The Cold War 45origins of the cold War
The first and most impor tant outcome of World War II was the emergence of two
superpowers— the United States and the Soviet Union—as the primary actors in the
international system, which resulted in the decline of Western Eu rope as the epicenter
of international politics. The second outcome of the war was the intensification of
fundamental incompatibilities between these two superpowers in both national inter-
ests and ideology. Differences surfaced immediately over geopo liti cal national inter-
ests. Having been invaded from the west on several occasions, including during World
War II, the USSR used its newfound power to solidify its sphere of influence in East-
ern Eu rope, specifically in Poland, Czecho slo va kia, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania.
The Soviet leadership believed that ensuring friendly (or at least weak) neighbors on
its western borders was vital to the country’s national interests. In the United States,
there raged a debate between those favoring an aggressive rollback strategy— pushing
the USSR back to its own borders— and those favoring a less- aggressive containment
strategy. The diplomat and historian George Kennan published in Foreign Affairs the
famous “X” tele gram, in which he argued that because the Soviet Union would always
feel military insecurity, it would conduct an aggressive foreign policy. Containing the
Soviets, Kennan wrote, should therefore become the cornerstone of the United States’
postwar foreign policy.^11
The United States put the notion of containment into action in the Truman Doc-
trine of 1947. Justifying material support in Greece against the communists, President
Harry Truman asserted, “I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to
support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or
by outside pressures. I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own
destinies in their own way.”^12 Containment as policy— essentially, the use of espionage,
economic pressure, and forward- deployed military resources— emerged from a com-
parative asymmetry of forces in Eu rope. After the Third Reich’s surrender, U.S. and
British forces rapidly demobilized and went home, whereas the Soviet army did not.
In 1948, the Soviets blocked western transportation corridors to Berlin, the German
capital— which had been divided into sectors by the Potsdam Conference of 1945; the
United States then realized that even as the sole state in possession of atomic weapons,
it did not possess the power to coerce the Soviet Union into retreating to its pre– World
War II borders. And, in August 1949, the Soviets successfully tested their first atomic
bomb. Thus, containment, based on U.S. geostrategic interests and a growing recogni-
tion that attempting rollback would likely lead to another world war, became the fun-
damental doctrine of U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War.
The United States and the Soviet Union also had major ideological differences. The
United States’ demo cratic liberalism was based on a social system that accepted the
worth and value of the individual; a po liti cal system that depended on the participationESSIR7_CH02_020_069_11P.indd 45 6/14/16 10:02 AM