After the Vietnam War, disgruntled lefties increasingly reconsidered American history to discover how the country could have chosen peace instead of a confrontation with the Soviet Union. One pivotal moment was the 1944 Democratic National Convention, when the party replaced Vice President Henry A. Wallace with Harry Truman. According to Oliver Stone, who helped popularize this revisionist history, “there would not have been this cold war” if Wallace was still vice president when Franklin D. Roosevelt died in April 1945. This view has percolated among the American left ever since. Benn Steil’s new book The World That Wasn’t demonstrates that Wallace would not have saved the United States from a rivalry with the Soviet Union. At most, he would have merely postponed the start of the Cold War for a couple of years, at which point Moscow would have gained a substantial advantage.
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Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin attend their bilateral meeting at the G20 Osaka Summit in Osaka, Japan, on June 28, 2019. (Mikhail Svetlov via Getty Images)