Who Was To Blame For The Cold War Essay

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Recommended: Historiography of the origins of the cold war

A common desire among those who study history is to determine who is to blame for the occurrence of significant events; but can it be done? Since the late 1940’s, historians have been engaged in a running debate over who caused one of the longest and most complex conflicts in US history, the Cold War. The tension between the communist Soviet Union and capitalist United States originated in 1917 with the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, when the communists expressed their hatred of western capitalism and desire to “communize” the rest of the world (Gardner, 403). As World War II came to a close, feelings of mistrust and fear between the US and USSR were amplified due to a number of military and political actions on both sides. However, it is …show more content…

Martin F. Herz claims that poor American diplomacy during the critical post-WWII period is to blame for the Cold War. Herz explains that the US had not taken the opportunity to meet the USSR halfway concerning the division of Europe and how the post-WWII world would look. Instead, he argues, an already ailing Roosevelt gave too much power to the USSR through the Potsdam and Yalta conferences, and after Roosevelt died, Truman’s diplomacy was a stark contrast to what some may call appeasement under FDR. Truman’s aggressive anti-communist actions provoked the Soviet Union into taking more offensive actions against the west in order to protect itself and its interests (Herz, 204). In an interview with Paul Jay, revisionist Gar Alperovitz supports the idea that the US is to blame for the Cold War, but for a different reason. He argues that the use of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki days before the USSR was to begin sending troops to Japan signalled American animosity toward the Soviets. Alperovitz goes on to argue that, in reality, the bomb was used as a tool to impose political pressure on the Soviets; in hopes that the USSR would essentially “back off” when it came to spreading communism throughout Eastern Europe and Asia. He also explains that the bomb was also used so that Soviet aid would not be necessary, and so that Japan would be rebuilt with a democratic, capitalist system, serving as another ally against

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