"NOWHERE IS this more true than in Bacevich’s treatment of the Cold War, which echoes the polemical literature of the anti-interventionist Left between the 1960s and the 1980s. Those works sought to make U.S. policy toward Korea, Indochina, Cuba and Latin America appear ludicrous and irrational, by insisting that these conflicts were not what they in fact were—proxy wars in great-power struggles—but unprovoked attacks by a bullying superpower on small countries whose regimes were really independent of Moscow and Beijing. Much of that writing has been discredited since the end of the Cold War, by the partial publication of Soviet archives, which shed light on the workings of other regimes, and the controlled releases of material by China, North Korea and Vietnam. All tell a far more complicated story than the simple tale of unprovoked American aggression."
http://www.newamerica.net/publications/articles/2010/america_under_the_caesars_33484