Warren Kimball

Warren Forbes Kimball (born December 24, 1935) is a historian of the Second World War and American foreign policy. He was an academic adviser to the Churchill Centre in London.[1]

He graduated from Georgetown University and taught at Rutgers University.[2][3]

Kimball argues that the American president Franklin D. Roosevelt only sought a "limited war" against Germany at first,[4] and that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a geopolitical tool by the United States to assert its power over the Soviet Union through intimidation.[5] He contends that Roosevelt had a consistent foreign policy during the war: that of a post-war liberal international order based on shared values and co-operation between the U.S. and its western wartime allies, the recognition of the Soviet Union and its integration into this system, and the dismantling of European empires and colonies after the war.[6]

He has also written on the Morgenthau Plan, and argues that the British Foreign Office knew of the plans ten days before the First Quebec Conference in 1943.[7] He has argued against the notion that the plan was intended to be punitive, saying that United States Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr.'s plans were intended to make Germany into "good, honest, democratic yeomen farmers, the Jeffersonian ideal".[8] He has also written about the history of the Lend-Lease Act[9] and the topic of white European guilt in postcolonial thought.[10]

  1. ^ "Warren F. Kimball". Rutgers SASN. Retrieved 31 January 2022.
  2. ^ Kimball, Warren F. (May 15, 2020). "Warren F. Kimball on Learning the Scholar's Craft: Reflections of Historians and International Relations Scholars". H-Diplo.
  3. ^ Kimball, Warren F. (January 1985). "Naked Reverse Right: Roosevelt, Churchill, and Eastern Europe from TOLSTOY to Yalta-and a Little Beyond*". Diplomatic History. 9 (1): 1–24. doi:10.1111/j.1467-7709.1985.tb00519.x.
  4. ^ Hogan, Michael J. (2000). Paths to Power: The Historiography of American Foreign Relations to 1941. Cambridge University Press. p. 232. ISBN 978-0-521-66413-4.
  5. ^ Pederson, William D. (21 March 2011). A Companion to Franklin D. Roosevelt. John Wiley & Sons. p. 406. ISBN 978-1-4443-9517-4.
  6. ^ Beisner, Robert L. (2003). American Foreign Relations Since 1600: A Guide to the Literature. ABC-CLIO. p. 967. ISBN 978-1-57607-080-2.
  7. ^ Dietrich, John (2013). The Morgenthau Plan: Soviet Influence on American Postwar Policy. Algora Publishing. p. 53. ISBN 978-1-62894-020-6.
  8. ^ Olick, Jeffrey K. (September 2005). In the House of the Hangman: The Agonies of German Defeat, 1943-1949. University of Chicago Press. p. 91. ISBN 978-0-226-62638-3.
  9. ^ Dobson, Alan P. (25 April 2002). US Economic Statecraft for Survival, 1933-1991: Of Sanctions, Embargoes and Economic Warfare. Routledge. p. 294. ISBN 978-1-134-46078-6.
  10. ^ Warren F. Kimball (2013). "Introduction". Journal of Transatlantic Studies (Volume 11, Issue 3 ed.). Springer Publishing. pp. 231–233. The politics of the players raised barriers - from European/white guilt to the exaggerated, I would argue, argument that imperialism 'caused' the failed-state syndrome that afflicts so much of the post-colonial world.