in their respective fields, in both cases deeply felt, humane works of historical reflection: Leffler’s A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration and the Cold War (1992) and Westad’s The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (2005). Leffler’s massive, meticulous analysis of American doctrines and actions in the first five years of the Cold War left no doubt of Washington’s drive for global hegemony—‘preponderance’ at large—and dismissal of the predictable apprehensions it aroused in Moscow, in the wake of one invasion from Germany and fear of another, as the US divided the country to keep the Ruhr securely within its grasp.31 Westad’s study broke decisively from a conventional focus on Europe, for a powerful narrative of the battlefields of the Third World, treated as the most important single front of the Cold War, and most disastrous for the peoples caught in the crossfire of American and Soviet attempts to control their fate.
Commanding though each of these works is on its terrain, that remains delimited. In historical scope, neither matches Kolko’s integration within a single compass of the full range of American strategic aims and actions while the Red Army fought the Wehrmacht, with a full sense of popular experiences of suffering and revolt from the Yangzi to the Seine, in the world beyond Washington.32 The forty pages of bibliography in the first volume of the Cambridge History contain no reference to The Politics of War, a telltale omission. At its best, this literature has produced major works of clear-minded political history. But while no longer apologetic, often dwelling on unwarranted blunders and excesses of American foreign policy that compromised the chance of better diplomatic outcomes after the war, or crimes committed in fear of worse in the underdeveloped world, it has proved consistently unable to come to terms with the matrix that rendered these rational enough for their purposes. The symptom of this inability is the general silence with which it has treated the cumulative work of those US historians who have made that the principal object of their research. Distortions of ideology and exaggerations of insecurity are the acceptable causes of American misjudgement or misconduct abroad. The political logic of a dynamic continental economy that was the headquarters of world capital is matter—at best—for evasion or embarrassment.33
That was not the case in the early seventies, when the influence of Williams was at its height. At that time, two penetrating critiques of the Wisconsin School appeared, whose clarity and rigour are in notable contrast with the foot-shuffling that followed. Robert Tucker and John Thompson each took aim at the elisions of the term ‘expansion’ in Wisconsin usage, pointing out that territorial expansion across North America, or even the Pacific, did not mean the US economy required foreign markets to thrive in either the nineteenth or first half of the twentieth century, nor that mistaken beliefs by politicians or businessmen to the contrary could be adduced as evidence of any purposeful continuity in American foreign policy, conspicuously absent. Expansion, Tucker readily conceded, there had been. But it was better understood, not as a projection of the socioeconomic structure of American capitalism, but of the sheer growth of American power and the dynamics of inter-state competition, accompanied by ideas of a mission to spread American values abroad. For Thompson, any number of beliefs were expressed by Americans as justifications of their country’s foreign policy, and there was no reason to attach a priori more importance to commercial than to strategic or moral or political arguments for them. Considerations of security, often invoked, were among the repertoire. Legitimate up to the mid-fifties, in Tucker’s view, these had become excessive thereafter, abandoning the rational pursuit of a balance of power for the will to hegemony of an expansionist globalism. In that respect, the Wisconsin critique of American foreign policy in the Cold War was sound. ‘To contain the expansion of others, or what was perceived as such, it became necessary to expand ourselves. In this manner, the course of containment became the course of empire’.34
___________________
1Famously: ‘If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible’: speech in the Senate, 5 June 1941. In the White House, he would more than once cite the forged Testament of Peter the Great—a nineteenth-century Polish counterpart of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion—as the blueprint for Soviet plans of world conquest. In the severe judgement of his most lucid biographer, whose conclusions from it are damning, ‘Throughout his presidency, Truman remained a parochial nationalist’: Arnold Offner, Another Such Victory: President Truman and the Cold War, 1945–1953, Stanford 2002, p. 177.
2The crudity and violence of Truman’s outlook distinguished him from Roosevelt, entitling him to high marks from Wilson Miscamble’s vehement From Roosevelt to Truman: Potsdam, Hiroshima and the Cold War, Cambridge 2007, whose only complaint is that he did not break fast enough with Roosevelt’s collaboration with Stalin: pp. 323–8. FDR would have been unlikely, in dismissing a member of his Cabinet, to rage at ‘All the ‘Artists” with a capital A, the parlour pinkos and the soprano-voiced men’ as a ‘national danger’ and ‘sabotage front’ for Stalin. See Offner, Another Such Victory, p. 177.
3In the last months of the war, Stalin had been so concerned with maintaining good relations with the allies that he bungled the capture of Berlin when Zhukov’s Army Group was a mere forty miles from the city across open country, with orders from its commander on February 5 to storm it on February 15–16. Stalin cancelled these instructions the following day, for fear of ruffling Allied feathers at Yalta, where the Big Three had just started to convene, and he received no favours in return. Had he let his generals advance as he had earlier agreed, the whole Soviet bargaining position in postwar Germany would been transformed. ‘Towards the end of March, Zhukov found him very tired, tense and visibly depressed. His anguish was hardly alleviated by the thought that all the uncertainties might have been avoided if he had allowed the Red Army to attack Berlin and possibly end the war in February, as originally planned’: Vojtech Mastny, Russia’s Road to the Cold War. Diplomacy, Warfare and the Politics of Communism, 1941–1945, New York 1979, pp. 238–9, 243–4, 261. This would not be his only disastrous blunder, not of aggressive overreaching, but anxious under-reaching, as World War Two came to a close.
4For a penetrating depiction of Stalin’s outlook at the close of the War, see Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War, Cambridge, MA 1996, pp. 11–46.
5This was the theme of his speech to the Supreme Soviet of 9 February 1946. Since the first inter-imperialist war had generated the October Revolution, and the second taken the Red Army to Berlin, a third could finish off capitalism—a prospect offering ultimate victory without altering strategic passivity. To the end of his life, Stalin held to the position that inter-imperialist contradictions remained for the time being primary, contradictions between the capitalist and socialist camp secondary.
6‘If the end of history as emancipated humankind is embodied in the ‘United States”, then the outside can never be identical or ultimately equal. Difference there is, but it is a difference that is intrinsically unjust and illegitimate, there only to be overcome and eradicated’. These passages come from Stephanson, ‘Kennan: Realism as Desire’, in Nicolas Guilhot, ed., The Invention of International Relations Theory, New York 2011, pp. 177–8.
7‘A battle to the death the Cold War certainly was, but to a kind of abstract death. Elimination of the enemy’s