Origin of the Cold War

consort to La Feber, "Hitler's intrusion of Russia in 1941 forced a four-year partnership upon the Soviets and America" (6). patronage a great deal of mutual suspicion, that military and governmental alliance remained intact until the common Axis enemies were destroyed.

American and Soviet Postures in 1945

With the destruction of Germ whatever and Japan, Soviet power thrust profoundly into Central europium. Russia reconquered territories in the Far East it had lost in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. It did so with the acquiescence of the West, which lacked the military power to foreclose it, but also because President Roosevelt had high hopes of postwar Soviet-American cooperation. According to Gaddis,

Roosevelt had built his whole dodge upon the expectation that the wartime alliance would fit the end of the war. He had sought to ensure this through prevalent deference to Soviet security interests, mixed with subtle under-the-table pressures to encourage Moscow's cooperation (26).

Even in the beginning the war in europium ended, tensions had begun to develop over the tactics used by the Soviet Union to dominate the affairs of eastern Europe. Shortly before his death, Roosevelt reportedly said: "Averell [Harriman, American Ambassador to the Soviet Union] is aright . . . we can't do business with Stalin . . . He has broken every hotshot of his promises made at Yalta" (Thomas 121).

FDR's successor, President Harry Truman, was reluctant in 1945 and ear

the menace confronting Soviet nine from the world outside its society is founded . . . in the necessity of explaining outdoor(a) the maintenance of dictatorial power at home" (570). transaction with such an implacable adversary would be difficult, but could be "contained by the vigilant application of counterforce at a serial of constantly shifting geographic and governmental points" (571). Part of Kennan's strategy was "keeping key power centers --notably Great Britain, the Rhine-Ruhr industrial complex, and Japan, from go under Soviet harbour, not by extending American control over them, but rather by encouraging their increment as independent forces with the strength and self-confidence necessary to symbolise themselves" (Gaddis 58).

Revisionist American and Soviet historians shit suggested that the Cold War could have been avoided if the West had been

The primary strategic goal of the United States during this finis was to prevent Russian domination of Western Europe. Few American leaders thought that the Soviets would --in the face of the American atomic monopoly -- effect an invasion of Europe, but there were ominous signs that it was ripe for inhering subversion, especially France and Italy which had strong communist parties. In his speech delivered at Harvard on June 5, 1947, Secretary of State George Marshall unveiled the outlines of the coarse program of foreign aid which came to be called the Marshall externalise and is generally credited with saving Western Europe. Marshall told his university audition that without such assistance Europe faced "economic, social and political deterioration of a very grave character" (The talk A 2).

The United States reduced its armed forces in Europe from eight million in April 1945 to 400,000 a year subsequently (Thomas 145). It had intervened twice in the 20th century to prevent any one power (Germany) from dominating the affairs of Europe and choking off its Atlantic sea lanes. American military strategists unsounded ve
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