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These historians believe that the US and the USSR followed a pattern of action and reaction; and that neither nation had a definitive plan of action (Todd, 2009). Also, after President Roosevelt was replaced by Truman, the US foreign policy adopted a hardliner stance towards communism. Thus, President Trauma’s hardliner stance foreign policies played a significant role in causing the Cold War because of the paranoia and upset it caused in the USSR.
One of Trauma’s policies that may have played a role in starting the Cold War was the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. According to historian Kolas, the war in the Pacific was coming to a close and that there was really no need for the US to use weapons of mass destruction on Japan. However, Truman ordered the use of the atomic bombs on Japan as a means to threaten the USSR and warn them of the great power the US had at its disposal.
The significance of this in causing the Cold War is that it ignited a nuclear, as well as traditional, arms race which escalated tension between the US and USSR. This ace-card that the IIS held caused the USSR to respond by strengthening their military, working on the development of their own clear weapon, and major increasing military spending. Once the USSR had exploded their first nuke in 1 949, it caused huge tension because now a real threat of nuclear war existed and led to a race between the US and the USSR to see who could stockpile the most weapons.
The Truman Doctrine and the Marshall plan were the hardliner stance policies of the IIS that had an important part in causing Cold War tensions. This is because the USSR took these policies as a direct attack against communism. Stalin coined the term “dollar imperialism” for the US foreign policies because hey offered economic aid to nations in Europe that were detrimentally affected by WI in an attempt to make these nations economically dependent on and politically influenced by the US.
It caused fear and paranoia in the USSR because the soviet communists believed that the US would gain political and economic control of the countries in need of aid. It also caused fear and paranoia because the Truman Doctrine and Marshall plan condemned communism as evil and it took action to prevent the spread of communism to any susceptible nation by providing military assistance. The USSR was upset that the LIST could do such a thing thus they responded furiously to these policies by developing their own similar form of economic aid.
These were called the Molotov Plan and Common which forcefully imposed economic aid on countries such as Czech (even if these nations wanted the aid of the US instead). These actions and reactions caused tensions to greatly rise in the Cold War (Todd, 2009). Thus, it can be argued that it was not only Trauma’s policies, but Stalin’s policies that also played a major role in the Cold War. Stalin’s foreign policies such as establishing a Soviet-form of communism on a global scale and creating a buffer zone around the USSR also played a major role in starting the Cold War.
Through the evidence in Seaman’s Telegram, Truman was able to justify his aggressive policies as a result of the policies of the USSR. In addition, through Seaman’s Telegram, Keenan revealed that the Soviet Union’s domestic policies such as acclimatization, purging, etc were evil and inhumane (Todd, 2009). Thus, the US had no choice but to take a hardliner stance against Soviet-communism to prevent it from spreading. This was the primary justification of Trauma’s policies.