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One of the great historiographical disputes of the past century hasfocused upon the causality of the Cold War, with intense scholarlyattention being devoted to casting the blame for the historical ordealupon either the Soviet Union or the United States. This essay expoundsthe moderate stance that neither camp shoulders clear culpability and

therefore that the US and the USSR were jointly responsible for theoutbreak of the Cold War.

On the American front, the perception of Soviet expansionism wasinstrumental in the decision by members of Trumans administration toconceptualize and execute various measures in order to contain thespread of communism, including the economic lifeblood of post-warEurope, the Marshall Plan. The fears of Soviet expansionism, whilecertainly validated by the USSRs acquisition of East Germany andterritories extending to the Curzon Line, were exaggerated in theAmerican imagination as a result of widespread suspicion of the

communist ideology, which was popularly understood to incorporate anoffensive and militaristic element. In reality, what were construed to beSoviet expansionist tendencies might have been the defensive andpre-emptive moves of the USSR to secure itself against a Germannemesis that had threatened it twice in its recent past. Hence, thepossibility of an American overreaction to ideologically situated fearsmight have accelerated the onset of the Cold War.

While ideology might have accidentally fuelled misperceptions in thestrategic realm of the budding conflict, its role in creating an ideationalrift within the alliance of Second World War victors was both purposiveand influential during the opening phase of the Cold War. Americasseemingly ruthless use of the atomic bomb and its insistence onmonopolizing nuclear technology seemed to confirmed Sovietmisgivings about the forces of capitalism, while the brutalization andrepression carried out by the Stalinist regime in Moscow contradictedthe liberal vision America held for the post-war world. At their cores,the capitalistic democracy practiced in the West and the Marxist-Leninist paradigm governing the Soviet Unions behavior wereincompatible, leading to divergent views in each bloc about thepolitical ideology that ought to prevail in the post-war world. Thesalience of ideology to both sides and their mutual refusal to budgefrom their ideological stations made conflict an imminent possibility.

Finally, the culpability of both sides may also be established whenseeing the Cold Wars genesis as the consequence of economicdecisions. The United States, which by 1945 had cast off its formerlyisolationist stance in order to fully embrace the vision of a global freetrade environment, found that vision compromised by the SovietUnion, which closed itself off to the possibility of open trade,accompanied by an entire bloc of Eastern European nations. The USSR

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envisioned a global economic environment that was based on acentralized, command-style economy, divorced from what was seen asthe corrupting influence of capitalism. It was when both theseeconomic ideologies came into collision around the fringes of the IronCurtain that additional fuel was added to the stoking fires of the Cold

War.

In conclusion, the causality of the Cold War whether one is disposedto understand the event through ideological, strategic or economiclenses was evidently the consequence of a bipolar arrangement inwhich two great powers, endowed with post-war hegemony anddevoted to divergent governing philosophies, came to collide, resultingin the regrettable events of the five decades of the Cold War.