike trumpets...
...it reverses the roles of hero and villain completely...
...27 Mr...
...There are three main lines of thought indicating longterm American commitments: • To the first proposition of the conventional view, Professor Denna D. Fleming answers that the world need not be concerned with Soviet expansionism—but with the systematic and consistent encirclement policies of the West, beginning with the interventions of 1917-20, and later methodically enlarged to form coalitions threatening the Soviet Union with atomic destruction and organizing the Cold War as a holy crusade...
...conducted the Cold War by helping Tito, a Communist—but Mr...
...de Tocqueville, 130 years earlier, that "there are today two great peoples which, starting out from different points of departure, advance towards the same goal—the Americans and the Russians...
...Alperowitz quotes show indeed that the relations between the allies were distrustful throughout the war...
...Zhdanov revived these conceptions when the power vacuum in postwar Europe opened an opportunity, and Stalin felt "secure" only with Communist governments installed in each European capital...
...The Open Door policy clearly was directed first of all against Japan, second against Western colonialists, and only third against Russia, imperial as well as Soviet...
...instead of denouncing the use of great ideas for petty ends, ideas as such are held up to ridicule...
...but it is not difficult to recognize the bastard which conservative realpolitik has begotten on Populist pacifism...
...W W E CAN NOW understand the importance of this ideological identification...
...They assume that any errors of judgment or mistakes of policy were made in good faith, perhaps under the pressure of circumstances or as the consequence of honest miscalculation, misinformation, and misunderstanding...
...I of Democracy in America...
...The invasion of Hungary in 1956 was subjected to the same "coldwar" treatment...
...Bernstein's volume leaves much to be desired...
...All three authors acknowledge W. A. Williams as their master...
...X" article.25 This indeed has been the red-white-and blue thread that runs throughout American foreign policy...
...Critics of U.S...
...They find it difficult to admit that conflicts arise out of the fact that "we live in a system of states" (Lenin), and that in such a system of con flicting and converging interests all combina tions are possible...
...2 Taking a cool view of the East-West conflict, Mr...
...Ultimately it was Wilson's effect to convert the First World War, initially a European [!] dynastic and commercial carnage, into a war for the unattainable goal of universal peace and justice...
...Instead of separating the cold-war ideologies from the power conflict, they have carried them into more areas of conflict, such as the wars in Africa and in the Middle East...
...Alperowitz, however, amasses documents to show that the real reason for an early use of the bomb was not victory in Asia over the Japanese, but intimidation of the Russians in Europe...
...14 No Soviet actions but the mere existence of the Soviet Union called up Western ire...
...Revisionists have justly criticized the self-centered, arrogant view that this country is called to maintain the world order single-handedly...
...But like other revisionists, he tends generally to attribute too much of what happened in the last 80 years to American initiatives...
...One may criticize this rhetoric on many grounds, except on the assumption that the Russians take it seriously...
...The world has since questioned the wisdom of this decision but not the alleged reasons...
...Far from practicing "dollar imperialism" the U.S...
...Nor would he learn the full measure of Stalin's contribution to the Cold War...
...He then proceeds to interpret this threat as "one paramount motivation" for the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan.23 It is, of course, much more correct to say that the Marshall Plan was the economic arm of the Truman Doctrine...
...was drawn into this conflict because it is basically a European-Atlantic nation, and this entanglement seems to have been fatefully inevitable...
...The famous British weapons expert was the first to criticize the concepts of nuclear deterrence...
...I happen to think that the Western powers should have taken Molotov's offer and trusted the dynamics of further development—the German uprising a year later then might have been a different affair...
...From their vantage point, the Cold War appeared as a contest between two brain-washing crews, and perhaps even as the outgrowth of hate ideologies...
...Professor Walter La Feber has rendered a valuable service in tracing the relationship between the domestic and the international 4 Andre Fontaine, History of the Cold War (NewYork: Pantheon, 1968...
...foreign policy to economic causes...
...P. M. S. Blackett, Fear, War and the Bomb: Military and Political Consequences of Atomic Energy (London, 1948...
...Back to the Cold War...
...La Feber may blame Acheson for throwing the Communist scare into the Congress debate when obdurate isolationists like Taft would not grant Greece the aid she needed...
...IN A STRANGE WAY, revisionists reflect the mirror-image of their opponents: both think that "ideology" was the cause of the Cold War, or that some conspirational power was hiding behind the ideology—be that power the Communist world leadership, or Amer ica's military-industrial complex...
...So much for "the economic motive," the search for which only shows that American liberals rarely understand power as a motive...
...To perceive this, a man has to abandon the vantage point of a contestant in the field and view the past with the historian's detachment...
...they try to avoid the issue of power...
...it had appeared before the end of the war...
...22 Bernstein, op...
...17 David Horowitz, The Free World Colossus (New York: Hill & Wang, 1965...
...The truth can be known only by careful study of the documents...
...cit., p. 237...
...This is only to be expected in the era of the cold war, which historians are still loyally fighting when most sensible people have for gotten about it.29 " Professor Taylor, it will be remembered, was a member of the infamous Astor set which tried to buy peace for England by encouraging Hitler to acquire an Eastern empire...
...The Cold War, Mr...
...Citing Poland's Quixotic refusal to become either Hitler's or Stalin's satellite, he says: "Western historians exaggerate Soviet faults as much as they condone Polish ones...
...Like many great wars, it was not settled, had no victors or vanquished, but is simmering down...
...Halle, similar views had been expressed by conservative critics like George Kennan and Hans Morgenthau who warned that the Cold War must not be escalated into a military confrontation, must not be extended to areas outside Europe, 3 Walter Lippman, The Cold War (New York, Harper, 1948...
...This does not mean, of course, that we must absolve the governments of the charge that they blundered, or that at least some of the blunders were avoidable...
...All this happened while the U.S...
...Small nations, on the other hand, have no right to tender nerves...
...that even in ideological warfare the participants believed in what they were saying and that indeed the conflict came about rather like a Greek tragedy—through a confusion of the minds wrought by jealous gods...
...We have to accept as the lesson of history that forces which were more or less blind and guided by their own dynamism clashed in conflict and therefore had to hate each other...
...policy-makers...
...grants immunity to aggression" 30 The "cool," sophisticated postwar generation feels superior to the generation of its parents which stumbled into two or three wars because they either believed in ideas or placed their faith in collective security...
...In the less poetic language of the Secretary of State: "Let no would-be aggressor suppose that the absence of a formal defense treaty...
...The aim of this policy, including its economic measures, was not economic penetration but the preservation of independent states in all areas of the world...
...The new view, therefore, is somehow associated with deep-seated attitudes of the academic mind...
...What matters to him is not whether this country has obligations to come to the aid of others, but that it returns to the isolationist stance which was imparted to it in George Washington's Farewell Address...
...Had it not been for this persecution mania, the Western reaction might have provided the basis for a settlement...
...He concludes by quoting Arnold Toynbee, that America is today "the leader of a worldwide anti-revolutionary movement in defense of vested interests...
...Later, Molotov appeared with a large staff of experts to participate in setting up the Marshall Plan machinery...
...in areas where it had little interest, less power, and no traditional ties...
...For we are dealing here with the kind of tension between powers that is the usual stuff of history...
...But is the Cold War so much past history that we can look at it in this way...
...it might even be possible to argue that the cold confrontation was among the milder forms which that antagonism was capable of taking...
...The essence of this policy was not ideology or anti-ideology, but collective security (even the Communist scare was mobilized only to make containment acceptable to a reluctant Congress and a war-weary public...
...But the revisionists have failed to prove that the postwar coexistence could be anything but antagonistic...
...Rather, Mr...
...curity is available to all parties and every nation may need "defensive expansion...
...Rusk took it over from his predecessor, and Stevenson endorsed it shortly before his death in a letter to Paul Goodman...
...The pattern which the Czars established reproduced itself in the relations of the Bolshevikis with their neighbors and even (I am writing at the peak of the Czechoslovak crisis) with other "socialist" countries...
...The general merely was repeating the anguished outcry of his compatriot, Alexis trying to lull Stalin into complacency...
...Alperowitz fail to mention the Oppenheimer-Compton report which recommended the military use of the bomb without any reference to Europe...
...No similarly detailed study exists of the decision to re-arm Germany...
...For it was not Japan but the United States which "in 1941 rigidly asserted that any order in Asia would have to be in terms of its objectives...
...Christopher Lasch laments that it was inconsiderate of Mikolajczyk to inquire how 4,000 Polish officers came to be buried in a mass grave in Katyn...
...The Asian and African wars must be explained in terms of their specific origins...
...The U.S...
...In Asia, on the contrary, even the most ardent Kremlin partisan of coexistence never wavered in his support of "wars of liberation...
...It will then be found that the Cold War alone, as we knew it in the forties and fifties, may soon be over...
...This aspect has been very little commented upon by the revisionists because it is the one which is least likely to disappear so soon, and it is also the one that keeps the cold-war ideology alive...
...Instead of attacking him for misapplying the principle, the principle itself is attacked...
...We shall hear about those gods later on...
...As to the loan, the Kremlin could have used drawing rights in the amount of $1.5 billion had it ratified the Bretton Woods agreements...
...There is something incomprehensibly sectarian in the revisionist charge that all American and indeed all Western policies have always been directed against Russia...
...As originally conceived, the policy of containment meant the creation of strong, selfreliant states along the periphery of the Soviet empire, but especially in Europe...
...He calls the Open Door policy "anti-colonialist imperialism" and condemns the Marshall Plan as another attempt to force a door open—an attempt which apparently left Stalin no choice but to save Europe from U.S...
...86 U.N...
...to the radical it does not matter at all...
...he was varying the coinage "dry war," which had been used before World War I. This policy was consistant with Wilson's 23 La Feber, op...
...Both Documents are now contained in his Memoirs (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967...
...Fleming's work reads in places like a scrap book of newspaper clippings...
...re-interpreting or ignoring documents which up to now have formed our view of the Cold War...
...he kept Chiang Kai-shek on the leash and made no move to get the Russian armies out of Europe...
...10 Alperowitz tells us how: Truman wished to show Stalin his real strength...
...Brian Thomas reminds us that Groza was not even a Communist...
...Though a superficial glance at 19th-century history should dispel such fantasies, most criticism of U.S...
...Therefore, Bernard Baruch quipped that we were engaged in a "cold war...
...To the orderly mind of the political scientist, historical events always seem to be planned, or at least conceived to suit some idea or conception...
...15 William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Foreign Policy (Cleveland: World, 1959...
...Professor A. J. P. Taylor, in his turn, author of a book which absolved Hitler of all guilt in unleashing World War II,28 writes in—of all places!—the New York Review of Books: "Germans were no more wicked in aspiring to dominate Europe...
...The English have always been very generous with land that did not belong to them—but why does the New York Review lend its columns to this kind of 18th-century statecraft...
...Leaning over backward is a laudable attitude, but this is going rather far...
...The revisionist, who can study the archives at a later time, obviously has the advantage over the statesman who was in the middle of the rumble...
...Instead of accepting Mr...
...it is Mr...
...World War I started between nations of like ideology, and World War II saw nations with opposing ideologies allied nevertheless...
...but to no avail...
...He shows how much of the cold-war anxieties and of our responses was due not to enemy action but to our interpretation of it...
...The scope and point of view of this brave attempt is indicated by its starting date—the October Revolution...
...Andre Fontaine, foreign editor of the Paris Le Monde, also abandons the blackandwhite view of history in his two-volume History of the Cold War.4 Each side, he la ments, sees the enemy as an outlaw against whom no holds are barred, and each feels righteous about its cause...
...policies is based on some version of a Fall...
...He still thinks that in September 1939, the peace might have been preserved if Poland had yielded some territory and in exchange had been compensated, perhaps, with a piece of the Ukraine...
...The rulers of her wide-open plains, we learn, could protect themselves only by seizing ad jacent territory, a strategy called "defensive expansionism...
...the idea that closed economic areas are healthy for development and for peace...
...for supremacy...
...supervision...
...This must be said even of Dulles whose often misquoted simile emphasized the need to step to the brink and back...
...Lend-Lease was stopped not only to Russia but to England as well since the programs's authorization automatically ended when it had fulfilled its purpose—victory in Europe...
...they were fought in a different area, with different means, and against a different enemy...
...He cites a different set of facts and he sets out to prove with documents that the real course of events was quite different from what people believe...
...Garden City: Doubleday, 1961...
...One needs no imagination to see the trap here: the Cold War, too, has been fought on this side under the ideology of collective security against a power that had openly proclaimed itself as the challenger of the status quo...
...A perfectly good tool of foreignpolicy, e.g., such as "arbitration," may be used as foreign policy, is a game on a checker board where every move can be figured out coldly with all its consequences...
...They were in a sense less wicked...
...Alperowitz impresses his point of view on the reader by an excessive display of irrelevant scholarship...
...back and reflects on the impact these decisions may have had on the other side, and he comes rather close to the admission that some of the early critics of the containment policy, like Henry Wallace, Walter Lippman, and P. M. S. Blackett,3 may have had a point: the Russians refused to play the game according to our rules, and instead of being contained they strained every effort to break out of the "iron curtain" which from their side looked like "capitalist encirclement...
...feeling that she no longer had within herself sufficient scope for her energies...
...To the younger (and some not so young but equally naive) revisionists, however, this question seems to matter: in order to prove the U.S...
...Even the contention that the Cold War is over is a partisan slogan...
...policy of creating independant national states in place of the old empires, and with F.D.R.'s anticolonial thrust during and after World War II...
...American intellectuals have been angered by cold-war lies...
...But there is not the slightest connection between "Communism" or "anti-Communism," and the quarreling factions in, say, the Congo or Nigeria...
...Conservatives and Radicals cherish the pious legend that once this country lived in a state of innocence but at some point evil spirits, power-hungry politicians and greedy capitalists, contrived to entangle it in foreign alliances and wars...
...Acheson was staunchly anti-Communist, yet forget to mention that he supported Tito's Communist economy...
...Conservative and radical critics of the Cold War may differ on the precise phase of it which they began to reject: some started the day Henry Wallace was fired, others after the proclamation of the Truman Doctrine, the more moderate would still go along with the European confrontation until 80 Senate Preparedness Committee, quoted in the Washington Post, August 26, 1966...
...an open letter was about the most solemn announcement, next to a speech by Stalin himself, of a shift of policy in Comintern usage...
...At Potsdam, indeed, where the powers implemented the Yalta arrangements for the future of Europe—we must now say for the partition of Europe—the Western statesmen tried to secure some measure of freedom for their friends in the Eastern countries which they had abandoned to Russian hegemony...
...Only in the footnote does he ac knowledge that when Truman spoke, Bol 5 Walter La Feber, America, Russia and the Cold War 1945-1966 (New York: Wiley, 1967...
...very ancientones are "empire" and "hegemony...
...It may be possible to point to an aversion which they share—the fear of ideologies and in particular of the idea of collective security...
...He is fanatically devoted to 19 George F. Kennan, The Decision to Intervene (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958, paper, New York: Atheneum, 1967...
...but accidental outbreaks of military hostilities in Asia created a climate of "crusading" which needlessly embroiled the U.S...
...They have fallen down on their self-assigned task...
...84 Revisionists of the conservative school reject "ideologies" but at least are aware that "principles" or political concepts are necessary to understandand to shape foreign policy...
...demanded no real open door but only equal rights with the Japanese and other colonialists...
...Once created, however, ideas may transcend the immediate propaganda purpose and become myths or rigid doctrines which tend to alienate their faithful from reality, freeze hostilities whose real causes have long been forgotten, and prolong loyalties which no longer make sense...
...Shorn of the anti-Communist rhetoric to which Kennan objected, this was the message of the Truman Doctrine of which Kennan approved...
...For obvious reasons we shall give them the name they prefer, radicals...
...That kind of logic can prove anything...
...Halle gravely informs us, cannot be understood unless we go back into history—not to Churchill's Fulton speech that some use as the date of its beginning, nor to Yalta that to me seems the most reasonable date, not even to November 7, 1917, as Messrs...
...Since Mr...
...The New Left, in its general waste land of theory, does not understand the difference between ideologies, which supply rationalizations or justifications for action, andtheories or concepts and principles, which are tools...
...However, I have no quarrel with his method...
...The conventional view of the so-called Cold War, as it still appears in such widely used textbooks as Spanier and Lukacz,' is under attack...
...Today our European allies demand that we punish Moscow for the invasion of Czechoslovakia...
...Its permanence is reflected, for instance, in A.J.P...
...Now let us see how power has been understood by U.S...
...The U.S...
...Alperowitz indeed has an answer: Byrnes was Why, in fact, did they all look on meekly while brutal ultimatums expelled their friends from the governments of Bulgaria, Rumania, Poland, Hungary, and later of Czechoslovakia...
...It meant measures short of war, and there was then no premonition of NATO or other military confrontations...
...after the death of Stalin,3' or even side with the U.S...
...However, it so happened that U.S...
...18 In all the last-named books the scholarship is unbelievably poor...
...The indifference of U.S...
...The professional historian will instinctively distrust such a pat presentation...
...Moreover, he fails to mention that the entire "peace plan" was nothing but a desperate, last-minute bait to prevent West Germany from joining NATO...
...Mr...
...Alperowitz names such a sinister and ludicrous reason, we are further tempted to agree that he must be right, and from there it is only one step to the conclusion that, since all this is so shameful, Truman's hope to save a little democracy in Eastern Europe must also be condemned...
...Khrushchev felt incircled by the free city of West Berlin, and today Brezhnev does not feel secure behind the Carpathian mountains...
...policy was antisocialist even when it seemed to be antifascist, he quotes Foreign Affairs for July 1937 to the effect that "capitalism is lost where it is not built on liberalism...
...This they leave to our simpletons on the Right and Left...
...He also makes it clear that the somewhat confused message which soon was to be called "Truman Doctrine" was hardly conceived as the blistering pronunciamento which it seemed to Kennan in retrospect...
...It was Russia's neighbors who had reason to complain about Nature's disfavor, and Russia's belligerency was a product of her state rather than of her geography...
...Reading La Feber or any other revisionist book, no one would guess that British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin did more than anybody else to muddle a postwar settlement in Europe, or that Ernst Reuter single-handedly forced us to fight for the freedom of Berlin...
...Nor was Laval a Nazi...
...In fact he still chuckles when he remembers the incident in his Memoirs .° Mindful of the coming election year, eager to "bring the boys home" and also aware that an early victory over Japan would give "Uncle Joe" no chance to claim his part of the spoils, Truman made the fateful decision to use the bomb at once...
...Many critics of U.S...
...still enjoyed its atomic monopoly, and Mr...
...So obsessed is he indeed with the search for secret evidence of evil that he never notices the evil which was being done in plain daylight...
...Probably the best of the historical narratives...
...Had Horowitz analyzed the episode instead of quoting propaganda notes, he would have seen that it provides an argument for, not against cold-war tactics: Molotov had never made even as limited an offer New Left anthology Towards a New Past, Barton J. Bernstein, ed...
...instead of questioning the ideological foundations of the crusade, they have simply changed the labels of villain and victim...
...It has escaped notice that the "war to end all wars," that black joke of the Wilson era, has emerged once more in our day as the war to end all insurgency...
...industrial complex while the Russians who could not compete, tried to assure themselves political leverage by creating spheres of influence...
...We must judge them by their success in disentangling the entanglement because they could not avoid it in the first place...
...Sun Yat-sen to turn to Lenin for help...
...Mr...
...But let us note that for all his talk about brinkmanship Dulles failed to come to the aid of East Berlin in 1953, or Hungary in 1956...
...A superb work, both personal and scholarly...
...But it was not just the actual fear and the recent experience which determined Stalin's expansionism...
...Smith is amused by "simplistic" people who still believe in "the Adolf Hitler syndrome...
...On closer inspection, the quoted passage turns out to be by a German exile, editor of a respected business magazine, trying to warn American business to beware of Hitler...
...Alperowitz shows 8 Gar Alperowitz, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1965...
...This calls for three kinds of operations: • Finding a suitable date for the beginning of the Cold War...
...Therefore, he is not surprised to read, in Mr...
...Thus professor La Feber quotes A. A. Berle testifying in 1947 that "within four years the world will be faced with surplus production...
...The U.S., on the other hand, could not allow any power to combine the potential of a reconstructed Europe with the resources of Asia...
...13 T T EMPTING as it may be to trace the European roots of revisionism, we must now inquire what is the nature of this American imperialism which has motivated American initiatives in the Cold War...
...Lukacz's work is a philosophical history, comparable in scope to the one cited in footnote 2. sious we barely avoided military conflict: in Berlin and in Cuba...
...for that purpose he needed a demonstration of the awesome power of the atom...
...Robert Freeman Smith, writing in a New Left collection, who suggests that the conformist interpretation of World War II supports the cold-war arguments...
...The wanton destruction of Guernica in the Spanish Civil War, of Lidice, of Coventry, of Amsterdam and Kharkov—all brought about by the wicked resistance of the victims...
...In certain respects it might even be said that the phrase "cold war" exaggerates the gravity of the situation...
...26 Correct...
...If Truman wished to frighten Stalin, why did he chuckle instead of plopping the bomb with all its awful statistics on the conference table...
...Do the revisionists of World War I, World War II, and of the Cold War have more in common than the name...
...conduct in Asia while agreeing with it in Europe, or agree in 1950 but not today...
...As formulated by Niebuhr: for peace we must risk war...
...Moreover, such moves were clearly meant as "deterrence...
...As to the economic motive, the trouble is that our China trade never lived up to the expectations of the "100 million lamps, "21 but remained 1 -2 per cent of our total imports and exports...
...He may even find it easier to proclaim his solidarity with a frankly revolutionary Ho Chi Minh than with a pacific one...
...Even before Mr...
...they provide rationalizations for actions, they justify the division into parties...
...12 Ronald Steel, Pax Americana: The Cold War Empire How It Grew and What It Means (New York: Viking, 1967...
...was not even capable of practicing dollar diplomacy—the use of dollars for political ends...
...This is not true...
...pens that way...
...Each of them will one day hold in its hands the destinies of half of mankind...
...first we must speak of the new revisionists who disclaim to recognize them but charge that vicious men with malicious purposes started the Cold War...
...he cannot conceive that Hitler and Hirohito had any design to rule the world, and Pearl Harbor to him "revealed the full implication of [Brooks Adams's] imperial logic," which also made the Cold War inevitable...
...The noblest principle of American foreign policy, or perhaps the noblest principle in the foreign policy of all ages, has been ridiculed in order to disparage the policies of a particular Secretary of State...
...It is night when Minerva's owl sets out on its flight...
...Halle presents would contrast with the three propositions of the conventional view in the following way: • After the defeat of Hitler, the balance of power was not restored in Europe, and from both sides of its outer fringe, therefore, attemps were made to establish a new equilibrium...
...to take or support countermeasures...
...At the beginning of the century the State Department vainly tried to encourage American bankers and railway magnates to help in offsetting the Japanese and European influence...
...government, while glossing over the most important statements by Lenin, Stalin, and their successors...
...La Feber can quote senatorial diaries endlessly to the effect that 24 Quoted by La Feber, from A. S. Link, Wilson: The Struggle for Neutrality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), p. 48...
...This is the domino theory in reverse, and we must ask ourselves how far it may lead...
...18 Arnold Toynbee, America and World Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961...
...With all due respect to Professor Halle's eminence and scholarship, this is history stood on its head...
...This view may be crudely presented in three propositions: • After World War II the Soviet Union tried to expand its power through military conquest and Communist uprisings in as many countries as possible...
...demobilized its armies, did not prevent the development of atomic energy elsewhere, and did not try —as I think it should have—to barter its monopoly against the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Eastern Europe...
...Robert F. Smith descends to the following trick: 22 21 Title of a prewar book exhorting America todeny the great Chinese market to the Japanese...
...He relayed this top secret to Stalin in such a way as to minimize its importance, and he chuckled when he told Churchill that the Russian apparently had not grasped the significance of the information...
...Revisionists fail to combat but rather tend to amplify the legend that Europe was a mere object of American policies...
...While he sought to contain the Communists he also recognized that they were containing us...
...Lasch displays ignorance of Communist affairs...
...our policy was largely defensive, and if we sent soldiers abroad, it was only to help the oppressed or to ward off aggression...
...Halle, writing from personal memories, conveys the sense of urgency that set the pace for those who had to respond to a sudden change of the situation...
...The Astor set had to resist the pressures which came from the Popular Front in the name of both antifascism and collective security...
...Asian policies have always arguedthat we have no substantial "interests" there...
...and the U.S.S.R...
...government's actions in the early months of the Cold War...
...To the second proposition Professor William Appleman Williams replies that American interventionism abroad needed no provocation by the Soviets...
...no proof has been given that either Stalin or Truman was having designs for the destruction of the other's power...
...Yet, some political scientists stillseize upon such rhetoric to prove that there is a"cold war...
...Halle usefully reminds us that the U.S...
...Christopher Lasch, another revisionist, writing in the New York Times Magazine,° brushes this letter off as just a quibble about electoral tactics and takes Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., to task for considering it a key document...
...into an internationalist policy but the defense of narrow economic interests, 17 to wit those of the rich...
...Both sides in that war recognized rather early in the game that its solution could only be a confirmation of the status quo: for all his propaganda antics about the "liberation" of "captive nations" and the "roll-back" of the Iron Curtain, the late John F. Dulles did the most to "freeze" the Cold War where it stood...
...shevik was already three months old, i.e...
...The revisionists are poor historians if they don't understand the importance of principles and ideas, either in guiding or in moving the men who act...
...But it was restrained by vigorous counteraction of the Western powers which "contained" the Soviet advance by measures of mutual assistance short of war...
...Williams maintains, they cannot have been provoked by it, as Fleming will have it...
...The late John Foster Dulles, with his solemn countenance, was ideally suited to make this image plausible...
...Nor were American capitalists eager to invest in China as the modern theory of the "surplus" would require...
...To the liberal it matters whether Ho Chi Minh can be compared to Stalin or maybe even to Hitler...
...Speaking of Dulles, finally, one remembers the worst feature of the Cold War, its ideological aggressiveness, its crusading spirit, its grandiloquacious militancy...
...A genuine difficulty is that some principles may beused as ideologies...
...If this is true, Professor Williams would have to postulate that potential development of hypothetical interests has the same effect on policy-making decisions asactual interests...
...It is not Dean Rusk who proposes the false analogy between Hitler and Stalin or Ho Chi Minh...
...Alperowitz that the reason for this crime must have been at once sinister and ludicrous...
...Ideology has done very little to embitter or alleviate these conflicts...
...The New Left rejects these illusions: containment policy, the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and NATO have led to other alliances and to wars in Asia...
...The Cold War, though widened to encompass worldwide conflicts is essentially the continuation of the international power contest which has raged from the time of the Seven Years' War through the Napoleonic wars and the two world wars of this century to the present day...
...This atrocious statement is followed by more sick jokes and by an interesting aside 27 Bernstein, op...
...Moreover, this policy was bipartisan...
...After the recent invasion of Czechoslovakia by the armies of five Warsaw Pact powers, Mr...
...We won all the battles of righteousness but, thank God, the Cold War did not really break out into a hot war...
...Strangely enough, some revisionist writers have drawn this uncouth consequence...
...Lasch and La Feber also omit Molotov's speech at the opening session of the U.N...
...For their domination was achieved with little physical destruction and comparatively few casualties, whereas the effort to resist them produced general devastation...
...It makes no sense to apply the term "cold" war to the hot wars in Korea and Indochina or to areas where no such conflict rages...
...To show that Stalin was prepared to sacrifice the odious Ulbricht regime in East Germany, he quotes Molotov's unification plan of March 10, 1952...
...cit., p. 247...
...In all the quotations with which Mr...
...George Ball deplored, berated, and condemned the Soviet Union, but carefully avoided key words such asaggression which might have obligated the U.S...
...As a remedy he recommended the "containment" policy spelled out in the controversial "Mr...
...But so far the results have been meager: the documents Mr...
...In all three cases the U.S...
...Lenin, and to a greater extent Trotsky, needed no "persecution mania" to conceive of the Soviet state as a revolutionary bastion in a worldwide uprising of the underprivileged proletarians and colonial peoples...
...What we see, rather, is a series of disconnected actions which happened at opportune moments, of opportunities seized and of weaknesses exploited...
...Lasch flatly maintains that they "asked Stalin to accept hostile governments" or even "tried to force the Soviet Union out of Europe...
...Horowitz requotes Fleming's quotes with admiration and adds nothing but vulgar Marxist explanations or plain misinformation...
...ls 13 See concluding page of Vol...
...T T HE REVISIONISTS' ability to empathize with Stalin's tender nerves is at times limitless...
...fortunately Mr...
...cit., p. 43...
...Well, Homer's heroes are hollering at each other when they are not giving battle, and ideology in the Cold War served the most degrading purpose to which an ideology can finally be put—as a cover for inaction...
...Never mind how their anxiety is to be soothed...
...Exalting Stalin's magnanimity, Mr...
...Horowitz's treatment of the episode is a rather typical example of the half-truths on which much revisionist writing is based...
...U New York Time Magazine, January 14, 1968...
...The most impressive and best documented work of this sort has 7 Others have suggested that Truman could have avoided the Cold War if he had not abruptly stopped Lend-Lease operations after V-E Day, or if he had granted Stalin a loan...
...They forget that all business relations betweenpeople, institutions, and states are based on "interest," which may be beneficial either to both or to only one side...
...policies think their job has been done when they can prove an "interest...
...As for his teacher Fleming, his file of episodes, which throws a bad light on Western governments, may be a good thing to have handy when a government apologist offers nothing but a similar file indicting the Soviet government...
...Why does Mr...
...Writing from the vantage point of French politics, M. Fontaine usefully reminds us that in 1944 Ho Chi Minh liberated part of Vietnam with the help of the CIA (or its predecessor) and that Maurice Thorez, then the French Communist leader, told the Vietnamese that he "would not like to be considered the liquidator of French positions in Indochina...
...We also see a certain awareness on both sides to spare the other's susceptibilities and to carry provocations just to the threshold but not beyond...
...as his March 10 plan until the Germans actually threatened to join NATO...
...Berle then was Under-Secretary for Economic Affairs, and he was particularly concerned with promoting the "Point Four" program which was designed to win the friendship of underdeveloped countries in the world struggle between the U.S...
...it had not been created to "take up the white man's burden" and was not fit for empire...
...control...
...This could surprise only Stalin's faithful who had to believe the myth of the anti-fascist, Popular Front coalition...
...But even such debased principles are easy to distinguish from ideologies, such as Communism and anti-Communism, which cannot serve as guides for a policy and neverhave served so, but merely described an imputed motivation...
...Opprobrium should properly be castnot oninterests as such but on exploitative intereststhat subordinate other interests...
...A more modernone would be "collective security...
...the Varangians and the Swedes had come across the sea, and so did the allies in the Crimean War...
...We did this, we did that—as though diplomacy were not an interaction of many powers...
...been presented by Gar Alperowitz in his analysis of the Potsdam Conference of August 1945.8 It will be remembered that President Truman was on his way to Potsdam when he received the "good news" from Almogordo, that the first atomic bomb had been successfully tested...
...14 Denna D. Fleming, The Cold War and Its Origins 1917-1960, 2 Vols...
...This endeavor goes beyond the intentions of moderate critics like Halle and La Feber...
...The U.S...
...She is always opposed to the building of empires, as we saw...
...an arrogant, puritanical sense of mission drove this country to assume the mantle of world policeman, which sat awkwardly on its shoulders...
...Groza was only the man on top of the list of the ministers which Vishinsky handed the king of Rumania with an ultimatum to appoint them within two hours...
...15 He maintains that it dates back to well before the October Revolution, to be precise to the Open Door policy of the nineties of the last century, a policy designed to "keep China sovereign for purposes of exploitation by the burgeoning U.S...
...11 New York Times, November 1 and 15, 1945...
...Even earlier, at the time of Roosevelt's death, two public statements announced a reversal in Kremlin policies: one was Jacques Duclos's "Open Letter" in Cahiers du Communisme for April 1945...
...I (Garden City: Doubleday, 1955), p. 419...
...Halle impresses on our sympathetic heart, the Russians are suffering from a deep-seated, historical encirclement complex, an anxiety which the Western powers have clumsily fostered instead of allaying...
...He is used to the play of force and counterforce with little reference to good and evil, and he expects to see every hero debunked in due time, every patrtiotic myth destroyed in the light of newly found documents, and every decision which had been deemed "inevitable" or "forced upon us," after diligent research proven avoidable...
...Such a principle is the old-fashioned "balance of powers...
...9 Harry S. Truman, Memoirs, Vol...
...He can hardly remember a twenty-year period in history where right has been consistently on one side and wrong with equal regularity on the other...
...No one had conceived of the "cold war...
...83 It may not be easy to recognize in this caricature the person of the Secretary of State...
...Consists (1 12 articles originally printedin the New York Herald Tribune in reply to George F. Kennan's "Mr...
...IF THE LIBERAL CRITIC of the Cold War laments the alleged fumbling of our policies,' and deplores the fateful but involuntary military and ideological escalation—or if establishment historians impute all criminal initiative to Stalin—the radical says it just was not so...
...They are no less provincial in assuming that different attitudes in this country alone could at will have changed a course of events that was largely determined by others and by its starting point...
...After all, reasoning from inse 26 Brian Thomas, in the Journal of Contemporary History (London) January 1968...
...New York: Pantheon, 1968...
...phases of the Cold War and in describing the struggle between the cold-war ideology and the critical forces in this country...
...Could Stalin really be expected to tolerate such a man in a Polish cabinet, even a cabinet totally dominated by Communists...
...A particularly flattering version of the legend is the Woodrow Wilson myth: that a misguided "idealism...
...Security Council debates provide good examples of "cold-war" language signifying nothing...
...by merely suppressing the long periods of coexistence, by ignoring the differences between the attitudes of various Western governments in their relations with the Soviet Union, and by taking the SovietWestern relationships out of the context of the constantly shifting play of coalitions and constellations, Mr...
...To the odious crime of releasing the djinn that since has hovered over the future of mankind, Alperowitz adds the indictment that this was done wantonly, for an unrelated purpose, in an action that was not even directed against the enemy but against an ally...
...see also the contributions by Lloyd Gardner and Robert Freeman Smith to the • To the third proposition David Horowitz replies that not idealism led the U.S...
...There was no war plan and no concerted effort to achieve welldefined aims...
...somewhat more critical John Spanier, American Foreign Policy Since World War II (New York: Praeger, 1967...
...Whatever disturbs this imaginary idyll is bad, above all the American efforts to prevent any pieces of geography from being fenced off as empire...
...20 Scott Nearing and Joseph Freeman, Dollar Imperialism (New York: Viking, 1925...
...The responsible statesman is distinguished from the chess player in that he does not see all his enemy's forces on the board and has no way of knowing his true intentions...
...as Edmund Stillman, "Dean Rusk: In the AmericanGrain," Commentary, May 1968, p. 36...
...It was the diplomats' business to keep this conflict under control, not to fan it...
...82 William Pfaff and Edmund Stillman, The New Politics (New York: Harper, 1961), and The Politics of Hysteria (New York: Harper, 1964...
...But he fails to mention that Mobtoy refused to allow free elections under U.N...
...The Cold War is such a conflict for the "mastery of Europe" in which political, diplomatic, psychological, and economic pressures are the principal weapons but military deployment is used in a symbolic and logistic fashion short of warlike action...
...A series of episodes does not show consistency of a policy...
...but though German revisionists have asked why Molotov failed to follow suit, American revisionists remain silent—for good reason...
...Where we had pointed an accusing finger at Stalin, charging him with bland disregard of the Yalta agreements, we now find ourselves in the defendant's dock, indicted not with an isolated misdeed but with the consistent, systematic, and—one is tempted to say—congenital pursuit of Empire...
...remained at war with Japan while Stalin already was retaining ships loaned to him for war purposes...
...Immersed in the documents which have earned him the reputation of scholarship, he neglects to look at the acts of the various governments and to reconstruct the climate of the year 1945...
...Would it not justify a Hitler, too...
...Long before he had ever heard of Bolshevism, Col...
...government wrong they must prove Stalin right...
...has been opposed to closed doors indeed, everywhere and at all times...
...In this view we appear virtuous, restrained, and almost passive...
...Messrs...
...Long before the end of World War II, it was therefore clear to Professor Halle, who then was in the State Department, that ultimately a confrontation between the victors could not be avoided: "The dynamics of the postwar situation produced an expansion of Moscow's tyranny that was not altogether voluntary but provoked a reaction in the West that in turn awoke Moscow's persecution mania...
...which reveals the purpose of Taylor's revisionist effort...
...He can leisurely study all the pertinent documents and ignore the pressures of time, opinion, and other business that act on the statesman...
Vol. 15 • November 1968 • No. 6
