Both good threads, but with due respect to @wellerstein - whose work I admire - @baseballcrank is correct. Alex’s view seems rooted in old-school Cold War revisionism.https://twitter.com/EsotericCD/status/1027732601098981377 …
-
(Because both the "orthodox" and "revisionist" extremes make the historical actors WAY too rational, strategic, and clairvoyant in their aims. Which I think anyone who has looked closely at gov't decision-making knows it isn't how it has ever worked in real life.)
The only "revision" I myself make to this topic (forthcoming article alert!) is about Truman's own understanding of what he did, which I think is more limited than scholars have tended to argue (I think he misunderstood the nature of the Kyoto vs. Hiroshima choice). Anyway. FIN.
