Was Franklin D. Roosevelt responsible for the outbreak of the Cold War?

Question

Was he? If so, why?

Answer 1

Roosevelt and Stalin share equal responsibility. FDR because he was too idealistic to realize that Stalin did not want good relations with the U.S. and did not address the threat earlier. Stalin because of his distrust of Western influences, but of course, all of the Russian people felt that way. After World War II, the Russians felt betrayed by the Allies because they saw their hesitancy to enter as being an attempt to get Germany and Russia to exhaust each other so neither would gain power.

Answer 2

Yes. He was a good president domestically but a poor one when it came to foreign policy. He naively thought that he could deal with Soviet dictator Stalin and trust Stalin to keep his word.

At the Yalta in Conference in 1945, he agreed to let the Russians occupy nearly all of Eastern Europe plus about 2/3 of Germany when the war was over. The occupation was supposed to be only temporary. Later, another conference was supposed to convene in which free elections would be held in the eastern European countries and the new boundaries of Germany and the Eastern European countries would be determined jointly by Britain, France Russia and the U.S. It never happened. Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945 just weeks before the Second World War ended.

His successor, Vice President Harry Truman, was automatically at a negotiating disadvantage with Stalin at the Potsdam Conference the following summer because of the agreements Roosevelt had made with Stalin. Therefore, Truman could not prevent the Russian occupations of Eastern Europe and North Korea after the war.

However, Truman was later able to prevent the Russians from grabbing Greece, Turkey, Iran, West Berlin and South Korea. He was not a fool about Russia's real intentions like Roosevelt was.

Answer 3

No more so than Stalin or Churchill, A serious bone of contention was Poland. the war started on 9-1-39 upon the invasion of Poland on Sept' 17 1939 USSR invaded Poland from the East trapping about 3 million Polish troops behind the Bug river line. They were treated badly by Soviet troops and deported to prisons and forced labor in eastern Russia In 1942 the Germans had invaded Russia ending the Molotov Von Ribbentrop pact. of 1938. the Germans found mass graves at Katyin forest in the Ukraine of Polish officers, thousands of them all shot in the head. USSR tried to say the Nazi did it but they had been dead for more than a year and Germany had only just attacked. At the end of the war Churchill and Roosevelt pushed for a guarantee of polish sovereignty that Stalin refused to give. Also the Soviets were hunting down Polish underground fighters who had fought the Nazi's and were arresting and killing them. this made for tough times between former allies. It was down hill from there.

Answer 4

He was complicit in it by treating the USSR as an ally rather than as simply a (somewhat hostile) co-belligerent which it really was. The concessions made to Stalin, allowing for a de facto Soviet empire postwar, didn't help matters any.

Answer 5

Its debatable whether he was or not, but to really come to your own conclusion read the following links