The matters of the cold war have been regarded by historians from both sides of the ocean for the years, and everyone accuses the opposite side of starting the cold war.
If regarding things objectively, both sides behaved aggressively towards each other in sharing the conquered Germany. Both sides tried to capture additional spheres of influence, as both believed in the righteousness of the inclinations and aims.
As it is known, the official start of the Cold War is considered Winston Churchill’s speech in Fulton, which was called “The Sinews of Peace,” declaring that an “iron curtain” had descended across Europe. From the standpoint of the Soviets, the speech was an incitement for the West to begin a war with the USSR, as it called for an Anglo-American alliance against the Soviets. The worsening of the relations had been observed long before it, as the tension had been previously mentioned in “Long Telegram”, which became the basis for the further theory of containment, which in some measure added fuel to the common fire of the Cold War. The Long Telegram did not really cause the adoption of the Cold War policy via NSC-68 (National Strategy of Containment).
NSC-68 offered for a distinctly dissimilar type of containment than that stated in the Long Telegram. The Long Telegram called for financial embargoes against the USSR, whereas NSC-68 called for militaristic pressures. Kennan believed that it was satisfactory to permit the Soviets to increase Communism to nations adjoining the USSR as these countries would only serve the reason of comprising a rightful security buffer zone for the USSR.
Opposing Kennan’s opinion, NSC-68 stated that any and all “defeats” of nations to Communism (characterized in the Domino theory) were intolerable and a threat to US national security. While NSC-68 offered military force to discontinue these ” defeats,” Kennan felt that it was pointless to try to stop the Soviets in this attempt. These are two disconnect policies that offer two various means to attain two dissimilar ends.
On September 6, 1946, James F. Byrnes proclaimed a speech in Germany, disclaiming the Morgenthau Plan and warning the Soviets that the US meant to support an armed attendance in Europe indefinitely. As Byrnes confessed one month later, “The nub of our program was to win the German people it was a battle between US and Russia over minds.
It is necessary to emphasize, that the wartime coalition between the United States and the Soviet Union began to disentangle even before the end of World War II. When the war ended, the Red Army occupied much of Eastern Europe. The obvious weakness of Western Europe raised the ghost of communism spreading even further.
Although the Marshall Plan helped restore Western Europe, other events of the late 1940s kept tension high: the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia and Soviet blockade of West Berlin in 1948, the fall of China and the Soviet A-bomb in 1949. Soviet support for the North Korean invasion of South Korea in 1950 confirmed the threat in Western eyes.
References
Deighton, Anne. The Impossible Peace: Britain, the Division of Germany and the Origins of the Cold War. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.
Leffler, Melvyn P., and David S. Painter. Origins of the Cold War: An International History. New York: Routledge, 1994.