Cold War

posture of neutrality, the United States had a vested interest in the victory of England and France over Germany. America's own military security, her trade lines with England and France, economic and political control over Latin America and South America - all would best be preserved if Germany were defeated. Moreover, American banks and munition makers had invested millions of dollars in the allied cause. Nevertheless, the issue of national self-interest rarely if ever surfaced in any presidential statement during the war. Instead, U.S. rhetoric presented America's position as totally idealistic in nature. The United States entered the war, President Wilson declared, not for reasons of economic self-interest, but to "make the world safe for democracy." Our purpose was not to restore a balance of power in Europe, but to fight a war that would "end all wars" and produce "a peace without victory." Rather than seek a sphere of influence for American power, the United States instead declared that it sought to establish a new form of internationalism based on self-determination for all peoples, freedom of the seas, the end of all economic barriers between nations, and development of a new international order based on the principles of democracy.

America's historic reluctance to use arguments of self-interest as a basis for foreign policy undoubtedly reflected a belief that, in a democracy, people would not support foreign ventures inconsistent with their own sense of themselves as a noble and just country. But the consequences were to limit severely the flexibility necessary to a multifaceted and effective diplomacy, and to force national leaders to invoke moral - even religious - idealism as a basis for actions that might well fall short of the expectations generated by moralistic visions.

The Soviet Union, by contrast, operated with few such constraints. Although Soviet pronouncements on foreign policy tediously invoked the rhetoric of capitalist imperialism, abstract principles meant far less than national self-interest in arriving at foreign policy positions. Every action that the Soviet Union had taken since the Bolshevik revolution, from the peace treaty with the Kaiser to the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact and Russian occupation of the Baltic states reflected this policy of self-interest. As Stalin told British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden during the war, "a declaration I regard as algebra ... I prefer practical arithmetic." Or, as the Japanese ambassador to Moscow later said, "the Soviet authorities are extremely realistic and it is most difficult to persuade them with abstract arguments." Clearly, both the United States and the Soviet Union saw foreign policy as involving a combination of self-interest and ideological principle. Yet the history of the two countries suggested that principle was far more a consideration in the formulation of American foreign policy, while self-interest-purely defined-controlled Soviet actions.

The difference became relevant during the 1930s as Franklin Roosevelt attempted to find some way to move American public opinion back to a spirit of internationalism. After World War I, Americans had felt betrayed by the abandonment of Wilsonian principles. Persuaded that the war itself represented a mischievous conspiracy by munitions makers and bankers to get America involved, Americans had preferred to opt for isolation and "normalcy" rather than participate in the ambiguities of what so clearly appeared to be a corrupt international order. Now, Roosevelt set out to reverse those perceptions. He understood the dire consequences of Nazi ambitions for world hegemony. Yet to pose the issue strictly as one of self-interest offered little chance of success given the depth of America's revulsion toward internationalism. The task of education was immense. As time went on, Roosevelt relied more and more on the traditional moral rhetoric of American values as a means of justifying the international involvement that he knew must inevitably lead to war. Thus, throughout the 1930s he repeatedly discussed Nazi aggression as a direct threat to the most cherished American beliefs in freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom of occupational choice. When German actions corroborated the president's simple words, the opportunity presented itself for carrying the nation toward another great crusade on behalf of democracy, freedom, and peace. Roosevelt wished to avoid the errors of Wilsonian overstatement, but he understood the necessity of generating moral fervor as a means of moving the nation toward the intervention he knew to be necessary if both America's self-interest-and her moral principles-were to be preserved.

The Atlantic Charter represented the embodiment of Roosevelt's quest for moral justification of American involvement. Presented to the world after the president and Prime Minister Churchill met off the coast of Newfoundland in the summer of 1941, the Charter set forth the common goals that would guide America over the next few years. There would be no secret commitments, the President said. Britain and America sought no territorial aggrandizement. They would oppose any violation of the right to self-government for all peoples. They stood for open trade, free exchange of ideas, freedom of worship and expression, and the creation of an international organization to preserve and protect future peace. This would be a war fought for freedom—freedom from fear, freedom from want, freedom of religion, freedom from the old politics of balance-of-power diplomacy.

Roosevelt deeply believed in those ideals and saw no inconsistency between the moral principles they represented and American self-interest. Yet these very commitments threatened to generate misunderstanding and conflict with the Soviet Union whose own priorities were much more directly expressed in terms of "practical arithmetic." Russia wanted security. The Soviet Union sought a sphere of influence over which it could have unrestricted control. It wished territorial boundaries that would reflect the concessions won through military conflict. All these objectives-potentially-ran counter to the Atlantic Charter. Roosevelt himself-never afraid of inconsistency-often talked the same language. Frequently, he spoke of guaranteeing the USSR "measures of legitimate security" on territorial questions, and he envisioned a postwar world in which the "four policemen"-the superpowers-would manage the world.

But Roosevelt also understood that the American public would not accept the public embrace of such positions. A rationale of narrow self-interest was not acceptable, especially if that self-interest led to abandoning the ideals of the Atlantic Charter. In short, the different ways in which the Soviet Union and the United States articulated their objectives for the war—and formulated their foreign policy—threatened to compromise the prospect for long-term cooperation. The language of universalism and the language of balance-of-power politics were incompatible, at least in theory. Thus, the United States and the Soviet Union entered the war burdened not only by their deep mistrust of each other's motivations and systems of government, but also by a significantly different emphasis on what should constitute the major rationale for fighting the war.

1.2 Causes and Interpretations.

Any historian who studies the Cold War must come to grips with a series of questions, which, even if unanswerable in a definitive fashion, nevertheless compel examination. Was the Cold War inevitable? If not, how could it have been avoided? What role did personalities play? Were there points at which different courses of action might have been followed? What economic factors were central? What ideological causes? Which historical forces? At what juncture did alternative possibilities become invalid? When was the die cast? Above all, what were the primary reasons for defining the world in such a polarized and ideological framework?

The simplest and easiest response is to conclude that Soviet-American confrontation was so deeply rooted in differences of values, economic systems, or historical experiences that only extraordinary action— by individuals or groups—could have prevented the conflict. One version of the inevitability hypothesis would argue that the Soviet Union, given its commitment to the ideology of communism, was dedicated to worldwide revolution and would use any and every means possible to promote the demise of the West. According to this view—based in large part on the rhetoric of Stalin and Lenin—world revolution constituted the sole priority of Soviet policy. Even the appearance of accommodation was a Soviet design to soften up capitalist states for eventual confrontation. As defined, admittedly in oversimplified fashion, by George Kennan in his famous 1947 article on containment, Russian diplomacy "moves along the prescribed path, like a persistent toy automobile, wound up and headed in a given direction, stopping only when it meets some unanswerable force." Soviet subservience to a universal, religious creed ruled out even the possibility of mutual concessions, since even temporary accommodation would be used by the Russians as part of their grand scheme to secure world domination.

A second version of the same hypothesis—argued by some American revisionist historians—contends that the endless demands of capitalism for new markets propelled the United States into a course of intervention and imperialism. According to this argument, a capitalist society can survive only by opening new areas for exploitation. Without the development of multinational corporations, strong ties with German capitalists, and free trade across national boundaries, America would revert to the depression of the prewar years. Hence