Was the Cold War inevitable or the result of choices?

The short answer

• 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.

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.