Was American Diplomacy Really Tragic?

It is fashionable to lambaste U.S. foreign policy for undesired outcomes in world politics. In the 1990s, many blamed Washington for responding indecisively, sluggishly, even callously to genocide in Rwanda and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia. More recently, the administration of George W. Bush has been accused of unilateralism, overassertiveness, and militaristic hubris. It is hardly surprising then, that the U.S. role in the most dangerous conflict in recent history, the Cold War, has been revisited by historians time and again. Some perspectives keep recurring, including ones that lay the primary blame on the United States for having started the Cold War. Proponents of this view contend that the U.S. government's anti-Soviet policies, especially the Marshall Plan, forced the Soviet Union to abandon its previous stance of moderation and cooperation with the West.¹ As an unintended consequence of U.S. policy, Josif Stalin pressed ahead with the Communization of Eastern Europe and turned against the West in order to protect vital Soviet interests. As Michael Cox and Caroline Kennedy-Pipe argue, "exactly what the Soviet Union did in Eastern Europe was not predetermined." In their view, "as a result of the Marshall Plan, Stalin moved ahead with the Cominform and rejected any idea that Communist parties in Eastern and Central Europe could or should act independently through individual paths to socialism." Moreover, were it not for the Marshall Plan, "the East-West conflict ... might have been avoided altogether."² These are bold statements, but alas they are based more on speculation than on hard evidence.

In fleshing out their argument, Cox and Kennedy-Pipe follow in the footsteps of William Appleman Williams, whose paradigmatic Tragedy of American Diplomacy was grounded on liberal and Marxist writings about the connection between capitalism and great-power expansionism.³ Williams attempted to establish American culpability for the Cold War. The didactic purpose of his book was evident from the title, insofar as tragedy implies that a positive outcome might have been feasible: "the fall of the protagonist and the shaking of the world he inhabits are not regarded as totally threatening to those who survive the agonic test. There has been a gain in consciousness for the spectators of the contest."⁴ Unlike some of the more radical revisionists who followed, Williams believed that if his concerns were heeded, the United States might not be beyond redemption. He made the United States out as the antagonist of the Cold War in his quest to reform the alleged ills of American capitalism. In the process, however, he (and his followers) creatively manipulated historical evidence to suit the story they wanted to tell.⁵ In challenging the "old orthodoxies about who started the Cold War and why," Cox and Kennedy-Pipe are skeptical that new evidence proves Soviet culpability for starting the conflict. "In fact," they claim, " ... it was American policies as much as (and perhaps more than) Soviet actions that finally led to the division of Europe and thus the Cold War itself." They reject the thesis that Stalin's rule made the Cold War unavoidable. Central to their argument is the oft- repeated proposition that the Marshall Plan "propelled the Soviet leadership into a more antagonistic and hostile stance, including the establishment of its own economic and political bloc." The Sovietization of Eastern Europe, they believe, came as a response to the allegedly grave challenge posed by the Marshall Plan. The causal relationship between the Marshall Plan and Soviet hostility as manifested in the Bolshevization of Eastern Europe and the consequent division of the continent is the crux of the paper: Stalin allegedly switched his political course after the West cornered him in with the Marshall aid proposal.

This argument has several logical problems. First, if Stalin was able to consolidate his holdings in Eastern Europe with such ease—the East European countries declined participation in the plan at the first hint of Soviet displeasure—why was it...