United States and the Origins of the Cold War, The: 1941-1947

The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947, is a full-scale reassessment of United States policy toward the Soviet Union during and immediately after World War II, based on recently opened sources. It is the first major effort to move beyond the revisionist interpretations which have characterized most of the recent writing on the subject. Professor Gaddis acknowledges the contributions New Left scholars have made by demonstrating the influence of economic considerations on American diplomacy, but he argues that their focus has been too narrow: many other forces-domestic politics, bureaucratic inertia, quirks of personality, perceptions, accurate or inaccurate, of Soviet intentions-also affected the behavior of Washington officials. This book seeks to analyze these determinants of policy in terms of their full diversity and relative significance.

-(Overview taken from the back cover of the book)-