The Tragedy of Cold War History

John Lewis Gaddis

From Foreign Affairs, January/February 1994

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Summary:  Historians of the Cold War were powerfully influenced by fears that America was betraying its ideals in the course of that long struggle. The real tragedy of the Cold War, however, was that faced by Stalin?s victims. The newly available archives from the East seem to bear out Western hard-liners.

John Lewis Gaddis was President of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations in 1992. This essay was the 1992 presidential address and has previously been published, in a different form, in Diplomatic History, with whose permission it appears here. Gaddis is also the author of The United States and the End of the Cold War: Implications, Reconsiderations and Provocations, (Oxford, 1992).

It has been well over three decades now since the historian William Appleman Williams first called upon his colleagues in the profession to undertake a searching review of the way America has defined its own problems and objectives, and its relationship with the rest of the world. In The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, surely one of the most influential books ever written about the history of U.S. foreign relations, Williams rejected the celebratory tone that had characterized earlier scholarship, insisting that the record of this nation's foreign policy had been a "tragedy" because of the gap Americans had allowed to develop between aspirations and accomplishments. We had preached self-determination but objected when others sought to practice it; we had proclaimed the virtues of economic freedom even as we sought to impose economic control. The result, Williams concluded, was that "America's humanitarian urge to assist other people is undercut--even subverted--by the way it goes about helping them."

The classical definition of tragedy is greatness brought low by some fundamental flaw in one's own character. When one considers the difficulties the United States created for itself through its own hubris and arrogance during the Vietnam War era, it is hardly surprising that Williams' tragic view of American diplomacy seemed, to a great many people at the time, to make sense. To a good many even today, it still does.

Therein, however, lies a danger. Any view held by a considerable number of people risks becoming an orthodoxy, and there are signs that this has happened within the field of American diplomatic history. Williams was, according to those who knew him, a profoundly unorthodox character. I suspect that the last thing he would have wanted would have been to see his own ideas--or anybody else's, for that matter--become conventional wisdom. As he himself put it in The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, "history is a way of learning, of getting closer to the truth. It is only by abandoning the clichés that we can even define the tragedy."

The end of the Cold War has obliged most of us to jettison any number of clichés, orthodoxies and long-cherished pearls of conventional wisdom; in this sense, we are all becoming post-Cold War revisionists. All the more reason, then, for taking another look into what Williams called the "mirror" of history, "in which, if we are honest enough, we can see ourselves as we are as well as the way we would like to be."1

THE AMERICAN VISION

Students frequently ask the question these days: what was the Cold War all about? Given what we now know of the Soviet Union's internal fragility; given what has long been clear about the economic absurdity of Marxism-Leninism; given persuasive evidence that an international communist monolith never really existed; given all of these things, what exactly was the threat to American interests anyway? Whatever could have justified the massive expenditures on armaments, the violations of human rights abroad and civil liberties at home, the neglect of domestic priorities, ...

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