Cold War · CHAPTER 1 ·
Origins of the Cold War
Chapter 1 of The Cold War, 1945–1991: “The World the War Left”
The Soviet Union and the United States defeated Nazi Germany together, then defined security in opposite ways: Moscow sought control of the ground between it and Berlin, Washington a world of open trade and free alignment. Disputes over Poland and Iran in 1945–46 hardened mutual suspicion into a lasting rivalry.
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The map above is the world of The world, August 1945 — The world the armies made.
Every state on the map that year: The world in 1945 · Europe in 1945.
Part of IB History: The Cold War →
SHORT EXPLANATION
In 1945 the United States and the Soviet Union stood together among the victors over Nazi Germany. Their armies also stood on different sides of Europe. The Soviet Union had suffered two invasions through Poland in thirty years and had lost some 27 million people in the Second World War. Its leaders wanted control over the ground between Moscow and Berlin as protection against another attack. Americans, twice drawn into world wars amid European collapse, wanted an open trading world in which governments could choose their own alignments. Each power’s idea of safety left the other uneasy.
The security dilemma describes how those fears can feed one another. A Soviet buffer could look like expansion to Washington; American resistance could look like encirclement to Moscow. Disputes over Poland, Iran and Germany made the danger concrete. In 1946 George Kennan proposed containment, patient resistance to Soviet pressure without war. Winston Churchill gave the division its enduring image: an “iron curtain” across Europe.
The full story
The postwar map began with the places armies had reached. Soviet troops occupied territory in central Europe from the east, while Western forces held ground taken from the opposite direction. Britain, France and other European powers still ruled empires across much of Asia and Africa. In Germany the victors divided both the country and its capital. Berlin lay deep inside the Soviet zone, so the Western powers could supply their sectors only by crossing territory held by the Soviet Union. Access to the city gave Moscow a way to exert pressure without a battle.
The allies also had to decide what kind of governments would emerge in the liberated countries. At Yalta Stalin had promised free elections in Poland, yet a communist-led government consolidated power there. In northern Iran, Soviet troops stayed beyond their agreed withdrawal date and left in 1946 under Anglo-American pressure. Neither dispute remained confined to the place where it began. American officials saw Soviet expansion; Moscow could read Western pressure as an effort to surround it. Each quarrel became evidence about the other side’s intentions, making a settlement in the next quarrel harder to reach.
Soviet leaders had powerful reasons to fear another invasion. Their country had been attacked through Poland twice in thirty years, and the Second World War had killed some 27 million Soviet people. Control of a belt of territory between Moscow and Berlin offered protection, but it also denied neighboring peoples a voice in their governments. To Americans, who had twice entered world wars amid European collapse, such control threatened to give one power dominance over Eurasia. Their resistance could in turn reinforce Moscow’s fear of encirclement. These fears help explain the confrontation; they do not excuse every action taken in its name.
George Kennan offered Washington a way to respond. He urged patient resistance to Soviet pressure, and his diagnosis helped shape a policy that acquired money and institutions through aid to Greece and Turkey, the Marshall Plan and, later, NATO. The policy did not remain exactly as he had conceived it. Kennan spent decades objecting to the military direction containment took. Its history is therefore both the story of an idea and of the choices made by those who put it into practice.
FULL EXPLANATION
Structure, ideology and responsibility
Where should responsibility for the Cold War lie? Orthodox historians point to Stalin’s coercion in Poland and the outward pressure of Soviet power. Revisionists give greater weight to American economic strength, the atomic monopoly and the drive for an open world economy that closed societies could not join. Post-revisionists bring those choices together with the situation in which they were made: after the defeat of Germany and Japan, two exceptionally powerful states faced one another across a political vacuum. The security dilemma helps us see why the same action could answer one fear while creating another. Soviet control in Eastern Europe responded to a history of invasion, but it also denied neighboring peoples a voice in their governments. American containment responded to coercion, yet increasingly treated local changes as parts of a single global threat. Poland makes the difficulty especially clear: Soviet security mattered, and so did Polish sovereignty. The structure made restraint difficult. It did not determine how far leaders would carry the rivalry; ideology and particular decisions made it deeper.
How a diagnosis became doctrine
Kennan’s Long Telegram explained what he thought drove Soviet behavior; it was not a finished military plan. He saw a regime shaped by internal ideology but cautious when confronted by firm, limited resistance. Political and economic strength at key industrial centers could, in his view, hold Soviet power in check. Washington turned that diagnosis into a broader guide. The Truman Doctrine presented aid to Greece and Turkey as support for free peoples everywhere. The secret NSC-68 review of 1950 called for much wider global military readiness. This is doctrinal expansion: officials extend a diagnosis into a rule for cases beyond those for which it was first framed. A general rule gives policy consistency, but it can also make different conflicts look alike. Nationalism, civil war and decolonization might then be mistaken for moves directed from Moscow. That difference matters when comparing containment as recovery in Western Europe with its far more contested and violent results in Asia and the decolonizing world.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
The security dilemma — two rational fears. Soviet leaders wanted distance between Moscow and a possible invader. Two invasions through Poland in thirty years, followed by a war that killed some 27 million Soviet people, made that desire urgent. American leaders drew a different lesson from two world wars entered amid European collapse: no single power should dominate Eurasia. A Soviet-controlled buffer appeared to Washington to advance precisely that danger. American efforts to resist it, meanwhile, could appear to Moscow as encirclement. The steps taken for safety could leave both sides feeling less safe.
Ideology made compromise read as defeat. The rivalry was also a dispute about the nature of political systems. Leninism taught that capitalist encirclement made eventual war likely; American liberal thought drew from the 1930s the lesson that closed societies bred aggression. Both offered explanations meant to apply far beyond one border. A struggle over Polish ministries or Iranian oil could consequently seem to disclose the direction of world politics. If each local dispute carried that significance, giving way in one might look like a defeat for the whole cause.
Poland: the test case that failed. Britain had entered the war in 1939 over Poland. At Yalta Stalin agreed to “free and unfettered elections”, but Home Army leaders were arrested, the 1946 referendum was rigged, and the 1947 election was falsified. Washington saw the sequence as evidence that Soviet promises could not be trusted. Moscow saw Western protest through its fear of being surrounded again by hostile states. For Poles the immediate consequence was that the promised choice had been denied.
A power vacuum with two occupants. The defeat of Germany and Japan left the powers that had organized either end of Eurasia in ruins. Britain was financially exhausted and, within three years, would devalue and retreat from commitments in Greece, India and Palestine. France had been humiliated. The United States and the Soviet Union retained resources to shape events on a comparable worldwide scale. Neither had chosen to become one of two such powers, but their decisions would be made in the space their defeated and weakened rivals had left.
THE TURNING POINT
Moscow, 22 February 1946. A routine question about Soviet opposition to the World Bank prompted George Kennan’s roughly 5,000-word cable of 22 February 1946. He argued that hostility served the Soviet regime’s internal needs, so Western friendliness alone could not remove it. His proposed response was patient, firm resistance: Soviet pressure could be contained without war until the system mellowed or broke. The cable circulated widely, including to American embassies, and gave officials a way to interpret subsequent events. Some forty-five years later the Soviet system did break apart.
What it changed
Containment becomes policy. Aid to Greece and Turkey and the Marshall Plan gave containment political and financial force within eighteen months; NATO followed later. Kennan had favored concentrating political and economic resistance at important centers of power. As containment acquired a larger military role, he protested for decades. His diagnosis had given policymakers a starting point, but they chose how far and by what means to apply it.
The wartime alliance is unrecoverable. The Soviet government developed an adversarial account of its own. In 1946 Ambassador Novikov warned that America sought “world domination”, and Stalin told voters that war was inherent in capitalism. Officials could now fit new events into opposing explanations of an enemy’s aims. Under those conditions a concession could look like weakness, making an escape from confrontation harder to recognize.
Europe divides before the world does. Churchill’s iron curtain is shown on the map as a dashed line from the Baltic to the Adriatic. Switch to the EUROPE theater to follow it. This division remained the center of the confrontation for decades, even as Cold War violence took devastating forms in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — Was the Cold War inevitable in 1945, or did avoidable choices make it?
Orthodox historians have stressed Stalin’s expansionism; revisionists have emphasized American economic ambition. Post-revisionists, including John Lewis Gaddis, ask how the inherited distribution of power and leaders’ decisions worked together. Germany and Japan had been defeated, leaving two exceptionally powerful states with universal ambitions facing each other. Rivalry was likely, but its severity was open to choice. A Poland with limited autonomy like Finland’s or an early agreement to share atomic knowledge suggests a less hostile settlement, although neither outcome was assured. Tensions also appeared in Korea, Germany and Iran where the powers’ interests met. The security dilemma helps explain why similar fears recurred; it does not remove the need to judge what governments chose to do.
An interesting fact
In October 1945, ten weeks after Hiroshima, George Orwell coined “cold war” in Tribune. He imagined nuclear-armed super-states living in “a peace that is no peace”. Bernard Baruch brought the phrase into an official speech in April 1947: “let us not be deceived: we are today in the midst of a cold war”. Walter Lippmann’s book that autumn helped establish it. Churchill’s “iron curtain” had a predecessor too: Goebbels used the phrase in print in February 1945, thirteen months before Fulton.
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