Customer Reviews

Writing History and Making Policy

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The debate over the origins of the Cold War is one the most hotly contested questions of our time. Making sense of the debate can seem a daunting task for outsiders, and even for those involved in the debate itself. Richard Melanson has provided a great service by explaining the major schools of thought and all of their major contributors in a clear and concise manner. Melanson divides the debate into the major schools of thought: The Orthodox, Realist Revisionist, Revisionist, and post-Revisionist Schools. The Orthodox was the first school of thought, which came into prominence early in the Cold War and saw the conflict as the proper US defense against an aggressive, ambitious Soviet Union. Prominent authors include Arthur Schlesinger, John Spanier, and Foster Rhea Dulles, among others. These men saw the US as having the moral high ground in the conflict. In the 1950's another group, the Realist Revisionists, came to the fore, led by Walter Lippmann, Hans Morgenthau, and George Kennan. These writers, scared by the crusading nature of the Truman Doctrine, tried to limit the American response to the Soviet threat from a total war against Communism in all forms, to a more moderate position. But their criticisms of US policy were mild compared to the new school of thought, the Revisionists, who came to prominence during the Vietnam conflict and viewed the conflict in directly opposite terms as the Traditionalists: It was the US that was expansionist and the Soviets were defensive. The movement was started by William Appleman Williams, who saw the tragedy of US foreign policy as unnecessarily directed at opening foreign markets. Later authors were more critical, culminating with Gabriel Kolko's "Limits to Power" which explained US expansionism as based on the needs of the capitalist system. But Kolko could not explain the fact that the US did not acquire most of its resources from the Third World as his theory posited. This made the economic source of US policy implausible and the Revisionists fell out of favor and were replaced by the post-Revisionists, in the 1970's, the most balanced of the schools. The Post-Revisionists saw the origins of the conflict in the fear that both sides had of each other, and of the hard-line policies each side followed, leading to a spiral effect. The Bipolar nature of the post-World War Two era, in which the United States and the Soviet Union were the two superpowers, is also noted, as their security interests conflicted, mostly in Europe. These authors included John Lewis Gaddis, Daniel Yergin, and Lynn Davies. Melanson concludes that the historiographical debate of any era seems to be more influenced by the current political situation than academics would like to admit. Hence, the radical climate of the Vietnam era produced anti-American works, while the patriotic early Cold War years generated pro-American sentiment even in academia. Melanson himself never says which school of thought he favors, although I once asked him personally and he prefers the Realist Revisionists. Since this book was written the debate has of course continued, and much more has been written. Notably, the Orthodox school received a boost from the fall of the Soviet Union and the revelation that the domestic nature of the USSR was even worse than we had previously thought. John Lewis Gaddis himself switched to the Traditionalist school. The Revisionist has particularly been undermined since then, by studies showing the poor scholarship used by their authors. Another new approach was taken by John Mearsheimer, the IR theorist. Using his pessimistic and deterministic theory, Mearsheimer concluded that while the Soviets may have indeed tried to avoid a conflict, the power vacuum in Europe left by Germany's destruction left the US and the Soviets in fear of each other's power, and there was perhaps no way the conflict could have been avoided. But nearly twenty years after Melanson published this book, the authoritative study of the origins of the Cold War, combining both the latest advances in theory, and newly declassified material, has yet to be written. Any such book shoud also endeavor to explain not only the origins of the conflict, but its durability, as the Cold War continued many years after the issues that originally started it (the future of Germany, the status of Eastern Europe) were settled. At present, I am aware of no such work.