Essay on Cold War

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This essay analyzes the relative positions of the United States and the Soviet Union in the aftermath of the Second World War and discusses the origins of the Cold War, including whether its coming was inevitable.
A power vacuum was created in the centre of Europe and other areas on the periphery of the Soviet Union by the defeat of the Axis.
The methods used by the Soviets to pursue their interests provoked vigorous defensive countermeasures by the United States and its allies [security dilemma]. No other response from the West could have been realistically anticipated so long as the Soviet Union remained under the control of Josef Stalin.[debateable]
Legacy of the Past According to La Feber, "the Cold War developed on a Conclusion The Cold War was the inevitable consequence of the destruction of the Axis and the entry of Soviet power into the center of Europe. . . Armed Truce: The Beginnings of the Cold War 1945-46. And consolidated his Eastern European empire, he might have won the cold war.. . America, Russia, and the Cold War. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998.
Clifford, Clark with Richard Holbrooke. Marshall told his university audience that without such assistance [the marshall plan] Europe faced "economic, social and political deterioration of a very grave character" (The Address 2). Acheson: The Secretary of State Who Created the American World. Chace says that "confronted by American resolveand the naval task force in the Turkish Straits, the Russians backed down"(154).
New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1967."The Address of Secretary Marshall at Harvard.
" New York Times, 6 June 1947: A 2.Thomas, Hugh.
He has broken every one of his promises made at Yalta" (Thomas 121). According to Chace, "in 1945 and 1946 American foreign policy fluctuated like a compass needle seeking the right azimuth" [reference point] (135). A statesman with his pronounced paranoid tendencies would never have permitted international inspection to permit verification. NSC-68, which became American policy in the spring of1954, concluded that the Soviet Union "animated by a new fanatic faith antithetical to our own, seeks to impose its authority over the rest of theworld" (Chace 175). The events of '48-'5 , especially the outbreak of the Korean War, contributed to a deepening of the Cold War and a conviction on both sidesof the iron curtain that no resolution of the Cold War was possible in the forseable future.
Its senior policy makers were, therefore, quite sensitive and felt vulnerable (despite the American monopoly of the atomic bomb) to the growing evidence that the Soviet Union intended to throw its new found military weight around outside its own borders. Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan In a meeting in the Kremlin in late 1944, Stalin had agreed with Churchill that Britain would be the dominant great power in Greece. However, toward the end of the war, the Soviets began to take a more strident approach toward Soviet interests in the Turkey and Greece. He and his first Secretary of State, James Byrnes, alternated between making protests to the Russians and seeking to arrange a modus vivendi with them. The antagonism between Russia and the West was somewhat muted during the early interwar period as Stalin concentrated on building socialism in Russia.
In his speech delivered at Harvard on June 5,1947, Secretary of State George Marshall unveiled the outlines of themassive program of foreign aid which came to be called the Marshall Planand is generally credited with saving Western Europe. .we can't do business with Stalin. The British with some help fromFDR attempted to persuade Stalin to accept non-communist elements, butLondon-based Poles who returned to Poland tended to disappear.
. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959.Gaddis, John L.
Revisionist American and Soviet historians have suggested that the Cold War could have been avoided if the West had been more sensitive to Russian security concerns, had not rearmed West Germany and
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