The Causes of the Cold War

The short-term causes of the Cold War basically relate to the ways in which the Soviet Union and the United States wished to shape the post-war world. Although the Yalta and the Potsdam Conferences had given the Americans, the British, and the Soviets different spheres of interests or influence it soon became apparent that only the Soviet Union and the United States could be considered to be global superpowers.

The Americans were unhappy about how the Soviet Union managed to install communist regimes throughout Central and Eastern Europe. The Soviet Union’s blockade of West Berlin worsened relations even further. There was also the fear that communist parties could take power in France and Italy, and also win the savage civil war in Greece. The British admission that they could no longer support the Greek government inadvertently led to the Marshall Plan that assisted the economic reconstruction of Western Europe, yet not extended to the states of Central and Eastern Europe due to Moscow not allowing them to take American money.

On the other hand the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin mistrusted the United States as well as Britain and to a lesser extent France. Stalin resented the fact that the Americans had developed and then used the atomic bomb without letting the Soviet Union know of its existence. The Soviet Union felt vulnerable for not been a nuclear power, Stalin’s successful quest to make it one harmed Moscow’s relations with Washington DC even further.

The long-term causes of the Cold War were fundamentally due to the ideological differences between east and west. The Soviet Union and the United States had been ideological opposites since the October Revolution. The United States standing as the foremost capitalist liberal democracy whilst the Soviet Union was the foremost communist state.

In many respects the wartime alliance between Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States had been brought about by the need to fight Nazi Germany. Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin were aware that the wartime alliance would not last for long, only Roosevelt had been optimistic about the relations between the Soviet Union and the United States remaining good.

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