Clash of Titans

The Roman strategist Flavius Renatus once said, “Si vis pacem, para bellum,” or “If you want peace, prepare for war.” It has been a standard of politics for well over 2000 years, certainly before 375 A.D. when the idea was officially written into the Roman Legion’s handbook. The modern idea of defense preparations and spending is not a new concept. Looking back throughout time competition, militarization, and conquest have been at the root of many great conflicts. The Punic Wars, the Mongol wars, the Hundred Years War, and the Napoleonic Wars are all examples of terrible conflicts fought between the great powers of their era. However, none rivaled the sheer destruction that was to come to pass in the 20th century. Warfare had come of age.

Between the conflicts of World War I, World War II, and the Cold War the modern nations could find little peace. The two World Wars were easily the most devastating conflicts in all of history, but they were only precursors to an even more dangerous conflict between the two most powerful states of the modern world and arguably the most powerful nations ever. The Cold War: the rivalry, mistrust, and often open hostility just short of war between the United States and the Soviet Union. What was the cause of this tension? Many have debated and analyzed American foreign policy of this period to attempt to reason why. Three main views have come to dominate the academic discussions: Orthodox, Revisionism, and Post-revisionism. Each position makes valid claims about the conflict and each is factual from a certain point of view. Mutually exclusive as they seem, many threads of the Cold War can be woven into each of these positions.

The first opinion to rise to dominance was the Orthodox view. In this opinion the blame for the Cold War is placed solely on the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. At the end of World War II the Soviet Union was in sole possession of Eastern Europe. Orthodox’s argue that Stalin did not live up to the agreements made at the Yalta Conference, specifically, to let the Eastern European countries to hold free and fair elections after the war. He imposed pro-Soviet regimes throughout the region and brutally suppressed all dissent against the puppet communist governments. Stalin’s view of Communism as a worldwide social revolution rather than just an experiment within the Soviet Union led to widespread fear of his expansionist tendencies . The United States felt obligated to defend the world from being unwillingly dominated by violent communist forces, both within and without their countries. The United States decided that it must, in President Truman’s words, “support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. ” (Ambrose, Brinkley, 1997, p. 82) In addition to this declaration the United States generously instituted the Marshall Plan to help the countries of war-torn Western Europe.