ABSTRACT
In We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History, Gaddis’s comparative methodology—his way of comparing different pieces of information from different places—proved to be an effective way of looking at new source material from the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and the People’s Republic of China. But while most historians were fine with Gaddis’s decision to consider the new material and compare it to sources in the United States and allied countries, some argued that his interpretation had problems and merely restated old arguments. Critics attacked that conclusion as triumphalist—meaning that the victory of the West in the ideological battle with the Soviet Union colored his analysis in an unhelpful way—and that he held the view even before he wrote the text. As the historian Anders Stephanson puts it, Gaddis was “less interested, consequently, in the moral implications of the Cold War and who was to blame for it than he was in statecraft and the scope of security claims.”.
