As soon as the term "Cold War" was popularized to refer to postwar tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, interpreting the course and origins of the conflict became a source of heated controversy among historians, political scientists and journalists.
[1] In particular, historians have sharply disagreed as to who was responsible for the breakdown of Soviet Union–United States relations after the World War II and whether the conflict between the two superpowers was inevitable, or could have been avoided.
[9] For example, Thomas A. Bailey argued in his 1950 America Faces Russia that the breakdown of postwar peace was the result of Soviet expansionism in the immediate years following World War II.
Bailey argued Joseph Stalin violated promises he had made at the Yalta Conference, imposed Soviet-dominated regimes on unwilling Eastern European populations and conspired to spread communism throughout the world.
Another prominent "orthodox" historian was Herbert Feis, who in his works like Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin and From Trust to Terror: The Onset of the Cold War stated similar views.
[2] "Revisionist" accounts emerged in the wake of the Vietnam War in the context of a larger rethinking of the United States role in international affairs, which was seen more in terms of American empire or hegemony.
[1] The influence of Williams, who taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and several of his students who subsequently published works on these themes, was enough to create what became known as the Wisconsin School of American diplomatic history.
[12] Following Williams, revisionists placed more responsibility for the breakdown of postwar peace on the United States, citing a range of their efforts to isolate and confront the Soviet Union well before the end of World War II.
To achieve that objective, they pursued an "open door" policy abroad, aimed at increasing access to foreign markets for American business and agriculture.
[1] New Left historians Joyce and Gabriel Kolko's The Limits of Power: The World and U.S. Foreign Policy, 1945–1954 (1972) has also received considerable attention in the historiography on the Cold War.
The United States was fighting not necessarily Soviet influence, but also any form of challenge to the American economic and political prerogatives through covert or military means.
[2] For example, Thomas G. Paterson in Soviet-American Confrontation (1973) viewed Soviet hostility and United States efforts to dominate the postwar world as equally responsible for the Cold War.
[14] An almost immediate move to challenge Gaddis' framework came from Melvyn P. Leffler,[15] who "demonstrated that it was not so much the actions of the Kremlin as it was fears about socioeconomic dislocation, revolutionary nationalism, British weakness, and Eurasian vacuums of power that triggered US initiatives to mold an international system to comport with its concept of security".
[20][21] Out of the "post-revisionist" literature emerged a new area of inquiry that was more sensitive to nuance and interested less in the question of who started the conflict than in offering insight into United States and Soviet actions and perspectives.
[22]From that view of "post-revisionism" emerged a line of inquiry that examines how Cold War actors perceived various events and the degree of misperception involved in the failure of the two sides to reach common understandings of their wartime alliance and their disputes.
We need to indicate how Cold War conflicts connect to broader trends in social, economic, and intellectual history as well as to the political and military developments of the longer term of which it forms a part.
[30] [31] They have sought emotional explanations for political decisions and developments typically examined from a rational perspective and have analysed interpersonal dynamics between world leaders.
[32] For example, he positions the breakdown of the wartime alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union and the hostilities of the early Cold War as being, in part, a result of the heightened strong emotional of key figures in American foreign policy, like Averell Harriman, following the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
To Costigliola, it was the "attitudes and rhetoric" of key diplomats at the end of World War II that set the tone for future relations between the United States and the Soviet Union.