No equally comprehensive strategy for confronting the Soviet Union emerged anywhere in the capitalist world before 1945. One reason was the absence of a single manager for the global economy, Britain having relinquished that role after World War I, and the United States not having yet assumed it. The rise of authoritarianism in Italy, Germany, and Japan further fragmented capitalism. By the mid-i93os, the remaining European democracies were too preoccupied with the Great Depression to devise common approaches in foreign affairs - beyond the vague hope that appeasing the fascists might somehow satisfy them. Stalin’s diagnosis in this sense was correct: divisions among capitalists prevented their devising a plan comparable to his own.
Despite their power, the Americans during these years were particularly purposeless. Woodrow Wilson had called, in response to the Bolshevik Revolution, for a new international order based upon principles of collective security, political self-determination, and economic integration. Before he even left the White House, however, the United States had reverted to its traditional posture of avoiding entanglements beyond its hemisphere. It thereby dodged the responsibility for defending ideas it valued - democracy and capitalism - at a time when no other state had the strength to do so. Franklin D. Roosevelt had hoped to revive Wilson’s cause after becoming president in 1933, but he made domestic economic recovery the greater priority, while the appeasement policies of the British and the French left him little basis upon which to seek an end to American isolationism.
All of this changed with Hitler’s seizure of Czechoslovakia in 1939, the outbreak of war in Europe later that year, and the fall of Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France to the Germans in the spring of i94o.
By this time, Roosevelt had a grand strategy: it was to do everything possible to save Britain, defeat Germany, and contain Japan. That meant cooperating with the Soviet Union, however, because Hitler’s invasion in June 1941 had made that country an informal ally of the British and the Americans. Germany’s declaration of war on the United States following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor closed the circle, creating the Grand Alliance.
It was almost as if Roosevelt had foreseen these events, for from the moment he extended diplomatic recognition to the USSR in 1933, he had sought to bring it within a shared international system. He consistently assumed the best of Stalin’s intentions, even when the Kremlin dictator - with his brutal purges and his cynical pact with Hitler - made this difficult. After they became wartime allies, Roosevelt deferred generously to Stalin’s postwar territorial demands. But he also expected Stalin to respect an American design for a postwar world that would combine great power collaboration with a new set of international institutions - most significantly the United Nations - based on Wilsonian principles.
Was Roosevelt naive? It is difficult to say for sure because his death, in April 1945, prevents our knowing what he would have done once it became clear that Stalin was no Wilsonian. We do know, though, that Roosevelt left his successor, Harry S. Truman, in a strong position to confront the Soviet Union if that should become necessary. Roosevelt had kept wartime casualties to a minimum, relying on the Red Army to do most of the fighting against the Germans. He had agreed to few, if any, territorial changes that Stalin could not have brought about on his own. He had doubled the size of the American economy during a war that had devastated the economies of most other belligerents - including that of the USSR - and he had authorized the building of an atomic bomb. Roosevelt’s did not seem, to Stalin, to have been a naive grand strategy.
None of this changes, however, a fundamental asymmetry. Roosevelt allowed for the possibility that a "cold war" might not happen. Stalin regarded it as inevitable.
World History
