The Cold War: Who’s fault was it?
Discuss the competing theories of the origin of the cold war. Which do you find most convincing?
As the allies closed in on Berlin it became quite clear that Nazi Germany was going to be defeated. There were two conferences held in 1945 by the grand alliance in order to effectively decide what to do with Germany and how to split up European influence among the victors. The first conference in Yalta was held between the leaders of the United states, Great Britain, and the USSR; Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin respectively. It wasn’t until the last conference, Potsdam, that the leadership of both the USA and Great Britain changed. Roosevelt died and was replaced by his vice president Truman, and Churchill lost the general election to Clement Attlee.
As much as Kissinger might argue that the United States under Truman was uninterested in Realpolitik and instead chose to be this principled moral force that would lead the world into a just future; that is an absurdly American-centric view that ignores the realities of how anti-communist Truman was and how unwilling he was to deal with Stalin the way that Roosevelt had for the duration of WW2. If Roosevelt handled Stalin like a scalpel, slowly providing incentives to work with the grand alliance as well as withholding help when they would go against US interests, then Truman was a tree in the forest that fell and beaned Stalin in the head.
In Truman’s defense, he had never been included in the strategic decision making that went on within Roosevelt’s white house, and so when he was thrust into power, he had no experience dealing with the reality of foreign relations with a highly suspicious USSR that had just been decimated by Germany for the second time in 30 years. During the Yalta conference Roosevelt and Stalin had decided that the United States and USSR would have “spheres of influence” over western and eastern Europe respectively. The issue was that they had very different interpretations of what spheres of influence meant. Between Yalta and Potsdam, Stalin actually increased the size of the Red Army and kept his soldiers in the countries that they had “liberated” from Nazi Germany. Increasing the size of the army after the war was over obviously made the allies suspicious and increased tension between the east and the west. In addition to this the “free elections” that Stalin agreed to hold in his sphere of influence were about as free as lunch with an economist.
Kissinger claims on page 435 that the most important part of the Potsdam conference was when Truman informed Stalin about the existence of the atomic bomb. This I can agree with, what I don’t agree with is when Kissinger implies that this wasn’t a threat and it was only Stalin’s paranoia that made him interpret it that way. This is clearly not true. This was about as direct a threat as any you would see made in international relations. In fact, it was so direct a threat, that Truman was not happy with how little Stalin reacted to the information. While not a widely accepted idea in the United States, many revisionist historians believe that one of the fundamental reasons for nuking Japan was to really show Russia the power that the United States commanded in order to more scared and mailable USSR.
Make no mistake, Stalin was a power-hungry dictator that killed millions and millions of his own people, however the historically orthodox view that it was purely soviet aggression that caused the cold war is simplistic and teaches this blind nationalism about the infallibility of American morality that I fundamentally disagree with. Truman and the United States saw a heavily weakened Post-War USSR and essentially saw an opportunity to establish a world hegemony based on American values. Truman miscalculated the lengths that Stalin was willing to go to protect his own power and the Soviet motherland. When it became clear that the USSR was not going to give an inch even when faced with the threat of the atomic bomb, the United States adopted the Truman doctrine, a much more aggressive policy of containment to prevent the spread of the perceived communist threat. For the following decades both the United States and the Soviet Union were engaged in a series of proxy wars all over the world, continuing to engage in realpolitik to advance their national interests. No part of the world would be safe from the Cold War or the conflict between communism and capitalism; not the middle east, not Vietnam, and not the countless governments that were overthrown by the CIA and the KGB.
The cold war may not have been inevitable had Roosevelt been around to organize the post war world, however Truman’s much more aggressive and vocal anti-communist sentiments did nothing but deepen the suspicion and distrust between the nations.
Then again, had Stalin not blatantly shown his willingness to push the bounds of the agreements to their breaking point (in the form of manipulating other countries elections and occupying eastern Europe to use as a protective shield against the west) there may have been more room for more negotiation and a less hostile outcome.