The Cold War: An Inevitable Conflict? Not so Fast.
Economic insecurity. Power vacuums. Paranoia. These, among other conditions, engendered a decades-long conflict (beginning in 1945 and terminating in 1991) between the United States of America and the Soviet Union that today denotes the Cold War. Unsurprisingly, the Cold War did not germinate in a vacuum. As Robert McMahon notes in his “World War II and the destruction of the World Order”, “World War II brought unparalleled levels of death, destruction, privation, and disorder”. Out of this conflagration emerged two victors, the United States, and the Soviet Union. Yet each nation’s victory could not have been more distinct. The Soviet Union lost between 10 to 20 percent of its population during the war, thus making up the largest portion of the roughly 60 million total wartime casualties. As if this weren’t enough, Hitler’s forces had decimated over 31,000 Soviet factories, destroyed millions of acres of Soviet farmland, and slaughtered tens of millions of Soviet livestock during the war(McMahon 10). World War II dealt the Soviet Union a particularly harsh economic, military, and psychological blow. Hence, the Soviet Union’s territorial expansion and military buildup after 1945 were borne out of necessity and not expansionism. The same cannot be said of the United States. After World War II, the United States was “in an age of affluence”.With an economic surplus, a monopoly on atomic weapons, a well-oiled arms industry, and more political allies than the Soviet Union, the United States could have chosen to simply focus on rebuilding the battered economies and infrastructure of Europe without engaging in military expansionism. Thus, the Cold War was far from inevitable, rather, it was the result of American leadership, as Soviet Ambassador Nikolai Novikov noted in a 1946 address, believing “that the United States has the right to lead the world”
One way in which the United States manifested its expansionist doctrine after World War II was via economic aid. Look no further than the Truman Doctrine. Under the Truman Doctrine, the United States extended financial aid(400 million dollars to be exact) to the struggling governments of Greece and Turkey in 1947. Truman’s logic behind this decision was that if the United States did not help aid Greece and Turkey, their governments could soon fall prey to “totalitarian regimes forced upon them against their will”. In this same address, Truman mentions the “violation of the Yalta agreement in Poland, Rumania, and Bulgaria”. Clearly, the “totalitarian regime” that Truman is referring to is that of the Soviet Union. But what is not mentioned explicitly in Truman’s address is that at the time of proposed aid, Greece was in the midst of a civil war between the Greek government(a capitalist democratic state) and a rebel communist faction. When Truman asked to send 400 million dollars to Greece, it was not as mere humanitarian aid. The intention was to provide the Greek government a means of outlasting their rebel countrymen until the enemy gave up and the United States could establish a military outpost in Greece. In fact, in his 1947 address, Truman remarked, “I ask the Congress to authorize the detail of American civilian and military personnel to Greece”, and, “I recommend that authority also be provided for the instruction and training of Greek personnel”.Through the Truman Doctrine, the United States was able to exchange economic aid to struggling European nations like Greece for strategic military outposts. It is not coincidental that Greece and Turkey are warm-water ports in Russia’s backyard. To think the Soviet Union, already insecure of its position geopolitically, would not respond to such developments with a military buildup would be naive.
While the United States’ desire to become the world’s policeman at the expense of international cooperation certainly instigated the Cold War, it certainly cannot be said that the Soviet Union’s response did not exacerbate the situation. The Soviet Union, having been invaded so many times by Germany and other powers through the ages, was naturally paranoid of invasion and thus sought to use the whole of eastern Europe, particularly Poland, as a shield from future threats. Stalin himself proclaimed, “Poland is a matter of life or death”. Therein lies the conflict. The Soviet Union saw the United States expanding, and already fearful of invasion, felt the need to belligerently expand more itself, which in turn made the already territory-hungry United States capable of excusing further military expansion.
Understanding that the Cold War was preventable is integral to understanding and improving U.S. foreign policy. With an excess of economic, military, and scientific influence, the United States, under President Truman and beyond, chose to abandon Roosevelt’s internationalism of the 1940s and adopt a militaristic world view, in which the United States had to maintain military supremacy across the globe, at all costs. If there is anything that the Cold War teaches us, it is that a little trust and de-escalation go a long way.
References
Chafe, William Henry, Harvard Sitkoff, and Beth L. Bailey. A History of Our Time: Readings on Post War America. New York: Oxford UP, 2008.
Cobbs-Hoffman, Elizabeth, and Jon Gjerde. Major Problems in American History, Volume 2: Since 1865. New York: Cengage, 2007.
Lepore, Jill. These Truths a History of the United States. W.W. Norton & Company, 2019
