I have one minor criticism of the book: It needs an editor, particularly the opening chapter, which attempts to relate the current War against Islam (let's face it, that's where we are, like it or not) to the Cold War. While it might be true, it shouldn't be in there. The book can stand on its own as a purely revisionist narrative of the Cold War, which the author properly identifies as running not from the end of the Second World War, but from before the beginning of it.
For Radosh, Horowitz, and all of the other naysayers, here's another excellent book, which bolsters most of Diana West's positions and was written by no bomb thrower, but a former American President: Freedom Betrayed Herbert Hoovers Secret History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath.
I was surprised by the existence of this book. Hoover started out his career and ended his presidency as a very liberal Republican; his predecessor, Coolidge, had nothing but disdain for Hoover's activism. As a matter of fact, a great many of the New Deal programs were actually economic reforms Hoover wanted to try, but he was sandbagged by a Democrat Congress in order to secure his electoral defeat.
But eventually Hoover became a conservative, and he wrote a fine book, well worth reading. [Just skip the Introduction, which is 100 pages of some academic's medal polishing over his editing that doesn't contribute anything to the work, unless you want to understand sources and methods. Most people won't.]
Maybe Horowitz is out there providing the outer bounds of what is acceptable in the way of anti-communism.
“...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”.