Frehiwot Dereje
Origins of the Cold War
Even before World War II had ended, the victors were competing to achieve the best possible post-war position. As long as a powerful common enemy remained in the field, the great coalition held together. The common interest in defeating the Axis states transcended and muted the latent rivalry and conflict between the Soviet Union and the two leading Western powers, Great Britain and the United States.
Whatever the wartime co-operation had done to reduce the basic hostility that had previously marked Soviet relations with the leading democratic and capitalist states, the common heroism and sacrifices could not submerge the basic relationship that East and West were destined to assume toward one another. Rivalry is endemic to the nation-state system. The nature of the system compels every participant to provide its own security; and one nation's security is ant.her nation’s insecurity. The logic of the nation-state system breeds insecurity, distrust, rivalry, and hostility.
In theory all members are enemy to the others, but in practice the international system at any given time does not generally comprise all nations attracting and repelling each other at random. Because all nations are not of equal strength or in exactly similar geographic relationships to each other, or uniformly willing to accept the status quo, individual nation-states sometimes modify the degree of hostility toward certain other nation-states in order to band together to enhance their security against another seemingly threatening single state or cluster of states.
This pattern sometimes illustrates the statement, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend.'' Or two rivals may seek to make an alliance with the state on the opponent's other border. Thus France, fearful of Germany, sought to ally itself before World War I with tsarist Russia and following World War I with the newly independent states on Germany's eastern borderland: Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Rumania. Another pattern was illustrated when Great Britain, confronted by the emergence of Wilhelmian Germany as both a naval rival and as a threat to European balance of power after 1890, relinquished its ambitions in the Caribbean in favor of the United States and in the area of Manchuria in favor of Japan.
Rivalry is also endemic to the nation-state system for psychological reasons. Citizens and nations seek to establish their identity, a process that often manifests itself in hostility toward others. This anxiety and hostility is always seeking an object. The nature of the nation-state system and the mechanisms of ethno-centrism directly interact to reinforce each other. This reaction invariably reinforces the relationship of hostility and rivalry born of the security dilemma. This process may build up to a military eruption or it may subside, but patterns of conflict and hostility are an enduring aspect of relations between nation-states.
The postwar relationship of the United States and the soviet Union was conducive to just such an outcome. The principal consequence of Hitler's attack upon Russia had been to destroy the balance set up in 1919 between Central Europe and Bolshevist Russia and to open the way for Soviet power to flood over Eastern and Central Europe. Similarly, the Japanese conquest of China and Southeast Asia sped the erosion of the status quo in those regions by undermining European hegemony and igniting revolutionary nationalism.
As the war ended, Soviet and American power confronted each other over congeries of prostrate, exhausted, and chaotic societies that provided an invitation to rivalry. Had Germany and Japan not been reduced to impotence by unconditional surrender or had France, Britain, and China been able to maintain control of their traditional spheres of influence, the Soviet-American confrontation might have been somewhat less stark and threatening. For a time the United States believed that the British Empire would continue to play its traditional role in the vast belt of land and sea stretching from Gibraltar to Singapore, and illusion that was soon shattered. Unfortunately, the historical magnitude and consequences of the war were destined to cast Russia and America in the fatal role of antagonists with no third state powerful enough to balance and relieve the acute security dilemma.
The enormous destruction wrought upon the Soviet Union by the German juggernaut was bound to produce a quest for maximum security guarantees. Russia lost 13.6 million soldiers and ''the military campaigns in the Soviet Union devastated 1,710 cities and settlements, 70,000 towns and villages, and over 6 million buildings of all kinds''.
The government of any nation suffering such staggering losses would be bound to seek to take measures against any such catastrophe ever again occurring. The Soviet Union engaged in a supreme wartime effort to conquer as much of the vital borderlands as possible. As long as this effort also served the common purpose of defeating the Axis, its implications for the future were passed over in silence or veiled with some ambiguous and face-saving formula by Roosevelt and Churchill. But as victory drew near, the necessity for suppressing the security dilemma implicit in Soviet expansion lessened.
At first subtly and then more and more openly the British and American leaders began to challenge the legitimacy of Soviet activities in Eastern Europe. Between the Yalta and Potsdam conferences (February and June 1945) a critical transformation occurred in the expectations between Russia and the West. For during the discussion of ways and means of reforming Europe politically in order to ensure peace in the world and in the wake of unilateral measures in Eastern Europe, the alliance fell apart. The ideological chasm which until then had been concealed by the soviet Union and disregarded or minimized by the Western nations was too deep.
The United States was content during the closing months of the war and the first months of the postwar period to preserve those advantages with which it was emerging from the war. Even before his death, Roosevelt had reversed himself on Germany. Instead of going forward with either the ''Morgenthau Plan'' or other plans for the dismemberment of Germany, he and Churchill refused to commit themselves ''to Russian proposals for Germany that would unavoidably magnify Soviet power in Europe. On the last day of the Yalta conference, Secretary of State Stettinius, Foreign Minister Molotov, and Foreign secretary Anthony Eden signed a revised clause on Germany that read as follows:
