Problems had already surfaced during World War II, but President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin were able to keep tensions in check (see chapter 23). The president went a long way toward defusing Stalin’s concerns at the Yalta Conference in 1945. Stalin viewed the Eastern European countries that the Soviets had liberated from the Germans, especially Poland, as a buffer to protect his nation from future attacks by Germany. He refused to allow hostile, anti-Communist governments to rule these countries and wanted to maintain a regional sphere of influence favorable to Soviet foreign policy objectives. Roosevelt understood Stalin’s reasoning, and he recognized political realities: The Soviet military already occupied Eastern Europe, a state of affairs that increased Stalin’s bargaining position. Still, while accepting Stalin’s basic position, the president insisted that the Yalta Agreement include a guarantee of free elections in Eastern Europe. Roosevelt believed in spreading democracy and freedom, but he was also a realist, and the Yalta Agreement reflected his effort to strike a delicate balance.

By contrast, his successor, Harry S. Truman, took a much less nuanced approach to U.S.-Soviet relations. He believed that the Soviets threatened “a barbarian invasion of Europe,” and he intended to deter it. Stalin’s ruthless purges within the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s, which led to the deaths of millions of his opponents, convinced Truman that the Soviet dictator was paranoid and extremely dangerous. President Truman did not expect the United States to achieve “100 percent of what we propose” in negotiations with the Russians, but “we should be able to get eighty-five percent.” In his first meeting with Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov in April 1945, Truman rebuked the Russians for failing to support free elections in Poland. Molotov, recoiling from the sharp tone of Truman’s remarks, replied: “I have never been talked to like that in my life.”

Despite this rough start, Truman did not immediately abandon the idea of cooperation with the Soviet Union. At the Potsdam Conference in Germany in July 1945, Truman and Stalin agreed on several issues (see chapter 23). The two leaders reaffirmed the concept of free elections in Eastern Europe; Soviet troop withdrawal from the oil fields of northern Iran, which bordered the USSR; and the partition of Germany into four Allied occupation zones. (Berlin was also divided into four occupation zones.) After Stalin assured Truman that he did not support the Communist revolution in China against the Western-backed government of Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek), Truman wrote, “I can deal with Stalin. He is honest—but smart as hell.”

Within six months of the war’s end, the president had changed his mind, and relations between the two countries quickly soured. The United States was the only nation in the world with the atomic bomb, which it had used on Japan, and boasted the only economy reinvigorated by the war. As a result, the Truman administration believed that it held the upper hand against the Soviets and could gain most of what it wanted. With this in mind, the State Department offered the Soviets a $6 billion loan, which they needed to help rebuild their war-ravaged economy. But when the Soviets undermined free elections in Poland in 1946 and established a compliant government, the United States withdrew the offer. Soviet troops also remained in northern Iran, closing off the oil fields to potential capitalist enterprises. The failure to reach agreement over international control of atomic energy proved the last straw. Before reaching an accord, the United States wanted to make sure it would keep its atomic weapons, while the Soviets first wanted the United States to destroy its nuclear arsenal. Clearly, the former World War II allies did not trust each other, and each suspected the other of trying to gain an atomic advantage.

Truman had significantly underestimated the strength of the Soviet position. The Soviets were well on their way toward building their own atomic weapons, negating the Americans’ nuclear advantage. In the meantime, until the Russians obtained the bomb, they could rely on the power of their huge army—the largest in the world—poised in Eastern Europe. The Soviets could also ignore the enticement of U.S. economic aid by taking resources from East Germany and mobilizing the Russian people to rebuild their country’s industry and military. Indeed, on February 9, 1946, Stalin delivered a tough speech to rally Russians to make sacrifices to enhance national security. By asserting that communism was “a better form of organization than any non-Soviet social system,” he implied, according to George Kennan, that capitalist nations could not coexist with communism and that future wars were unavoidable unless communism triumphed over capitalism.

Whether Stalin meant this speech as an unofficial declaration of a third world war was not clear, but U.S. leaders interpreted it this way. A few days after Stalin spoke, Kennan sent his 8,000-word telegram from the U.S. Embassy in Moscow to Washington, blaming the Soviets for stirring up international tensions and confirming that Stalin could not be trusted. “Driven by a neurotic view of world affairs,” Kennan maintained, “[the Soviet Union] would respond only to force.” The following month, on March 15, former British prime minister Winston Churchill gave a speech in Truman’s home state of Missouri, which the president read in advance and presumably approved. Declaring that “an iron curtain has descended across the Continent” of Europe, Churchill observed that “there is nothing [the Russians] admire so much as strength, and there is nothing for which they have less respect than for military weakness.” This comment reaffirmed Truman’s sentiments expressed the previous year: “Unless Russia is faced with an iron fist and strong language another war is in the making.” The message was clear: Unyielding resistance to the Soviet Union was the only way to avoid another world war.

Not all Americans agreed with this view. Although some 60 percent of the public believed that cooperation with the Soviets was unlikely, a minority argued that a more amicable relationship was possible. Led by Roosevelt’s former vice president Henry Wallace, who served as Truman’s secretary of commerce, critics voiced concern about taking a “hard line” against the Soviet Union. Stalin was pursuing a policy of expansion, they agreed, but for limited reasons. Wallace claimed that the Soviets merely wanted to protect their borders by surrounding themselves with friendly countries, just as the United States had done by establishing spheres of influence in the Caribbean. Except for Poland and Romania, Stalin initially accepted an array of governments in Eastern Europe, allowing free elections in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and, to a lesser extent, Bulgaria. Only as Cold War tensions escalated did the Soviets tighten control over all of Eastern Europe, snuffing out any semblance of democracy. Critics such as Wallace considered this outcome the result of a self-fulfilling prophecy; by misinterpreting Soviet motives, the Truman administration pushed Stalin to counter the American hard line with a hard line of his own.