“As crossfire raked his body, the second boy fell back onto the strip of now churning sand. Wounded, moaning for help, he lay only 300 yards from a unit of United States troops. But the American commanding general issued orders: ‘Stand fast. Do nothing.’ Fifty-five minutes later Peter Fetcher was dead, and his body was carried away into the recesses of the city from which he had tried to escape.” This excerpt, from The Cold War: From Yalta To Cuba by Robin W. Winks shows how, despite its name, the Cold War was anything but cold.
World War II is considered by most experts to have ended in 1945, when the Japanese signed an unconditional surrender to Allied powers. Although World War II ended, the Cold War was just warming up. A very big part of the Cold War was the arms race. When the United States of America dropped the first atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we had displayed our power and jumped ahead in the race. This was a huge surprise to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. They grew uneasy and distrustful of the US and other hidden powers we may possess (Trueman). After World War II ended, Europe was left in shambles. The US, not nearly as devastated as the rest of the world, developed the Marshall Plan to try and rebuild Europe. While the main goal of this plan was to help Europe rise from the ashes, a secondary goal was to stop the spread of Communism that Stalin was trying to promote (Marshall). Upset and frightened by the attempt to spread American ideas, the USSR developed the Zhdanov Doctrine. This doctrine “claimed that the United States was seeking global domination through American imperialism, as well as the collapse of democracy. On the other hand, according to this Doctrine, the Sovie...
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1 Walter Lippman, The Cold War: A Study in U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1947) 48-52.
Discussions of the causes of the Cold War are often divisive, creating disparate ideological camps that focus the blame in different directions depending on the academic’s political disposition. One popular argument places the blame largely on the American people, whose emphasis of “strength over compromise” and their deployment of the atomic bomb in the Second World War’s Pacific theatre apparently functioned as two key catalysts to the conflict between US and Soviet powers. This revisionist approach minimizes Stalin’s forceful approach and history of violent leadership throughout World War 2, and focusing instead on President Harry Truman’s apparent insensitivity to “reasonable Soviet security anxieties” in his quest to impose “American interests on the world.” Revisionist historians depict President Truman as a “Cold War monger,” whose unjustified political use of the atomic bomb and ornery diplomatic style forced Russia into the Cold War to oppose the spread of a looming capitalist democratic monopoly. In reality, Truman’s responsibility for the Cold War and the atomic bomb drop should be minimized. Criticisms of Truman’s actions fail to consider that he entered a leadership position set on an ideological collision course, being forced to further an established plan for an atomic monopoly, and deal with a legacy of US-Russian tensions mobilized by Roosevelt prior to his death, all while being influenced by an alarmist and aggressive cabinet. Upon reviewing criticisms of Truman’s negotiations with Soviet diplomat Vyacheslav Molotov and his involvement in the atomic bomb drop, the influence of Roosevelt’s legacy and Truman’s cabinet will be discussed in order to minimize his blame for starting the Cold War.
Gaddis, John Lewis. “We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History.” Taking Sides: Clashing Views On Controversial Issues in United States History. Ed. Larry Madaras and James M. SoRelle. 14th Edition. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2011. 302-308.
With this book, a major element of American history was analyzed. The Cold War is rampant with American foreign policy and influential in shaping the modern world. Strategies of Containment outlines American policy from the end of World War II until present day. Gaddis outlines the policies of presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, including policies influenced by others such as George Kennan, John Dulles, and Henry Kissinger. The author, John Lewis Gaddis has written many books on the Cold War and is an avid researcher in the field. Some of his other works include: The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947, The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past, Surprise, Security, and the American Experience, and The Cold War: A New History. Dr. Gaddis received his PhD from the University of Texas in 1968; he currently is on a leave of absence, but he is a professor at Yale . At the University, his focus is Cold War history. Gaddis is one of the few men who have actually done a complete biography of George Kennan, and Gaddis even won a Pulitzer Prize in 2012.
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2Gaddis John Lewis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947, New York, 2000, pp. 32-62, 282-315.
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