Was the US responsible for Cold War?

Question

Why?

Answer 1

The "Cold War" wasn't actually a war.

The term "Cold War" was introduced in 1947 by Americans Bernard Baruch and Walter Lippmann to describe emerging tensions between the two former wartime allies.

The tention started because the U.S. and the Soviet Union could not agree on how to reconstruct the postwar world even before the end of the World War II

The first school of interpretation to emerge in the U.S. was the "orthodox" one. For more than a decade after the end of the Second World War, few U.S. historians challenged the official U.S. interpretation of the beginnings of the Cold War. This "orthodox" school places the responsibility for the Cold War on the Soviet Union and its expansion into Eastern Europe.

U.S. involvement in Vietnam in the 1960s disillusioned many historians with the premises of "containment", and thus with the assumptions of the "orthodox" approach to understanding the Cold War. "Revisionist" accounts emerged in the wake of the Vietnam War, in the context of a larger rethinking of the U.S. role in international affairs, which was seen more in terms of American empire or hegemony.

While the new school of thought spanned many differences among individual scholars, the works comprising it were generally responses in one way or another to William Appleman Williams' landmark 1959 volume, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. Williams challenged the long-held assumptions of "orthodox" accounts, arguing that Americans had always been an empire-building people, even while American leaders denied it.


I think The Soviet Union started it, but the USA didn't make it any better.

The USA became so scared of Communism that we made some really bad choices! Vietnam and Korea.

Answer 2

The United States was in the Cold War with Russia. Both nations, I believe, were equally responsible for triggering the Cold War, and all of close calls, that came with it.

Answer 3

Depends on which side of the conflict you are on. The U.S. did send armed troops into Soviet Russia after that nation signed a separate peace with Imperial Germany in World War One. Supposedly that National Guard regiment from Michigan was there to guard Allied munitions which were still stored at Archangel and Murmansk. But, beginning in February 1918, they fought pitched battles against the 25 Red Army Division on both sides of the Dvina River. Some are still buried under the frozen tundra. The rest lie in White Cross Cemetery in Detroit. When Soviet Russia sent their first Consular official to the U.S. in the 1920s he was arrested and imprisoned in NY State for being a communist!
Many think that the Cold War started in the post-Cold War Two period. I like to think it started when the British Minister of Munitions, Winston Churchill, convinced President Woodrow Wilson to dispatch those troops.

Answer 4

Yes the US was responsible because had they waited for the Russians to lick their wounds from the front in Europe, the cold war probably would not have happened. The U.S. went ahead without the help from the Russians (who were promised northern lands in Japan for their help, and perhaps the U.S. didn't want any disputes over land) and bombed Japan. The USSR was angry that the U.S. went ahead without them. So to sum it up, yes the U.S. was responsible because if they had waited for the Russians another day, they could have taken Japan by foot rather by air. Granted that this saved many American lives from dying, the nuclear bomb really damaged the towns of Nagasaki and Hiroshima because of the radiation where there are still child birth defects and other medical issues 60 years later.

Answer 5

After WW2 the Soviets did not leave eastern Europe. They set up "puppet" governments. So even though there weren't Soviet flags flying over them, there may as well have been. When there were uprisings, the Soviet army was "invited" to "help" quash the rebellion.

Then they built the Berlin wall, they put missiles in Cuba, and Nikita Khrushchev looked at the leaders of the Western World and said "We will bury you."

Consider, no one ever tried to escape "into" a Soviet backed country.

So, in point of fact, no. We were NOT equally responsible for the Cold War.

It was the Soviet's fault. I know it isn't PC, but I'm old enough to remember.

Answer 6

Which Cold War WW2 with Germany? If you think every time the US was in a war it was our fault you should be speaking some language other than English. Yes if Japan won you would not have been allowed to ask that question.

Answer 7

There would have been no Cold War had there not been two adequately powerful, large, densely-inhabited groups both believing in their own ideas and weapons and both after world leadership.

Answer 8

The US is responsible for everything bad. Can anyone name one thing that America ever did right? Besides Jim that is.

I am so sick of America being blamed for everything. Feel free to move. It is a free country.

Answer 9

The U.S.A. made a responsible response to Communist aggression and expansion.

Answer 10

It take 2 to tango. no one party is fully responsible