The Primary Motivations of Both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. during the Early Decades of the Cold War Conflict
There are competing interpretations of which side was primarily to blame for the long duration of the Cold War. Analyze the primary motivations of both the US and the USSR during the early decades of the Cold War conflict.
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The Cold War is the name given to the period between 1945, the end of the Second World War, and 1991, the date of the collapse of the Soviet Union and is used to describe a period of stand-off between the USA and the USSR – a cold war being fought by all means short of international armed conflict – who are often described as the ‘superpowers’. Over the past 60 years historians have disagreed over the origins of the conflict, most notably over the question of who was to blame for the breakdown in American-Soviet relations. At the end of the 1940-1945 conflict the alliance of the ‘Big Three’, the USA, the British Empire and the Soviet Union, had emerged victorious yet by the 1950s the Western Powers were at loggerheads with the USSR and remained so until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The first round of the debate was between the ‘traditionalists’ or ‘orthodox’ historians and the ‘revisionists’. This was followed by an attempt to produce a synthesis of their arguments now generally known as ‘post-revisionism’. These various attempts to revise the historiography of the Cold War have largely resulted from new sources becoming available to each succeeding school of thought. The traditionalists were dependent on unclassified material (much of official archive still being classified in the first decade of the Cold War), public papers, ongoing US foreign policy and personal experience1. In the early 1970s revisionist scholars benefited from the emergence of American foreign policy documents and recordings like those President John F. Kennedy made of the meetings of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council at the time of the Cuban
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The Cold War is the name given to the period between 1945, the end of the Second World War, and 1991, the date of the collapse of the Soviet Union and is used to describe a period of stand-off between the USA and the USSR – a cold war being fought by all means short of international armed conflict – who are often described as the ‘superpowers’. Over the past 60 years historians have disagreed over the origins of the conflict, most notably over the question of who was to blame for the breakdown in American-Soviet relations. At the end of the 1940-1945 conflict the alliance of the ‘Big Three’, the USA, the British Empire and the Soviet Union, had emerged victorious yet by the 1950s the Western Powers were at loggerheads with the USSR and remained so until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The first round of the debate was between the ‘traditionalists’ or ‘orthodox’ historians and the ‘revisionists’. This was followed by an attempt to produce a synthesis of their arguments now generally known as ‘post-revisionism’. These various attempts to revise the historiography of the Cold War have largely resulted from new sources becoming available to each succeeding school of thought. The traditionalists were dependent on unclassified material (much of official archive still being classified in the first decade of the Cold War), public papers, ongoing US foreign policy and personal experience1. In the early 1970s revisionist scholars benefited from the emergence of American foreign policy documents and recordings like those President John F. Kennedy made of the meetings of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council at the time of the Cuban
Bibliography: Professor Ernest R. May (Harvard) John F. Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis URL: http://BBC/history/coldwar [accessed 3.3.2012 - last updated 17.2.2011] John Kent (LSE) Cold War and the Periphery URL: http://www.history.ac.uk/ihr/focus/cold/articles [accessed 5.3.2012] William Dudley Opposing viewpoints in World History : The Cold War URL: http://www.e-notes.com/cold-war-article [accessed 5.3.2012] Tony Judt Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 William Heinemann London 2005 John Lewis Gaddis The emerging Post-Revisionist Synthesis on the Origins of the Cold War URL: http://eaglepoint.lexingtonchristian.org/hs/kconfor%20History/Revisionist%20Cold%20War.Gaddis.pdf Bodgan Antoniu (Romania) The Origins of the Cold War: A Historiographical Review URL: http://ebooks.unibuc.ro/StintePol/euro-atlanticstudies.pdf E. Hobsbawm The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914 – 1991 Abacus 2003