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Coldwar

The Cold War—we have spent a generation hearing about it, thinking about it, worrying about it. We all know it somehow grew out of World War II, that it involved conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, and that it led to a series of frightening confrontations: the Berlin airlift; the escalating stages of the nuclear arms race; the Cuban missile crisis; the wars in Korea and Vietnam. But what really caused the Cold War? It is not a simple question, and knowledgeable and honest men can differ considerably in answering it.
The new American foreign policy of Containment
Harry Truman (1945-53)
In March 1947, President Truman gave a speech to Congress in which he requested the appropriation of $400 million in aid to the Greek and Turkish governments, then fighting Communist subversion.[8] Truman pledged to, "support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures."[8] This pledge became known as the Truman Doctrine. Portraying the issue as a mighty clash between "totalitarian regimes" and "free peoples," the speech marks the onset of the Cold War and the adoption of containment as official U.S. policy. Truman's motives on this occasion have been the subject of considerable scholarship and several schools of interpretation. In the orthodox explanation of Herbert Feis, a series of aggressive Soviet actions in 1945-47 in Poland, Iran, Turkey and elsewhere awakened the American public to this new danger and Truman responded.[9] In the revisionist view of William Appleman Williams, Truman's speech was an expression of longstanding American expansionism and infatuation with private property.[9] In the realpolitik view of Lynn Davis, Truman was a naive idealist who unnecessarily provoked the Soviets by couching disputes in ideological terms like democracy and freedom.[10] According to psychological analysis by Deborah Larson, Truman felt a need to prove his decisiveness and feared that aides would make...