The Cold War Begins

The alliance between the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union was always a marriage of desperation. It existed for one reason: Adolf Hitler. The three powers shared almost nothing else, not economic systems, not political values, not visions of the postwar world. Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin smiled for photographs at Yalta in February 1945, dividing up a Europe they hadn't yet finished liberating, and the cracks were already visible in the plaster.

Stalin wanted security. The Soviet Union had lost roughly 27 million people in the war, a number so large it resists comprehension. Entire cities had been reduced to rubble. The western Soviet Union was a landscape of burned villages, shattered railways, and mass graves. Stalin's conclusion was straightforward: never again. He intended to surround the Soviet Union with friendly, meaning communist, buffer states so that no army could ever roll across the Polish plain toward Moscow again.

The Americans and British wanted something different. They spoke of free elections, open markets, self-determination. These were genuine beliefs, but they were also convenient ones. A Europe of democracies trading freely would be a Europe open to American goods, American investment, American influence. Idealism and self-interest pointed in the same direction.