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Considering the horrors attendant upon revolution from below (Communism) and revolution from above (fascism), Moore prescribes revolution only as a last resort, and under certain specific conditions. The most debatable revisionist reinterpretations have involved American foreign affairs. The U.S., revisionists say, has become the imperialistic aggressor of the cold war, while the Soviet Union, even under Stalin, is seen as essentially cautious and realistic. In The Tragedy of American Diplomacy and more recently in The Roots of the Modern American Empire, William Appleman Williams —perhaps the longest-practicing revisionist—contends that the American pursuit of an open-door policy has brought it into conflict with nations around the world. Williams interprets every act of U.S. diplomacy in the light of his neo-Marxist conviction that capitalism must always expand in search of new markets. Thus the U.S., while claiming to be championing Chinese integrity against the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, was only interested in China as a source of trade. This economic compulsion eventually led to war with Japan, says Williams.
In relentless application of this same principle, other revisionists find American capitalist cupidity behind the decisions to go to war in Korea and Viet Nam—a clear example of twisting the facts to fit the theory. While minimizing the vices of the totalitarian leaders, Cold War revisionists invariably exaggerate the shortcomings of American statesmen. This requires something approaching a conspiracy theory of history. How else explain the fact that U.S. leaders are always doing what they say they are not doing? D. F. Fleming, professor emeritus of Vanderbilt University (The Cold War and Its Origins}, and David Horowitz (Empire and Revolution), onetime director of research for the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, accuse the U.S. of having followed a deliberate policy of intimidating Russia. As evidence, they cite events from the Allied intervention in the Russian civil war of 1918-21 to America's rigorous opposition to the expansion of Russia into Eastern Europe at the end of World War II. According to the revisionists, Russia after the war was not being aggressive, but simply establishing security within its normal sphere of influence. The ruthless, bloody way in which the Soviets imposed their rule is blithely brushed over by the revisionists. Intimations of conspiracy are liberally sprinkled throughout American Power and the New Mandarins by M.I.T.'s linguist-turned-historian Noam Chomsky. He attributes the Viet Nam War to the machinations of amoral technocrats who slavishly serve the repressive U.S. social order.