Cold War origins: three views

After World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union – both fearful of each other’s power and influence – engaged in the competition called the Cold War.

The Soviet Union established Communist regimes wherever possible. The United States tried to keep the Communist influence from spreading. Both used a variety of methods short of war with each other to support and influence smaller nations. Among the methods used were these: helping needy governments, taking sides in disagreements in other countries, fighting in “limited” wars, making newer and bigger weapons, and using propaganda to build favorable images of their own systems.

Why did the Cold War start? The following are three interpretations of the origins of the Cold War. How does each historian interpret the events of the post war years?

Directions: For each of the three authors, write the author’s name and summarize his/her point of view in a sentence. Justify or defend his/her point of view with evidence from the reading.

After you read through all three views, explain which author you agree with and why.

  1. Historian David J. Dallin, writing in the middle 1950s, gives what has been the most widely accepted American view.

Betraying the hopes of the world, breaking treaties and commitments, the Soviet government after WWII embarked on a new course of forcible expansion and aggression. In 1945 and 1946 Russia’s neighbors in Europe and the Far East, their territory occupied by the Red Army at the end of the fighting, were transformed into a new kind of dependencies, so-called satellites [that is, no longer independent nations], with the Communist Party in power. Soon a belt of such satellites… [surrounded] Russia from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean. Although the United States and her Western allies protested this course, Moscow remained adamant [firm], fully aware of the inability of the Western allies to prevent the process of expansion.

Now, with the military bases at the Elbe and the Kiel Canal in Germany, in Austria, in Manchuria, and in Korea, the Soviet Union was threatening not only the western part of the defeated Reich [Germany], but England, France, and Japan as well…

The setting up of satellite governments in adjoining nations was the Soviet way of expanding the political and economic system of Communism. But now the satellites themselves embarked as a similar course in regard to their own neighbors. They extended their ties with Communist underground organizations, assisting them with arms, leaders, advisers, and experts… This method of expansion, recognizing no limits, threatened every free nation of the world.

In these circumstances a new conception of American foreign policy emerged, the essence of which was to stop the progress of Communism. Trying to avoid the extremes of a world war on the one side, and acquiescence [acceptance of] Soviet expansion on the other, this policy of containment meant many things to many countries – in some cases financial aid; in others, arms and supplies; in others, military alliances; and in still others, even military activity, as was the case in Korea.

  1. Lisle A. Rose, in his 1973 book, Dubious Victory, gives a second interpretation of the causes of the Cold War.

The drama of the Cold War that has enveloped and shaped our lives since shortly after the end of WWII has tended to obscure what is truly the central fact of our time – America’s indisputable possession of the balance of global power.

… [A growing number of scholars] have argued… that aggressive American plans to shape the postwar international economic structure along the lines of free trade and capitalist supremacy led to attempts to create a global American empire, and this, in turn, caused the [development of bad relations with] Communist Russia and the beginnings of the Cold War between East and West…

[American] economic policy since 1947… has been… tied primarily and increasingly to military aid to those governments concerned with containing, repelling, or protecting themselves from “Communist aggress”…

Militarily however, the U.S. first revealed and exerted its global supremacy in the form of atomic weaponry as early as the summer of 1945 as it sought to bring the war against Japan to an abrupt conclusion. Washington’s [later] decision to retain the atomic monopoly and then, after the Russian breakthrough, to maintain nuclear supremacy, has been the salient [outstanding] factor defining America’s global pre-eminence…

The fact is plain: the American Age has been one defined largely in military terms – by the predominant military might of the U.S. and by Washington’s willingness to use a portion of that might to protect vital national interests. It was Hiroshima… not the Truman Doctrine, not the Marshall Plan… which ushered in the American Age and the bitter peace between East and West that soon followed.

…[The] American response to the agony and passion of WWII strikes me as intensely human and readily understandable. Few if any other people in a situation could have summoned any greater wisdom… to the task of waging world war while seeking global peace. Nor should the ferocious brutality with which Stalin… frequently pursued… essentially limited aims be forgotten or dismissed.

But the fact remains that war destroys compassion as well as understanding, that mass participation in a righteous crusade [destroys] intellectual clarity as well as tolerance, that exposure to battle, however remote, develops a taste for power and dominance in even the most generous of hearts. That this should have happened to the Americans, as well as the French, the Germans, the British, the Japanese, and the Russians, during the terrible years 1939-1945 should come as no surprise.

  1. Historian Thomas A. Bailey gives a third view of the origins of the Cold War. The excerpt is from Probing America’s Past (1973).

It is pointless to try to [place all the] blame for the Cold War [on] either the Communist World or the so-called Free World. Can we blame dogs for being hostile to cats, or water for being incompatible with oil, or fire for reacting violently to gasoline?

Communism, by the very nature of its closed society, has a built-in hostility to open-door capitalism – a hostility that existed from the beginning and [probably] will always exist as long as the two systems [keep] their basic identity and ideology [philosophy]. In this sense the Cold War has existed since 1917, when the Communists took over in Russia and proclaimed their undying hostility to the capitalist world. Basic frictions and suspicions were [temporarily ignored] during the anti-Hitler war, but they were always present; and circumstances in the postwar years [increased] the friction as each side sought to promote its ideologically directed aims. If the West feared Communist world revolution, the Soviet leaders feared, or professed to fear, “capitalistic encirclement.” The Cold War came so naturally that its avoidance would have been more remarkable than its occurrence.