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RICHARD CROCKATT, The Fifty Years War: The United States and the Soviet Union in World Politics, 1941-1991 (New York: Routledge, 1995), 398 + pp., maps, $29.95 cloth (ISBN 0-415-10471-8).
In the late 1960s and early 1970s revulsion toward American involvement in Vietnam led to widespread acceptance of an interpretation of the Cold War that portrayed the United States as expansionist and the Soviet Union and revolutionary states around the world as victims of unremitting American aggression. Generally known as New Left revisionism because of its rejection of standard treatments of the subject and its central thesis that the structural requirements of U.S. capitalism forced the creation of a far flung exploitative system, the interpretation also usually depicted Soviet objectives, even during the Stalinist era, in a fairly favorable light. Over the past twenty years the opening up of documentation--primarily on the American side but, since 1991, also from the Soviet--has allowed scholars to achieve greater balance in their work.
Interestingly, one of the major by-products of this quest for objectivity has been the tendency among historians and political scientists to see the United States and the Soviet Union as little more than like-minded military behemoths each seeking global hegemony, there being essentially no difference between them either in the value of their domestic regimes or their respective ideologies. Thus there were simply two armed camps attempting to purvey influence and maximize security--each miscalculating the other, each in turn reacting and over-reacting to imagined threats. It is particularly noteworthy in these accounts that Soviet motives are...