Cold War Origins, I

For American historians the term revisionism (already familiar in a Marxist context), has come to mean the questioning of established interpretations of history and the presentation of new interpretations; it is applied most frequently in the field of foreign policy, where the revisionists are willing to admit the impurity of American motives and the possibility that 'the other side' has a valid case. Today, more than twenty years after the enunciation of the Truman Doctrine, there is a growing body of revisionist literature devoted to a re-examination of the origins and nature of the Cold War, challenging conventional explanations of why it occurred and what it has all been about. One might perhaps say that it is premature revisionism in the sense that no one can say for sure that the Cold War is really 'over'. While the interpretations in these worksl vary, what gives them a common character is that they place on the United States primary responsibility for beginning the Cold War, and for maintaining or augmenting the tensions between the United States and its principal adversary in that conflict, the Soviet Union. Published in I961, Professor D. F. Fleming's The Cold War and its Origins takes up the story in I918, and continues it through I960. It is his general thesis that the Cold War began in I918, when western armies intervened on the anti-Soviet side during the Russian Civil War, and that by 1960 the war had been 'lost' by the West.2

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• Cold-War Revisionism

  Open Access•James L Richardson•World Politics•1972

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