Warmed-Over Cold War

...404 pp...

...Herring, much like the Soviet leaders who traditionally subordinate economic to political considerations, does not regard the economic aspect of the East-West relationship as its determining factor...

...216 pp...

...A characteristic sentence, summarizing the causes of the American disillusionment with the wartime dream of world harmony, illustrates the point: "The seductions of power, the attraction of simplistic thought, the force of anxiety, and the follies of statesmen promptly exploded this dream and led to further wars for the kids, a consistently unkind world, and a persistently unclean breed...

...Like Beitzell, Rose advances our understanding of past events very little...

...7.95...

...careful external and internal critique of this data...

...Unlike most authors...

...The lesson to be learned from comparing these three books is obvious...

...aid to Russia in World War II, was a chapter both glorious and pathetic in the temporary alliance between the two countries...

...Here was a potential leverage, possibly greater than Lend-Lease, and the historian's judgment about this missed chance is worth pondering: "Had the U.S...

...Reviewed by Vojtech Mastny Assistant Professor of History, Columbia University With the fashionable appeal of the revisionists of the Cold War beginning to fade, it is time to examine their more lasting effects...

...the collection and selection of evidence...

...the formulation of conclusions in the light of hard facts rather than preconceptions...

...One cannot agree strongly enough with his view that the absence-for whatever reasons-of the Second Front was the single most important cause of "uneasiness" within the alliance, as well as the clue to Soviet policies in 1941-1943...

...10.00After Yalta: America and the Origins of the Cold War By Lisle A. Rose Scribners...

...The third has tried to offer less self-righteous criticism and more sympathetic understanding of the revisionists-a natural impulse following a period of disputes conducted with spurious arguments, without decorum and without pity...

...In important ways, the three books reviewed here are representative of the three currents...

...This has proved to be beyond our power...

...He does present some new material, most notably from the Presidential libraries and from the private papers of several high-ranking officials, but his interpretations have a definite air of deja vu-in no small part because of his moralistic bent...

...It does not mean that we were wrong...

...But the revisionists did ask many insightful questions, though they often gave wrong answers, and they did bring forth some new information, though their taste for explanation exceeded that for research...

...The most critical was agreement to a large reconstruction loan requested by the Soviet Union in January 1945, which Washington never considered seriously...

...By far the best of the lot is George C. Herring's study, a solid piece of historical writing that originated as a doctoral dissertation at the University of Virginia...

...On the whole, Arthur Schlesinger's 1967 prediction that their interpretations would "fail to stick" appears vindicated...

...The positive object . . . was the concrete realization of the Atlantic Charter...

...Of the various kinds of responses stimulated by the controversy, three in particular stand out...

...He puts to rest with equal ease the myth that a tougher American stance on Lend-Lease could have altered Soviet War aims and the illusion that greater responsiveness to Moscow's postwar needs could have prevented the breakup of the Great Coalition...

...Since that inquiry, now nearing completion, will hopefully result in a major treatment of the subject, one wonders why the present book was written at all...

...Domestic pressures once the War was won, not any effort to coerce the Soviets, accounted for the abrupt curtailment of the shipments in May 1945...

...Since the origins of the Cold War are complex and elusive, and are further obscured by many a self-serving argument, the means employed to disentangle them must be commensurate to the task...

...The postwar relationship between the Soviet Union and the United States will continue to provide many temptations to historians, but there can be no shortcuts for painstaking research and a rigorous, dispassionate evaluation of all the accessible facts...

...Its substitute, offered in the conclusion, is fair enough but hardly earth-shaking: "Instead of dealing with what was, America launched itself into an increasingly costly and frustrating struggle to create what could not be...

...He writes that FDR's "efforts to meet every Russian request may not have encouraged the notion that the United States was an easy mark, but they did create certain expectations...

...The first has attempted to go beyond the revisionists in the areas where they proved weakest: the identification of specific rather than general problems...

...The Uneasy Alliance: America, Britain and Russia, 1941-1943 By Robert Beitzell Knopf...

...acted in 1944 or even in 1945, when Russian diplomacy retained some flexibility (in method if not in ultimate objective) and before divisions on postwar problems had hardened, some concessions on trade or political problems might have been secured...

...Beitzell also rightly stresses the significance of the decisions taken during the 1943 meetings at Moscow and Teheran: A careful account of the complex conversations during these conferences fills more than two thirds of his account...

...More seriously, the book is so crowded with irrelevant details and unenlightening witticisms ("The War Department created while the State Department dreamed") that a significant thesis fails to emerge...

...Yet despite Beitzell's good intentions and sound premises, his facility for writing and his eye for the colorful anecdote, the work is not a success...

...After Yalta by Lisle A. Rose, who serves currently in the Historical Office of the Department of State, is, according to the preface, a by-product of a "much broader and more detailed inquiry into the coming of the American age in 1945 and 1946...

...Based exclusively upon published sources, it does not expand our knowledge of what happened...

...Although Herring generally approves Roosevelt's policy of providing wartime aid with no strings attached, he criticizes other features of the operation...

...As Herring convincingly shows, the deliveries of materiel to Russia under Roosevelt and Truman were a military expedient, and the termination of Lend-Lease-to unfriendly Russia but to friendly Britain, too-was a consequence of the hostilities' ending in Europe...

...Its subject, U.S...

...The second has sought to reassess the already available mass of information and correct the obvious flaws in the "traditional" histories...

...The Uneasy Alliance by Robert Beitzell, who teaches history at the University of Maine, explores the factors in the first two and a half years of the U.S.-British-Soviet relationship forboding its doom...