Noam Chomsky - Turning the Tide U.S. intervention in

The Race to Destruction
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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adversaries. The claim is often quite explicit, sometimes in the most
astonishing forms, for example, when Henry Kissinger anguishes over
the fact that in the 1960s “European intellectuals began to argue that
the Cold War was caused by American as well as by Soviet policies”
while “a vocal and at times violent minority” in the US dared to
challenge “the hitherto almost unanimous conviction that the Cold War
had been caused by Soviet intransigence” alone. 51
The framework is a convenient one for Americans to adopt, but it has
to be argued, not presupposed as is the convention. Thus, in one of the
more critical studies within the mainstream, Gaddis explains that he
adopts the conventional framework while recognizing (which is rare) that
“the term ‘containment’ poses certain problems, implying as it does a
consistently defensive orientation in American policy.” He believes that
the implied premise is correct but does not argue the point, dismissing it
as “irrelevant for the purposes” of his study of US postwar strategy. The
reason for this remarkable judgment is that “American leaders
consistently perceived themselves as responding to rather than initiating
challenges to the existing international order,” so that it seems to him
“valid to treat the idea of containment as the central theme of postwar
national security policy.” 52 By the same logic, we should treat
containment of the US as the central theme of postwar Soviet policy,
and containment of the West, the USSR, and the Jewish challenge as
the central themes of Hitler’s policy, since Hitler as well as Stalin and
his successors perceived themselves as responding to challenges to the
health and integrity of the societies they ruled. We expect state
managers to perceive their role as defensive; the beginning of serious
inquiry is an investigation into whether this perception is based on fact
or convenience.