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“...The book can stand on its own as a purely revisionist narrative of the Cold War...”

Not quibbling with your excellent post, but the phrase “Cold War revisionism” has in the past described works by left-leaning authors like Gar Alperovitz which assign guilt exclusively to the United States and the anticommunist West for causing the Cold War to exist.

(Aside: it was U.S. atomic strength that kept the Soviets from engaging in hot war with the West, but as Emily Litella would say, “never mind”.)

Maybe Ms. West’s new book is the `new revisionism’ after forty plus years of post-Vietnam Blame America First “scholarship”.

We are agreeable on substance if not on naming convention.

In my lexicon, the Standard History of the Cold War is: America, England and Russia were part of a Grand Alliance that destroyed fascism which ultimately disintegrated because of Russian insecurity (the Soviets had lost so many men, Russians are historically distrustful, and a host of other rationalizations) and a subsequent American overreaction caused by the anticommunists, moneyed interests, and militarists.

It's all rubbish, of course. We didn't need Venona declassification or the (brief) opening of the Russian archives to establish that. The open source information available to every historian and interested lay people, the testimonies of Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley, and the work of the Dies Committee were more than enough to establish the true parameters of Russia's war against the West in general, and The Main Enemy in particular.

Yet a strange thing happened when academic historians started looking at the new, previously hidden sources: they actually changed their minds. It's true that their treatments have been largely demure, but (shockingly) they have been largely correct: The Russians were at War with us long before they were at war with the Nazis. But it didn't matter, because the first narrative is now so thoroughly embedded in the public mind that revelations which would have been considered startling in 1944, vindicating in 1954, have been completely ignored.

So in my mind, any attempt to set the record straight now is revisionist. If you prefer Neorevisionist, let it be so. The truth, by any other name...