Debating the Origins of the Cold War

(sau Perspectives on the origins of the Cold War)

The expression "cold war" has historically had a number of meanings. In the fourteenth century, medieval writer Don Juan Manuel referred to the conflict between Christianity and Islam as a "War that is very fierce and very hot ends either with death or peace, whereas a cold war neither brings peace nor confers honour on those who wage it."

Another definition of the term cold war was given after World War II by Eric Arthur Blair, known for his pen name, George Orwell, who used the term in the essay You and the Atomic Bomb, published on October 19, 1945, in the British newspaper Tribune. While contemplating a world living in the shadow of the threat of nuclear war, he warned of a peace that is no peace, which he called a permanent cold war.

The Cold War was a hostile rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. The war was "cold" only in that the two postwar superpowers never fought each other in a direct military confrontation. The term cold war was invented to describe a state of affairs, the principal ingredient in this state of affairs being the mutual hostility and fears of the protagonists.

The Cold War dominated the international affairs for four decades, being a standoff between two completely different political ideologies, on one hand American capitalism and on the other hand, Soviet Communism. The origins of the Cold War remain deeply controversial. The academic literature distinguishes three different perspectives on this question: traditionalist (also known as orthodox), revisionist, and post-revisionist (also regarded as 'new history').

Traditionalist perspective was focused on the idea that, if blame is to be attributed for the outbreak of the Cold War, the Soviet Union, including Stalin, deserves to be credited with full responsibility for the beginning of the conflict, while the United States of America was, according to this point of view, totally innocent. For example, Herbert Fries is convinced that under Stalin, during the war, the Russian people were trying not only to extend their boundaries and their control over neighboring states but also beginning to revert to their revolutionary effort throughout the world. In the same manner, Gaddis Smith affirms that, in the face of Soviet determination to embark upon a policy of expansion, the United States had to protect both its own legitimate security interests and democracy in the various European nations.

The first work known as the revisionist interpretation appeared in 1959, through William Appleman Williams, with his book, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. Williams argued that the United States had operated in world affairs while trying to maintain an open door for American trade in world markets. The confrontation with the Soviet Union was less a response to the Russian aggressive designs than an expression of the American belief in the necessity of capitalist expansion. For revisionist historians, the Soviet Union was so weak and devastated after the end of the Second World War as to be unable to pose any serious threat to the United States; moreover, the U.S. maintained a nuclear monopoly.

From post-revisionists point of view, both superpowers had the tendency to expand, not because the economic influence, but rather for security problems. As a textual proof of the hypothesis, Milovan Djilas quotes Stalin in Conversation with Stalin: This war is not as in the past; whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach.

With the newly gained acces to once forbidden soviet intelligence, new debate can start on which superpower started the war. Writer John Lewis Gaddis has now argued that the Soviets should be held clearly more accountable for the ensuing problems, because Stalin was in a much better position to compromise than his Western counterparts.