In a 1989 essay, the American historian Jerry Muller criticised Wehler as a "leading Left-Liberal historian" who used the "Historikerstreit" to smear neoconservatives unjustly by the Nazi tag Muller went on to write of the "interesting peculiarity of the political culture of German Left-liberal intellectuals" such as Wehler, who referred to Stalinist repression in the Soviet Union as "the excesses of the Russian Civil War" and argued that there was no comparison between Soviet and German history. Instead, Wehler suggested that the only valid comparisons were between the history of Germany and that of other Western nations.