To what extent was the United States responsible for the collapse of the Grand Alliance at the end of the Second World War?

There are other examples given of where the west was responsible for an increase in superpower hostility following 1945 however.  One episode deserves special mention: US interference in the Italian general election of 1948.  American and British officials were concerned that in the war-ravaged countries of France and Italy, economic hardship might result in communist parties coming to power through free elections; by 1946 such organisations already seemed poised to become the largest single political forces within those countries.  These worries quickly disappeared in the case of France, but when an election was scheduled for April 18th 1948 in Italy, the Italian communist party, at two million members the largest outside of the Soviet bloc, was poised certainly to win a large enough share of the vote to make it impossible to keep them out of a governing coalition, and possibly an outright majority.  The United States decided to intervene.  A massive letter-writing campaign was organised, resulting in some ten million letters being sent by Italian-Americans to relatives in Italy arguing against a vote for the communists, and the CIA in conjunction with the Catholic Church ran a huge anti-Marxist propaganda campaign.  In addition, some $2-3 million was distributed by the CIA to various anti-communist political parties in Italy.  When election day came the communists were humiliated, their share of the vote halved from what they had achieved in the 1946 local elections.  This is not the place to discuss whether American actions were justified, but undoubtedly the precedent set by the Italian effort, and its resounding success, resulted afterwards in the United States being far more willing to engage in anti-Soviet activities elsewhere, and this case is therefore cited as an instance where the actions of America contributed to the breakup of the Grand Alliance.

Another reason sometimes given is the American monopoly on nuclear weapons in the aftermath of World War Two.  On July 16th 1945, the largest man-made explosion in history took place at the Alamogordo test site in New Mexico, and the United States was immediately catapulted into a position of total military superiority.  Though the Soviet Union had ended the war with colossal conventional armed forces, the atomic bombings of Japan in August of that year left the Russians in no doubt that their on-paper ally had become indisputably the most powerful military force in the history of the world.  It has therefore been argued that this obvious fact caused Stalin and his government to feel threatened and bullied by the United States, and that this was the reason for the antagonistic nature of postwar negotiations.  Williams again writes: “Particularly after the atom bomb was created and used, the attitude of the United States left the Soviets with but one real option: either acquiesce in American proposals or be confronted with American power and hostility.”  Undoubtedly the US was sometimes guilty of flaunting its nuclear dominance: American officials evidently thought that the Paris Peace Conference of July 1946 would be far more productive were it to be immediately preceded by two nuclear weapons tests.  On the other hand, it is quite possible that considerations of American nuclear power did not factor significantly into Soviet thinking.  At the Potsdam conference (July-August 1945), more than one western official observed Stalin’s surprising calmness, even nonchalance, when told by President Truman that the US was in possession of a “new weapon of unusual destructive force”.  Only later did it transpire that not only did the USSR have an atomic weapons programme dating back to 1942 but that, due to the laxness of the Manhattan Project’s managers respecting its wartime ally, the Soviets had spies passing nuclear secrets to Moscow’s scientists.  Stalin was therefore fully aware that the United States’ monopoly on atomic weapons would be only temporary, and therefore that this need not be factored into long-term Soviet strategic thinking.  Furthermore, the aggressive actions taken by the USSR in the postwar period (see below) show no signs of restraint by Russian leaders on account of the destructive capability of the Americans’ nuclear arsenal.  The Berlin Blockade (June 1948-May 1949) took place and concluded before the Soviets successfully tested a nuclear bomb of their own on August 29th 1949.  The USSR’s leaders seem to have calculated, probably correctly, that the United States wanted to avoid war with the Soviet Union at almost any cost; after August 1949 this only became more true as MAD thinking began to gain widespread acceptance.

The more orthodox interpretation of the postwar period is that the alliance collapsed primarily because of the actions taken by the Soviet Union after the defeat of Germany, especially concerning the areas of Europe occupied by soldiers of the Red Army.  At the Yalta conference in February 1945, only months away from the defeat of Germany, major disputes arose over the fate of European nations such as Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia which had been liberated from German control by the troops of the Soviet Union.  The western leaders, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill, wanted Stalin to conduct free and fair elections with the aim of establishing self-governing sovereign entities, but were under no illusions that the Soviet leader intended to turn them into friendly buffer states, and probably totalitarian one-party regimes at that.  With respect to Poland especially, Stalin had already shown his contempt for national democracy movements by allowing the Wehrmacht to crush the Warsaw uprising in August-October 1944, and had a pro-Soviet puppet government ready and waiting to take over from the German authorities.  Previous Soviet treatment of Finland and the Baltic states gave every indication needed of how Stalin would react to attempts made at installing democracy in other countries.  Nevertheless, the Yalta communiqué produced from the conference was an unequivocal assertion of the right of east European states to free elections.  Section V pledged all of the allied powers, including the Soviet Union, to “the earliest possible establishment through free elections of Governments responsive to the will of the people”, and asserted “the right of all people to choose the form of government under which they will live”.

It does not need to be repeated that Stalin never had any intentions of carrying out the requirements of this passage.  Immediately after the war the leaders of national communist parties, many of whom had spent the pre-war and wartime years in exile in Moscow and had long been subdued under Stalin’s whip, began their gradual accumulation of power.  Invariably, the communists would contest a free-ish election under the auspices of the Red Army, win a minority of the vote (as little as 17% in Hungary and never more than 38%, in Czechoslovakia), and then agree to take part in a coalition government.  Under pressure from Stalin, their rivals would agree to give communists control of ministries of justice and of the interior, which would then be used to “disappear” political opponents.  In Poland the Soviet puppets’ methods were less subtle: a massive campaign of violence and intimidation preceded the first postwar elections in 1947, and the communists claimed 80% of the vote.  Despite assertions by some historians that western leaders “handed over” Eastern Europe to the Soviets at Yalta, short of a full-scale war with the USSR there was little if anything Roosevelt and Churchill could have done to prevent Stalin from turning eastern European countries into satellite states.  Nevertheless, the dictator’s flagrant violations of  the USSR’s promises at Yalta created a chasm between the former Allies even before V-E Day, and is therefore frequently cited as the primary reason for the collapse of the Grand Alliance.  As Roosevelt’s biographer Conrad Black has written, “The issue of whether the British and Americans’ (and France’s) foremost ally would be Germany or Russia would be determined by whether Stalin could resist the temptation of enslaving Eastern Europe.”

Others argue that the wartime alliance collapsed less because of Russian actions in Eastern Europe than because of attempts made by the USSR to expand its influence to countries which were not occupied by the Red Army at the end of the war, and because of the willingness of the west to confront this expansionist agenda.  A typical case of this was the Iran crisis of 1946.  At the Tehran conference of Allied leaders in 1943, it was agreed that both the British and Soviet occupiers would withdraw from the country no later than six months after the end of the war (the US had no significant military presence there).  As this deadline grew close, the British faithfully removed their troops, but the Soviets showed no sign of doing so, and some units were even moved into the centre of Iran.  Furthermore, the USSR used its Red Army presence to force the northern Iranian province of Azerbaijan to declare itself independent, and a communist puppet government was set up by force in a nation which throughout the whole of World War Two had been a state friendly to the Soviet Union.  The Iranian government formally complained to the newly established United Nations Security Council on January 19th 1946, and in March the Soviets promised to withdraw all troops within six weeks, though with no promises made about Azerbaijan the Iranians sent their own troops to restore control over the rebellious province.  Soviet troops were stationed in its defence.  However, after the British and Americans threatened to intervene on the Iranian side and Britain sent a brigade to Basra in support, the Soviets backed down and independent Azerbaijan was reincorporated to Iran.  This attempt by the USSR to create a satellite state outside of its accepted zone of influence and thereby gain access to much of Iran’s oil reserves, and more importantly the willingness of the United States and Britain to prevent it from doing so, showed very plainly that the former allies had begun thinking of each-other as enemies.  By its own imperialist agenda, the Soviets had provoked a confrontation with the west, and the case of Iran was therefore a telling sign of the future development of the Cold War.  There were other such cases in the years immediately following 1945 which can be characterised in the same manner, such as Turkey (1945-6) and the Berlin Blockade (1948-9).  It is hard to see any of these instances other than as attempts by the Soviet Union to expand its control, using force, to areas which were previously either autonomous or within western influence, and such examples have therefore been used to justify the argument that the USSR’s expansionism was the main reason for the breakup of the Grand Alliance.  Stalin biographer Robert Service, whilst not conceding that the Soviet Union was entirely to blame for the outbreak of the Cold War, nevertheless sums up well: “Stalin, moreover, was more active than Truman in making things worse.  He grabbed territory.  He imposed communist regimes.  He anyway took it for granted that clashes with “world capitalism” were inevitable.  Indeed he was mentally more ready for war than were the American and British leaders.”

Perhaps the final word must go to the argument that the entire premise of the dispute, that the Cold War was not inevitable and could have been prevented by cautious diplomacy on both sides, is incorrect.  Many have taken the view that, though it is possible to point to specific actions by both superpowers which aggravated postwar tensions, in reality the intense ideological mistrust between the United States and the Soviet Union all but guaranteed that the ostentatiously titled “Grand Alliance” would be only a temporary measure to bring about the defeat of Nazi Germany.  Despite having been inundated with wartime propaganda glorifying the bravery of the Soviet people and their leader “Uncle Joe”, the American people remained as infatuated with the free market as ever, and even before the emergence of witch-hunting McCarthyism had no intention of allowing Stalin to spread communism to other parts of the world.  The attitude of the Soviet people, such as it was, was inconsequential, but its leaders believed in the dissemination of Marxism as an ideological duty and certainly would never tolerate the liberalisation of trade in areas already under their control.  The most obvious sign of this thinking was the refusal of Marshall Aid: eastern Europe and the USSR were desperately in need of economic assistance after the end of the war, but as this would mean communism conceding its own inferiority by seeking help from capitalism, the possibility of even a loan from the United States was rejected on ideological grounds.  Service goes further, arguing that even after western powers had accorded recognition to the Soviet Union, they had always viewed it as something of a rogue state: “The USSR’s agreements with Western governments, from the commercial treaties of 1921 onwards, had been regarded by everyone on both sides as suspendable.”  From the 1921 agreements to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, nobody in the west, and certainly nobody in the Soviet Union, regarded such treaties as anything other than temporary pauses to the USSR’s long-term goal of igniting a world revolution, or to the west’s goal of stamping out communism altogether.  The Grand Alliance was no different, as Service continues: “Only common anti-Nazi interest had kept [the allied leaders] on speaking terms.  Communism and capitalism dealt uneasily with each-other.”  After the end of World War Two, none of the leaders of the former alliance believed that what was later called “peaceful co-existence” was even possible, let alone desirable, and they therefore made no serious attempt at it.  Soviet aggression may have contributed to the lack of postwar co-operation, but American leaders had never seriously considered that the USSR would take any other course, and nor had the Soviets expected that the United States would allow it to spread communism around the world unchallenged.  According to this line of argument, perhaps it is wrong to say only that the Grand Alliance fell apart, and more accurate to see wartime co-operation as a temporary anomaly in the general pattern of hostility between the rival ideologies which prevailed between 1917-91.

Nevertheless, despite the ideological divisions which separated the two superpowers, it is difficult to characterise the 1945-9 period in international relations as relentless American aggression provoking justified Soviet outrage.  After the end of World War Two the Stalin regime pursued an unapologetic campaign to dominate as vast a swath of the world as the Red Army could plant its boots in.  Unless the United States was prepared to stand by and watch, to allow the Soviets to install a puppet state carved out of Iran unchallenged, to allow Stalin’s massed troops to bully Turkey into allowing Soviet naval bases on its soil, or to permit military force to tear up the agreements the USSR had itself signed concerning occupied Berlin (to cite just three examples), then the collapse of the Grand Alliance following the defeat of Nazi Germany was inevitable.  With the exception of Italy in 1948, every incident in the years 1945-9 which increased Cold War tensions consisted of the United States taking action in response to Soviet aggression, and as a result the responsibility for the breakdown in postwar relations lies overwhelmingly with Stalin and with the Soviet Union.

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