A Study Of John Lewis Gaddis's Historical Thought

Western studies on Cold War history are generally divided into "Old Cold War history" and "New Cold War history".Gaddis is not only the representative figure of the post-revisionist school in the Old Cold War history,but also the appeal of the New Cold War history research.So what are Gaddis' s core academic views as a post-revisionist and New Cold War history? How can these academic views be used for reference to theories and methods of international relations?Why did Gaddis move from being a Post-revisionist to a New Cold War historiography? How did Gaddis' Grand Strategy theory of Cold War history come into being?These are the problems that need to be discussed in this paper.This paper is divided into three parts: introduction,text and conclusion.The text will be divided into three chapters to study Gaddis' historical thoughts.The first chapter mainly expounds the emergence and development of the Orthodox and Revisionist school of American Cold War history before Gaddis.After that,in the 1970 s,under the influence of the social scientization trend of historiography,the formation of historiography thought and the academic career of Gaddis'.Chapter two focuses on the analysis of Gaddis' Cold War history.Firstly,in the process of studying the foreign policy of the U.S.government during the Cold War,Gaddis gradually formed his own Grand strategy.He believes that the Grand strategy is a comprehensive plan of the country's foreign policy goals and means.The implementation of Grand strategy needs to constantly maintain a balance between goals and means.Secondly,in this process,he also formed a unique view of national security and rights and interests.Gaddis believed that after the end of the second world war,the United States and the Soviet union jointly chose George Kennan's "universalist" security path,hoping to transform the post-war world into an international environment conducive to their own national security.As a result,they had misunderstandings and contradictions with each other,which led to the rupture of their relations.So the Cold War was created by both the United States and the Soviet union.In addition,with the emphasis on military and political power in the realism school theory represented by morgenthau,Gaddis put the focus of the Cold War confrontation between the United States and the Soviet union on the competition for nuclear weapons and the construction of spheres of influence.According to waltz'sstructural realism theory,the bipolar pattern formed after world war II was more stable than the multi-polar pattern.Inspired by this theory,Gaddis put forward the famous "Long Peace" argument to describe the positive significance brought by the Cold War pattern of the United States and the Soviet union to maintain the stability of the international community.The third chapter describes the transformation of Gaddis' Cold War historiography from the Post-revisionist school in the Cold War period to the New Cold War history in the post-Cold War era.In the process,Gaddis' s view of Cold War origins changed.During the Cold War,he believed that after the war,the United States and the Soviet union had misunderstandings about each other's foreign policies,which led to the breakdown of their cooperative relations and the outbreak of the Cold War.The end of the Cold War and the failure of the Soviet union to compete for hegemony prompted Gaddis to attribute the outbreak of the Cold War more to Stalin's dictatorship and paranoid personality.His focus also shifted from the military and political struggle between the United States and the Soviet union during the Cold War to the role of their respective ideas and concepts.At the same time,Gaddis has intensified his focus on the third world during the Cold War and on the study of cross-examination of multi-national archives.All this has greatly advanced the study of the international history of the Cold War.