The first wave of Cold War historiography in the United States, associated with the “orthodox” school of the late 1940s to early 1950s, argued that the Cold War was caused by Iosif Stalin's hostility toward the West and his determination to push for world Communism. A “revisionist” antithesis emerged in the late 1950s, particularly in the works of William Appleman Williams, who argued that the U.S. government's relentless quest to gain new overseas markets, combined with its nuclear monopoly, forced Stalin to expand Soviet domination to Eastern Europe. A third, “post-revisionist” school of Cold War historical scholarship emerged in the 1970s blending the two earlier perspectives. More nuanced and better documented than the orthodox and revisionist alternatives, the post-revisionist literature took account of the growth of Cold War scholarship worldwide, prompted by the opening of government records in Western Europe as well as the United States.
Since the 1990s, the...