Overview
Rivalry between the United States
and the Soviet Union for control over the postwar world emerged
before World War II had even ended. U.S. presidents Franklin D.
Roosevelt and Harry S Truman and Soviet premier Joseph Stalin never
really trusted one another, even while working together to defeat
the Nazis. This mutual mistrust actually began as far back as 1917,
when the United States refused to recognize the new Bolshevik government
after the Russian Revolution. Stalin also resented the fact that
the United States and Great Britain had not shared nuclear weapons
research with the Soviet Union during the war and was unhappy with
the countries’ initial unwillingness to engage the Germans on a
second front in order to take pressure off of the Soviets. Additionally,
Stalin was irked by the fact that Truman had offered postwar relief
loans to Great Britain but not to the USSR.
Important ideological differences separated the two countries
as well, especially during the postwar years, when American foreign policy
officials took it upon themselves to spread democracy across the
globe. This goal conflicted drastically with the Russian revolutionaries’
original desire to overthrow capitalism. Having been invaded by
Germany twice in the last fifty years, Soviet leaders also wanted
to restructure Europe so that a buffer existed between the Germans
and the Soviet border. Both the United States and the USSR believed
that their respective survival was at stake, and each was therefore
prepared to take any steps to win. As a result, both countries found
themselves succumbing to the classic prisoners’ dilemma: working
together would produce the best result, but with everything to lose,
neither side could risk trusting the other.
At the same time, however, both the United States and
the USSR did much to prevent the Cold War from escalating, as both
countries knew how devastating a nuclear war would be. Truman, for
example, kept the Korean War limited by refusing to use nuclear
weapons against North Korea and China, aware that doing so would
force the USSR to retaliate. President Dwight D. Eisenhower kept
his distance from the Hungarian Revolution in 1956,
knowing full well that the USSR would not tolerate interference
in Eastern Europe. Likewise, the Soviet Union made sacrifices to
keep the war “cold” by backing down from the Cuban missile crisis.
Many Cold War historians believe that both countries worked hard
to keep conflicts limited and used tacit signaling techniques to
communicate goals, fears, concerns, intensions, and counteractions.
The Cold War had an enormous impact on the United States politically,
socially, and economically. In addition to spawning fear-induced
Red hunts and McCarthyism in the late 1940s
and early 1950s,
the Cold War also shaped U.S. presidents’ political agendas. Eisenhower,
for example, sought to reduce government spending at home in order
to halt what he called “creeping socialism” and to save money for
more urgent needs such as defense. Kennedy’s New Frontier inspired
patriotic fervor and visions of new hope in American youth. Even
Eisenhower’s farewell warning of a growing military-industrial complex
within the United States, which would come to dominate American
political thinking, proved to be eerily accurate during the Vietnam
War era the following decade. At the same time, federal dollars
feeding this complex helped produce one of the greatest economic
booms in world history.
The question as to whether the United States or the USSR
was more to blame for starting the Cold War has produced heated debate
among twentieth-century historians. For years, most historians placed
blame squarely on Soviet shoulders and helped perpetuate the notion
that Americans wanted merely to expand freedom and democracy. More
recent historians, however, have accused President Truman of inciting
the Cold War with his acerbic language and public characterization
of the Soviet Union as the greatest threat to the free world. Although
conflict between the two powers was arguably inevitable, the escalation
into a full “hot” war and the attendant threat of nuclear annihilation
might have been avoidable.
