The Roman strategist Flavius Renatus once said, "Si vis pacem, para bellum," or "If you want peace, prepare for war." It has been a standard of politics for well over 2000 years, certainly before 375 A.D. when the idea was officially written into the Roman Legion's handbook. The modern idea of defense preparations and spending is not a new concept. Looking back throughout time competition, militarization, and conquest have been at the root of many great conflicts. The Punic Wars, the Mongol wars, the Hundred Years War, and the Napoleonic Wars are all examples of terrible conflicts fought between the great powers of their era. However, none rivaled the sheer destruction that was to come to pass in the 20th century. Warfare had come of age.
Between the conflicts of World War I, World War II, and the Cold War the modern nations could find little peace. The two World Wars were easily the most devastating conflicts in all of history, but they were only precursors to an even more dangerous conflict between the two most powerful states of the modern world and arguably the most powerful nations ever. The Cold War: the rivalry, mistrust, and often open hostility just short of war between the United States and the Soviet Union. What was the cause of this tension? Many have debated and analyzed American foreign policy of this period to attempt to reason why. Three main views have come to dominate the academic discussions: Orthodox, Revisionism, and Post-revisionism. Each position makes valid claims about the conflict and each is factual from a certain point of view. Mutually exclusive as they seem, many threads of the Cold War can be woven into each of these positions.
The first opinion to rise to dominance was the Orthodox view. In this opinion the blame for the Cold War is placed solely on the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. At the end of World War II the Soviet Union was in sole possession of Eastern Europe. Orthodox's argue that Stalin did not live up to the agreements made at the Yalta Conference, specifically, to let the Eastern European countries to hold free and fair elections after the war. He imposed pro-Soviet regimes throughout the region and brutally suppressed all dissent against the puppet communist governments. Stalin's view of Communism as a worldwide social revolution rather than just an experiment within the Soviet Union led to widespread fear of his expansionist tendencies . The United States felt obligated to defend the world from being unwillingly dominated by violent communist forces, both within and without their countries. The United States decided that it must, in President Truman's words, "support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. " (Ambrose, Brinkley, 1997, p. 82) In addition to this declaration the United States generously instituted the Marshall Plan to help the countries of war-torn Western Europe.
In Secretary of State George Marshall's words, the United State needed to prevent "economic, social, and political deterioration of a very grave character," and should "provide a cure rather than a mere palliative," for the European countries. (1997) In addition, to confront the Soviets expansion and protect her allies, the United States formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization with much of Western Europe, which pledged mutual defense and treated an attack on one as an attack on all. The alliance relied on United States military backing and, at least at first, sole possession of the atomic bomb to deter the Soviet Union from overrunning Europe. (Targ, 2008). Combining that alliance with National Security Council Report 68, which stated "Any substantial further extension of the area under the domination of the Kremlin would raise the possibility that no coalition adequate to confront the Kremlin could be established," (Hoffman 2008) the United States set itself against the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to follow the policy of containing communism and defending democracy, freedom, and capitalism throughout the world.
The Orthodox view has been considered by many to be idealistic and naïve. After the loss of the Vietnam War many historians became disheartened with the policy of containment and NSC 68. The new generation of historians saw the United States as more of a hegemonic power that only was out to protect its economic interests abroad no matter the cost to native populations. This new view of American foreign policy became known as the Revisionist opinion. In this retrospective view the "American Empire" and the Soviet Union were economic rivals and were bound to come into conflict regardless of their ideologies. It has been argued, from this perspective, that the Cold War actually started in 1917 with the Russian Bolshevik Revolution and the Western Power's attempts to overthrow the fledgling communist government in "a half-hearted occupation of Russian territory that lasted from 1918 to 1920." (Gaddis, 1997) They also argue that America has always been an empire, ever since the acquisition of the Louisiana Purchase and "Manifest Destiny." This desire did not stop after spanning across North America. As Stephen Kinzer illustrates in his book Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change, the acquisition of overseas colonies starting with Hawaii and then Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippians turned America's continental empire into a global one. (2006)
