cold war front was to be the 38th parallel in Korea. The war may have stopped, but over the world towered the new Russian empire and the atomic bomb. Russia was in Manchuria, half of Korea, and European nations bordering its western boundaries were in thrall to the Russian forces. The "total" cold war exists today, in much the same strategic and political patterns apparent in the "first" cold war.
By January 1945, United States' troops were cutting off the German bulge in the Ardennes forest, and the Red Army had started a new drive to the west that was to carry it to the very gates of Berlin. The Yalta Conference in February 1945 looked forward, as did the people of the west, to victory with hope. A great deal of Allied planning for an early end to the war in Europe was related to the tremendous successes of the Russian armies:
Victory in this war will provide the greatest
opportunity in all history to create in the
years to come the essential conditions of peace.
These words were hard to resist by the war-weary leaders. But Stalin used the record of the Red Army as a wedge and almost broke up the conference, in an endless game of protocol:
The weakness of western statesmanship at this
time is essentially irrelevant to the fact of
Roosevelt, in an effort to bargain, told Stalin the truth that he did not believe he could obtain the consent of the United States Congress to keep United States troops in Europe more than two years after the war. Stalin used this circumstance to fill the increasing vacuum. Britain was exhausted, its main cities laid flat. France was a military vacuum. Germany was demolished:
That left only Russia which did not demobilize
after the war and did not dismantle its military
establishment. It kept its armed forces of 5-6
million, 50,000 tanks, 20,000 aircraft.
By the time of the Potsdam conference in July-August 1945, relations between the three gr...