Dawning of the Cold War: the United States' quest for order

Abstract

This book is an account of the Cold War. Incorporating the myriad memoirs, scholarly articles, and monographs that have appeared in the wake of Paterson's survey, Randall B.Woods and Howard Jones offer an examination of the issues and forces that shaped the East-West confrontation in the years just after World II. Combining narrative with analysis, the authors draw upon their own research and the wealth of orthodox, revisionist, and post-revisionist scholarship to describe the chain of events that inaugurated the Cold War. They trace the course of the evolving tensions from the Yalta Conference and the break-up of the Grand Alliance through Winston Churchill's Iron Curtain speech, the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the formation of NATO, and the Berlin blockade, while analyzing the tactics and weapons of the Cold War, including atomic and economic diplomacy. They pay attention to the transfer of power within the non-Communist world from Great Britain to the United States and the impact of this transfer on East-West relations. Utilizing Russian as well as Western secondary sources, they also highlight the Soviet motives and tactics at each turning point in the early Cold War. Finding that the evidence best supports an orthodox or realist interpretation of the Cold War, the authors maintain that in the late 1940s there was a general perception among the Congress, the White House, and the American people that the Soviet Union - despite its actual weakness - was bent on world domination. At a time when the extraordinary events in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union promise an end to the Cold era, understanding how it all began can provide important clues to the future course of international relations. The Dawning of the Cold War is a guide to the complexities of one of this century's most important historical phenomena.