William Appleman Williams was a prominent revisionist historian of American diplomacy.
His most famous work, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, challenged the previously accepted historiography of the Cold War, as Williams argued that the United States was the instigator. Williams contends that the United States’s desire to keep Europe a free market and open was not humanitarian or altruistic in nature but rather driven by the practical desire to maintain access to its goods and trade partnerships.
The United States also saw firsthand how lucrative war was. Following the end of World War II, economists knew that the American military-industrial complex would need to retool. In order to combat this and justify the research and building of new weapons, the Cold War needed to feel like a true war in the eyes and hearts of Americans, and the national media played into that narrative.
Also following World War II, the United States took a leading role in the formation of NATO in 1949. Six years later, the Warsaw Pact was cemented as a response. Americans at the time viewed these as inherently good versus inherently evil entities. Williams believed that neither entity was good or evil—they were simply both useful for building and maintaining the economies of both the East and the West.
In order to perpetuate the narrative of good versus evil and keep military spending high, the Cold War manifested in proxy battles—most notably the Vietnam War. The United States portrayed Stalin’s buffer zone in Eastern Europe as an aggressive act, which justified the implementation of the Containment policy. Following the absolute failure of the policy in Vietnam, thinkers like Williams began to question the genesis of the policy overall and view the United States as the instigator in the Cold War instead of the victim or savior.
William Appleman Williams was one of the early revisionist historians of Cold War historiography. In his work, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, Williams argues that it was the US who was the instigator of the Cold War. He argues correctly that the US was driven to keep Europe open not for humanitarian reasons; rather, the US needed European markets for its goods. This meant keeping the Soviet Union in a smaller role. Williams argues that the Soviet Union was severely weakened by World War II and that it needed to maintain Eastern European satellites as buffer states in order to protect it from the West. Williams also argued that the Soviet Union felt threatened by the formation of NATO in 1949 and that this led to the Soviet Union forming the Warsaw Pact. To Williams, the United States was the instigator of the Cold War, a war generated for economic reasons and as a justification to continue to grow the US's military-industrial complex.
Williams's work was written at a time when most contemporary historians viewed the Cold War as a war of good versus evil, with the US playing the role of the good guys. Williams looks at US containment strategies as ways to maintain markets rather than crusades for freedom. Williams would note that the US backed rightist dictators in Latin America in a similar fashion to Stalin's backing of leftists in Eastern Europe.
The U.S. and Soviet Union backed their own pet groups throughout the developing world during the twentieth century. Both sides spent trillions of dollars on aid and weapons for groups in Vietnam, Korea, Latin America, and Afghanistan in addition to vast sums in their respective nuclear arsenals—enough weapons to destroy the world many times over. Williams and other revisionists would state that this military spending was part of the US's goal to continue to grow its economy in the name of fighting the Soviet boogeyman. The Cold War finally ended under the Reagan administration when Soviet spending could not keep up with US military spending. This led to the collapse of the Soviet Union; however, relations between the US and Russia are still tense.
William Appleman Williams (1921–1990) was a revisionist historian who boldly challenged traditional explanations for the Cold War. Prior to his emergence as a persuasive revisionist, fellow historians and the general public accepted the view that America had to act to restrain Soviet aggressiveness and expansionism after World War II. Williams argued that American economic interests were primarily responsible for the Cold War, though. His most important book was The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959).
It was the West, not the Soviet Union, that established the first alliance system in postwar Europe. America was the driving force behind the creation of the anti-Soviet North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949. The Warsaw Pact was, in Williams' view, a response to NATO. Indeed, the Warsaw Pact was not founded until 1955.
Williams maintained that Joseph Stalin, the leader of the Soviet Union, had a right to a buffer zone in Eastern Europe. Germany invaded Russia twice—during both of the World Wars—and the results were devastating for Russia. The USSR was, in any case, too weakened from WWII to threaten Western Europe. The U.S., on the other hand, was not damaged during WWII, and it had a formidable nuclear arsenal.
Williams' revisionism became especially popular as the folly of America's war in Vietnam became apparent. If Containment had been the correct postwar strategy, how did it fail so badly in Vietnam?
In short, Williams argued that American diplomacy had long been driven by the demands of capitalism, not of democracy. As this related to the Cold War, he claimed that the United States, fearful that Soviet influence would crowd American investment out of European markets, took a hard line against Joseph Stalin. This position led to the outbreak of a rivalry in Europe that eventually spread throughout the world, and it was one that resulted more from America's aggressive stance than a Stalinist drive for global domination.
As for the implications for American foreign policy it should be remembered that Williams published his most famous work The Tragedy of American Diplomacy in 1959 at the height of the Cold War. The book's thesis strongly suggests that the United States embraced anti-colonial revolutions around the world, including those with leftist leanings. This, of course, was very different from what was going on in French Indochina (Vietnam), where the Americans took exactly the opposite course. It also strongly suggests a moral equivalency—or worse—between Stalin's actions in Eastern Europe and American policy in Latin America. Williams urged readers to see that economic motives rather than freedom were at the heart of American foreign policy, and he sought to change this power dynamic.
https://books.google.com/books?id=ZUS7t8Af-i4C&printsec=frontcover
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsule-review/1997-09-01/tragedy-american-diplomacy-enlarged-edition
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