The Emerging Post-Revisionist Synthesis on the Origins of the Cold War

It is no secret that there was once a certain amount of disagreement among American historians about the origins of the Cold War. A decade ago this subject was capable of eliciting torrents of impassioned prose, of inducing normally placid professors to behave like gladiators at scholarly meetings, of provoking calls for the suppression of unpopular points of view, threats of lawsuits, and, most shocking of all, the checking of footnotes. Today, in contrast, the field is very much quieter, its occupants are much more polite to one another, and talk of consensus is heard throughout the land. It may be that we are all getting older and have not the stomach for combat any longer. But I prefer to think that what is happening is the emergence of a genuine synthesis of previously antagonistic viewpoints, based upon an impressive amount of new research. There is no question that this research is taking place. The recent Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Guide to Diplomatic History Since 1700 devotes no less than 42 percent of its pages (514 out of 1213) to the period since 1945. One out of every five doctoral dissertations on U.S. foreign relations completed during the past four years dealt with some aspect of the 1945–50 period. The first six volumes of Diplomatic History contained 130 articles, of which 47 (36 percent) focused just on the years between the end of World War II and the onset of the Korean War.1