A stronger case, it seems, can be made for the position that the Cold War was unnecessary, or at least that conflicts could have been handled in a manner that avoided bipolarization and the rhetoric of an ideological crusade. At no time did Russia constitute a military threat to the United States. "Economically," U.S. Naval Intelligence reported in 1946, "the Soviet Union is exhausted.... The USSR is not expected to take any action in the next five years which might develop into hostility with Anglo Americans." Notwithstanding the Truman admin-istration's public statements about a Soviet threat, Russia had cut its army from 11.5 to 3 million men after the war. In 1948, its military budget amounted to only half of that of the United States. Even militant anticommunists like John Foster Dulles acknowledged that "the Soviet leadership does not want and would not consciously risk" a military confrontation with the West. Indeed, so exaggerated was American rhetoric about Russia's threat that Hanson Baldwin, military expert of the New York Times, compared the claims of our armed forces to the "shepherd who cried wolf, wolf, wolf, when there was no wolf." Thus, on purely factual grounds, there existed no military basis for the fear that the Soviet Union was about to seize world domination, despite the often belligerent pose Russia took on political issues.

A second, somewhat more problematic, argument for the thesis of avoidability consists of the extent to which Russian leaders appeared ready to abide by at least some agreements made during the war. Key, here, is the understanding reached by Stalin and Churchill during the fall of 1944 on the division of Europe into spheres of influence. According to that understanding, Russia was to dominate Romania, have a powerful voice over Bulgaria, and share influence in other Eastern European countries, while Britain and America were to control Greece. By most accounts, that understanding was implemented. Russia refused to intervene on behalf of communist insurgency in Greece. While retaining rigid control over Romania, she provided at least a "fig-leaf of democratic procedure"--sufficient to satisfy the British. For two years the USSR permitted the election of noncommunist or coalition regimes in both Hungary and Czechoslovakia. The Finns, meanwhile, were permitted to choose a noncommunist government and to practice Western-style democracy as long as their country maintained a friendly foreign policy toward their neighbor on the east. Indeed, to this day, Finland remains an example of what might have evolved had earlier wartime understandings on both sides been allowed to continue.

What then went wrong? First, it seems clear that both sides perceived the other as breaking agreements that they thought had been made. By signing a separate peace settlement with the Lublin Poles, imprisoning the sixteen members of the Polish underground, and imposing--without regard for democratic appearances--total hegemony on Poland, the Soviets had broken the spirit, if not the letter, of the Yalta accords. Similarly, they blatantly violated the agreement made by both powers to withdraw from Iran once the war was over, thus precipitating the first direct threat of military confrontation during the Cold War. In their attitude toward Eastern Europe, reparations, and peaceful coop-eration with the West, the Soviets exhibited increasing rigidity and suspicion after April 1945. On the other hand, Stalin had good reason to accuse the United States of reneging on compacts made during the war. After at least tacitly accepting Russia's right to a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, the West seemed suddenly to change positions and insist on Western-style democracies and economies. As the historian Robert Daliek has shown, Roosevelt and Churchill gave every indication at Tehran and Yalta that they acknowledged the Soviet's need to have friendly governments in Eastern Europe. Roosevelt seemed to care primarily about securing token or cosmetic concessions toward demo-cratic processes while accepting the substance of Russian domination. Instead, misunderstanding developed over the meaning of the Yalta accords, Truman confronted Molotov with demands that the Soviets saw as inconsistent with prior understandings, and mutual suspicion rather than cooperation assumed dominance in relations between the two superpowers.

It is this area of misperception and misunderstanding that historians have focused on recently as most critical to the emergence of the Cold War. Presumably, neither side had a master plan of how to proceed once the war ended. Stalin's ambitions, according to recent scholarship, were ill-defined, or at least amenable to modification depending on America's posture. The United States, in turn, gave mixed signals, with Roosevelt implying to every group his agreement with their point of view, yet ultimately keeping his personal intentions secret. If, in fact, both sides could have agreed to a sphere-of-influence policy--albeit with some modifications to satisfy American political opinion--there could perhaps have been a foundation for continued accommodation. Clearly, the United States intended to retain control over its sphere of influence, particularly in Greece, Italy, and Turkey. Moreover, the United States insisted on retaining total domination over the Western hemisphere, consistent with the philosophy of the Monroe Doctrine. If the Soviets had been allowed similar control over their sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, there might have existed a basis for compromise. As John McCloy asked at the time, "[why was it necessary] to have our cake and eat it too? . . . To be free to operate under this regional arrangement in South America and at the same time intervene promptly in Europe." If the United States and Russia had both acknowl-edged the spheres of influence implicit in their wartime agreements, perhaps a different pattern of relationships might have emerged in the postwar world.

The fact that such a pattern did not emerge raises two issues, at least from an American perspective. The first is whether different leaders or advisors might have achieved different foreign policy results. Some historians believe that Roosevelt, with his subtlety and skill, would have found a way to promote collaboration with the Russians, whereas Truman, with his short temper, inexperience, and insecurity, blundered into unnecessary and harmful confrontations. Clearly, Roosevelt him-self--just before his death--was becoming more and more concerned about Soviet intransigence and aggression. Nevertheless, he had always believed that through personal pressure and influence, he could find a way to persaude "uncle Joe." On the basis of what evidence we have, there seems good reason to believe that the Russians did place enormous trust in FDR. Perhaps--just perhaps--Roosevelt could have found a way to talk "practical arithmetic" with Stalin rather than algebra and discover a common ground. Certainly, if recent historians are correct in seeing the Cold War as caused by both Stalin's undefined ambitions and America's failure to communicate effectively and consistently its view on where it would draw the line with the Russians, then Roosevelt's long history of interaction with the Soviets would presumably have placed him in a better position to negotiate than the inexperienced Truman.

The second issue is more complicated, speaking to a political problem which beset both Roosevelt and Truman--namely, the ability of an American president to formulate and win support for a foreign policy on the basis of national self-interest rather than moral purity. At some point in the past, an American diplomat wrote in 1967:

[T]here crept into the ideas of Americans about foreign policy ... a histrionic note, ... a desire to appear as something greater perhaps than one actually was. ... It was inconceivable that any war in which we were involved could be less than momentous and decisive for the future of humanity. ... As each war ended, ... we took appeal to universalistic, Utopian ideals, related not to the specifics of national interest but to legalistic and moralistic concepts that seemed better to accord with the pretentious significance we had attached to our war effort.

As a consequence, the diplomat went on, it became difficult to pursue a policy not defined by the language of "angels or devils," "heroes" or "blackguards."

Clearly, Roosevelt faced such a dilemma in proceeding to mobilize American support for intervention in the war against Nazism. And Truman encountered the same difficulty in seeking to define a policy with which to meet Soviet postwar objectives. Both presidents, of course, participated in and reflected the political culture that constrained their options. Potentially at least, Roosevelt seemed intent on fudging the difference between self-interest and moralism. He perceived one set of objectives as consistent with reaching an accommodation with the Soviets, and another set of goals as consistent with retaining popular support for his diplomacy at home. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that he planned--in a very Machiavellian way--to use rhetoric and appearances as a means of disguising his true intention: to pursue a strategy of self-interest. It seems less clear that Truman had either the subtlety or the wish to follow a similarly Machiavellian course. But if he had, the way might have been opened to quite a different--albeit politically risky-- series of policies.

None of this, of course, would have guaranteed the absence of conflict in Eastern Europe, Iran, or Turkey. Nor could any action of an American president--however much rooted in self-interest--have obviated the personal and political threat posed by Stalinist tyranny and ruthlessness, particularly if Stalin himself had chosen, for whatever reason, to act out his most aggressive and paranoid instincts. But if a sphere-of-influence agreement had been possible, there is some reason to think--in light of initial Soviet acceptance of Western-style govern-ments in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Finland--that the iron curtain might not have descended in the way that it did. In all historical sequences, one action builds on another. Thus, steps toward cooperation rather than confrontation might have created a momentum, a frame of reference and a basis of mutual trust, that could have made unnecessary the total ideological bipolarization that evolved by 1948. In short, if the primary goals of each superpower had been acknowledged and imple-mented--security for the Russians, some measure of pluralism in Eastern European countries for the United States, and economic interchange between the two blocs--it seems conceivable that the world might have avoided the stupidity, the fear, and the hysteria of the Cold War.

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