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The Cold War was a pivotal era in the twentieth century. The term Cold War itself, popularized in a 1946 speech by Prime Minister of Britain Winston Churchill, describes the ideological struggle between Democracy and Communism that began shortly after the end of World War II and lasted until 1991. For the foreign policy of the United States, the cold war defined the last half of the twentieth century. It was a war of ideas, of threats, and of actual fighting in the countries of Korea and Vietnam, pitting western nations against the Soviet Union and China and their Communist allies. The 1940s and 1950s saw the cold war bloom into a period of unparalleled suspicion, hostility, and persecution.
“The Cold War in its original form was a presumably mortal antagonism, arising in the wake of the Second World War, between two rigidly hostile blocs, one led by the Soviet Union, the other by the United States.” (Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. – The Russian Revolution-Fifty Years After). During the Second World War, the United States deliberately abandoned the wartime policy of collaboration and, exhilarated by the possession of the atomic bomb, undertook a course of aggression of its own designed to expel all Russian influence from Eastern Europe and to establish democratic-capitalist states on the very border of the Soviet Union. As the revisionists see it, this radically new American policy - or rather this resumption by Truman of the pre-Roosevelt policy of insensate anti-communism - left Moscow no alternative but to take measures in defence of its own borders. The result was the Cold War.
The origins of the Cold War are diverse, and though it is possible to attribute worth to Stalin’s blockading of Berlin, it would be impulsive to state that this was the most decisive factor that began the Cold War. Other factors may be given weight, whether equal or not, to the subsequent political events.
Michael H Hunt, in Ideology and American Foreign Policy pointed out that after 1917
“The Cold War in its original form was a presumably mortal antagonism, arising in the wake of the Second World War, between two rigidly hostile blocs, one led by the Soviet Union, the other by the United States.” (Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. – The Russian Revolution-Fifty Years After). During the Second World War, the United States deliberately abandoned the wartime policy of collaboration and, exhilarated by the possession of the atomic bomb, undertook a course of aggression of its own designed to expel all Russian influence from Eastern Europe and to establish democratic-capitalist states on the very border of the Soviet Union. As the revisionists see it, this radically new American policy - or rather this resumption by Truman of the pre-Roosevelt policy of insensate anti-communism - left Moscow no alternative but to take measures in defence of its own borders. The result was the Cold War.
The origins of the Cold War are diverse, and though it is possible to attribute worth to Stalin’s blockading of Berlin, it would be impulsive to state that this was the most decisive factor that began the Cold War. Other factors may be given weight, whether equal or not, to the subsequent political events.
Michael H Hunt, in Ideology and American Foreign Policy pointed out that after 1917
Bibliography: John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (New York, 1982); Melvyn P Lefler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration and the Cold War (Stanford, 1992). Michael H Hunt, Ideology and American Foreign Policy (New Haven, 1987)) Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge, MA, 1996) Fraser J Harbutt, The Iron Curtain: Churchill, America, and the Origins of the Cold War (New York, 1986);