A Military History of the Cold War, 1944–1962 by Jonathan M. House (review)

According to Jonathan House, a professor of military history at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, the outbreak of the Cold War turned out to be pretty much a case of military malpractice. House opens A Military History of the Cold War with vignettes about Warsaw’s tragic fate, the civil war in Greece, and the post-conflict chaos in Indochina. All three confrontations, House contends, “involved fundamental misunderstandings and misperceptions” (p. 24), an assessment that captures his interpretation of all the history leading up to the Cuban missile crisis. Opting for ill-thought-out military solutions to resolve political troubles fostered a cycle of escalation that ended with a hard break between East and West.

The debate over the origins of wars is a staple of military and diplomatic historians. Conrad Russell, a prominent historian of the English Civil War, famously broke the cycle of blaming Cavilers and Roundheads by declaring the outbreak of the conflict was “like a road accident.” Russell’s writing has relevance to how House looks at history. Russell revolutionized the debate over the warfare that erupted in 1642 by shifting the focus away from just cataloging the long-term issues of constitutional conflict. Instead, he focused on the missteps and miscalculations made in the immediate run-up to war. Russell’s thesis was fresh in 1973. Historians of the period still keep the dispute lively. House hopes to open a second front for the “road accident metaphor as an explanation for the outbreak of the Cold War.

In retrospect, it makes sense that House’s revisionism would parrot the Russell thesis. Russell gored the long-established tradition of “Whig” history that envisioned the rise of modernism as the inevitable victory of liberal beliefs over reactionary antidemocratic forces. The Whig view of the world and America’s self-perception after the Second World War have much in common. In many ways, as the first half of the Cold War evolved, it slipped comfortably into the Whig paradigm of good seeking to triumph over evil. Thus, it was inevitable that at some point the idea of the U.S.-Soviet confrontation emerging as an inevitable conflict, like the wisdom of Whig history, would come under challenge.

When Russell was at the height of his powers in the second half of the twentieth century, challenging the established thinking on the ideological origins of conflict was all the rage. This “progression” in historical writing had as much to do with the politics of the time as it did with discovering new sources and methods. Western ideology was going out of fashion.

Even as Russell was rewriting the story of the English Civil War, a wave of leftwing revisionism regarding the Cold War was moving through the United States, much of it stemming from the negative reaction of Western academics to the Vietnam War. The popularity of William Appleman Williams offers a case in point. Williams began arguing that the ritual practice of empire-building was the root cause of a destructive U.S. foreign policy. Though he began his career at the end of the Eisenhower era, his popularity did not really take off until the Vietnam War. Looking for the origins of Cold War conflict in the American idea has been a staple of the most prominent strain of revisionist writings ever since.

A Military History of the Cold War offers a different kind of critique—one that parallels Russell’s anti-ideological thesis. In diminishing the power of ideas, however, House’s thesis raises similar concerns. Russell’s writings were popular not just because he offered a fresh interpretation of history but because he diminished the stature of the Western democratic project—a practice at the height of popularity in the post-Woodstock, draft-card-burning age. Russell was a politician and activist as well as a historian arguing that the British political system was hardly the model of perfection...