Who was to blame for the Cold War?

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Recommended: Schools of thoughts on the origin of the cold war

The cold war can be seen as an event in which there are many conflicting ideologies about how it started. Some of the perspectives that will be analyzed in this essay are the views of the revisionists, post revisionists and traditionalists. For more than a decade, various historians have challenged the Cold War origins.
The Revisionist viewpoint suggests that the US was not an innocent bystander and that they were mainly focused on expansionism and the entrepreneurial capitalism that had characterized the US history. The leading American Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis argues that there was “a new consensus emerging – the post revisionist one” (Leffler and Painter 1994 ). According to this consensus, the United States had “become an imperial nation after World War Two” (Leffler and Painter 1994 ) but that the American officials weren’t inspired by capitalist greed or fears of another depression. Gaddis makes a point that “the United States was not a confident power in 1945 and actually had to reshape many of its domestic priorities and institutions to deal with the competition of the Soviets”. (Pipe 2007)
In addition, Gaddis outlines three important lessons or ideas in his book. The first being that during the Cold War, “military strength ceased to be the defining characteristic of power itself, which it had been for the past five centuries”. Secondly, he argues that although “the USSR, China and several countries had authoritarian governments in 1948 and that during the latter part of the 20th century, communism fell out of favor”. Lastly he argues that the Cold War era witnessed “globalization of democracy which is illustrated by the rapid increase in number of democracies by the end of the 20th century”. (Malin and Joh...

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... War as being caused by the due to Stalin and the drive of Soviet expansionism. The Revisionist School of historians “placed the blame on President Truman and the demands of capitalism challenged this viewpoint” (Pipe 2007). Kennan, argues that the Cold War was not to “to blame the Soviets but to awaken American policy makers to the nature of the Soviet threat in the postwar world”. ( (T. J. White 2012)

In conclusion, the various historians argue that both sides were responsible for the beginning of the Cold War. The revisionist approach argues that the origins of the Cold War were controversial and also remained very important in understanding the origins of the Cold War. The post revisionist viewpoint argues that the Cold War was caused by the Soviet Union due to the rise of the Bolshevik government. Overall, both sides can be seen as the cause of the Cold War.

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