1/7/2024 0 Comments Strategic war truman![]() He emphasizes their impact on liberal (New Leftist) circles, even on popular historians, for example Stephen Ambrose, who found “containment” a codified view of American dominance. Ferrell defends, of course, the “traditionalists,” such as John Lewis Gaddis and Richard Kirkendall, who were among the supporters of the Truman-Marshall-Kennan “appropriate” reactions to genuine Soviet threats made to the United States and particularly to areas of the world where its interests were already at stake, namely Western Europe, as well as in the Middle East and the Far East.įerrell accuses the revisionists, perhaps a bit unfairly, of forming a contrarian conclusion to the prevalent version of current affairs in the 1950s and then marshaling (or manufacturing) the evidence to support it, violating the accepted rules of historiography and making prominent use of some (even questionable) evidence while ignoring documents that might refute it. Alperovitz is especially faulted for developing the theory of atomic diplomacy that is, essentially waving “the bomb” in Stalin's face, when, in fact, the United States possessed very few. Ferrell targets the works of Walter LaFeber, Gar Alperovitz, Lloyd Gardner, and other followers of William Appleman Williams at the University of Wisconsin, who viewed American aggressive (imperialistic) actions as creating and fomenting a defensive/offensive Soviet stance in response to the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and the formation of NATO. ![]() In a brilliant and concise work (a little over one hundred pages of text), the dean of American presidential historians delivers a critical commentary on the Cold War revisionists who tended to shift the blame for many of the Soviet–American encounters following World War II from the Soviet Union to the United States, from Joseph Stalin to Harry Truman.
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