Soviet-American Confrontation: Postwar Reconstruction and the Origins of the Cold War

by Thomas G. Paterson

The purpose of this book is to study the serious problem of reconstruction in the early Cold War, when the United States was the giant of the economic world, as President Harry S. Truman so aptly put it. Although economic foreign policy often lodged itself at the center or near the center of the Soviet-American confrontation, other policy ingredients were woven into the diplomatic cloth - distorted images, fears, and irrationality, personalizes and styles, the reading of historical lessons, traditional political ideals, bureaucratic lethargy, domestic politics and public opinion, and atomic-military power. To pull out one thread and bestow upon it singular importance is to sacrifice complexity for simplicity. This book is not, then, an economic interpretation of the origins of the Cold War. Rather, the diplomacy of reconstruction is considered in detail and assigned a conspicuous role in producing friction between the former Allies, but with the awareness that other diplomatic variables were also active. In Part 1, five issues central to the diplomatic confrontation in the Soviet sphere of influence are studied In Part 2 five chapters survey the considerable power and success of the United States in international organizations, in the Near East, in the Middle East, in western Europe, and in Western Germany. The concluding chapter summarizes the importance of United States reconstruction policies to the origins of the Cold War and ventures to answer a number of questions about the well springs of American diplomatic behavior.

302 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 1973

About the author

Thomas Graham Paterson received his Bachelors degree from the University of New Hampshire in 1963, and his Masters and Doctoral degrees from the University of California at Berkeley in 1964 and 1968, respectively. Paterson is known primarily for his contributions to Cold War history with an emphasis on United States-Cuba relations, as well as the study of United States foreign relations in general.
A prolific author, Paterson has written and co-written numerous books and articles, and has also served as an editor for several books and scholarly journals, including Diplomatic History and the Encyclopedia of U.S. Foreign Relations (1997), for which he was a contributing editor. He has published several articles and book reviews in newspapers, magazines, and newsletters, as well as scholarly journals such as the Journal of American History, The New England Journal of History, Diplomatic History, the New England Quarterly, and the American Historical Review. He is a member of a multiple of historical and scholarly associations, including the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, the New England Historical Association, and the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR), the last of which he was president in 1987.
Paterson is the recipient of a number of fellowships and research grants. He has appeared on television and radio programs, and has delivered an impressive number of lectures throughout the United States, as well as Canada, China, Cuba, Venezuela, New Zealand, Great Britain, Colombia, and Russia. He taught both graduate and undergraduate level History courses at the University of Connecticut from 1967 through 1997. Aside from his teaching duties, Paterson was also a member of several different University and History Department committees. Paterson has been Professor Emeritus since his retirement from teaching at UConn in 1997.