The Cold War

by John Lewis Gaddis

But they also ask themselves and me: how did we ever make it out of the Cold War alive?

I’ve written this book to try to answer these questions, but also to respond—at a much less cosmic level—to another my students regularly pose. It has not escaped their attention that I’ve written several earlier books on Cold War history;

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Stalin’s postwar goals were security for himself, his regime, his country, and his ideology, in precisely that order.

Stalin’s goal, therefore, was not to restore a balance of power in Europe, but rather to dominate that continent as thoroughly as Hitler had sought to do.

Roosevelt and Churchill repeatedly pressed Stalin to allow free elections in the Baltic States, Poland, and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. At the Yalta Conference he agreed to do so, but without the slightest intention of honoring his commitment. “Do not worry,” he reassured his foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov. “We can implement it in our own way later. The heart of the matter is the correlation of force.”21

initiatives followed: Stalin delayed the withdrawal of Soviet troops from northern Iran, where they had been stationed since 1942 as part of an Anglo-Soviet arrangement to keep that country’s oil supplies out of German hands. He demanded territorial concessions from Turkey as well as bases that would have given the U.S.S.R. effective control of the Turkish Straits. And he requested a role in the administration of former Italian colonies in North Africa with a view to securing one or more additional naval bases in the eastern Mediterranean.

This new firmness in Washington coincided with a search for explanations of Soviet behavior: why had the Grand Alliance broken apart? What else did Stalin want? The best answer came from George F. Kennan, a respected but still junior Foreign Service officer serving in the American embassy in Moscow. In what he subsequently acknowledged was an “outrageous encumberment of the telegraphic process,” Kennan responded to the latest in a long series of State Department queries with a hastily composed 8,000-word cable, dispatched on February 22, 1946. To say that it made an impact in Washington would be to put it mildly: Kennan’s “long telegram” became the basis for United States strategy toward the Soviet Union throughout the rest of the Cold War.34

The Kremlin boss had his reasons to be self-confident.

While Stalin was undertaking that task, Marshall—following Truman’s lead—was constructing a Cold War grand strategy. Kennan’s “long telegram” had identified the problem: the Soviet Union’s internally driven hostility toward the outside world. It had, however, suggested no solution. Now Marshall told Kennan to come up with one: the only guideline was “avoid trivia.”42 The instruction, it is fair to say, was met. The European Recovery Program, which Marshall announced in June, 1947, committed the United States to nothing less than the reconstruction of Europe.

The new Chinese communist leader concluded that Truman was preparing an invasion of the mainland to place the nationalists back in power. Preoccupied with European reconstruction, beset with anxieties over their own conventional military weakness, the overstretched Americans were planning no such thing. But Mao’s fears that they might be—together with his determination to prove his revolutionary credentials and to emulate Stalin’s dictatorship—were enough to bring him down firmly on the Soviet side.54

And Truman himself had left it to the Army Air Force to determine when and where the first atomic weapons would be dropped: the names “Hiroshima” and “Nagasaki” were no more familiar to him, before the bombs fell, than they were to anyone else.10

In the long run, these lapses proved less important than the precedent Truman set.