アメリカにおける冷戦論争の収束

「冷戦」-その虚構と実像-

抄録

The debate on the origins of the cold war which reached a peak in the late 1960s in America had declined with the end of the Vietnam war. Now a new debate on the sources of American foreign policy seems to be discernable.
It may be said that the cold war debate diminished under the heavy criticism from the revisionist school. However, why the revisionist school was able to achieve such an eminent position? The answer seems to lie in their determined advocacy of the American retreat from Vietnam. When the American Oligarchy decided to retreat from Vietnam then the position of the revisionist school was vindicated. The Pentagon Papers show that since 1968 this policy option was under discussion in the government. Therefore, the revisionist had been utilized by the government to make the national consensus for the retreat.
The end of the cold war debate has not seen the solution to the problems under dispute. But, now there is a prevailing tendency, among the scholars of Establishment, to insist that it was a sterile exercise. And some of them have the opinion that it seems at present more useful to analize international relations since the end of the second world war in the style of professor Kissinger who conceptualized them on the pattern of the congress system after the Napoleonic war.
On the other hand, the new Left theorists had also contributed to the end of the cold war debate. Their views insisted that the cold war debate had the unfair effect to justify the Yalta Agreement which was one accomplishment of F. D. Roosevelt's imperialistic diplomacy. Therefore, they avoided the use of the term “cold war” which would justify the Roosevelt position as an imperialist policy maker.
We can find a new controversy now in America. The point at issue here seems to be the various possibilities of America's return to “normal diplomacy”. In this context the estimation of President Truman as being a rational politician or not is one focus of the debate.