ORIGINS OF THE COLD WAR

Halle places himself firmly on the side of the balance- of-power viewpoint:

It is essentially true, them, to say that since the end of the eighteenth century four great wars have been fought to maintain or restore the European balance of power. The fourth was the Cold War, which began almost immediately

after World War II (Halle, 1967, p. 2).

In this view, ideology was more a system of internal justification for governments than a driving force in the conflict. Had Soviet Russia been, say, social-democratic, the Cold War would still have happened more or less as it did, simply because the U.S. and the Soviets were the only big boys left on the block after World War II.

The alternative argument is that ideology is indeed a driving force - that, as Zbigniew Brzezinski argues, ideology plays a "persisting and important role" in shaping Soviet policy (Graebner, 1976, p. 77). This ideology, to Brzezenski, drives Soviet policy to an

. . . apocalyptic image of the future and the belief in the inevitable trium

. . .
or perhaps simply without the personality of Stalin, who embodied all that was most frightening about Soviet ideology), the tensions could have been managed without producing a long-term crisis atmosphere. It was the West's and Stalinism's (or Stalin's) mutual abhorrence that caused this tension to erupt almost uncontrollably into the Cold War. PERSISTENCE OF THE COLD WAR It has been suggested above that a symbolic or benchmark date for the beginning of the Cold War can be fixed at Winston Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech in March, 1946. At this point, a Western leader traditionally associated with a cool balance-of-power outlook declared that the West could not do business as usual with the Soviets; that relations were entering a state of confrontation rather than of manageable tension. The underlying reason for this state of confrontation was ideological: on the one side, Stalin and his ideologists held that the Soviets and the West could not exist in balance, but that one prevail and the other decline; on the other, Western leaders and Western (particularly American) public opinion concluded that their way of life was threatened unless Stalinism was eradicated or at least decisively checked. The personal role of Sta
. . .

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Approximate Word count = 2107
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)