by Michael Mercadante

Created on: April 23, 2009   Last Updated: April 25, 2009

Immediately following the second World War, longtime allies The United States and The Soviet Union drifted away from each other ideologically and politically, to the point that each regarded the other as public enemy number one. This period of hostile tension between the world's two superpower nations lasted nearly 40 years, and became known as the Cold War ("cold" because no actual military battles were fought, as opposed to a "hot" war, such as World War II).

Who is to blame for this? Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin maintained at least a hospitable working relationship during World War II, at least up until the former's death in 1944. Thereafter, Harry Truman was running the show. Is Truman responsible for altering political course away from the Soviets, or did Stalin set his country on a collision course with America following the death of FDR?

Truman, according to historian Thomas Paterson, deserves his fair share of the blame, for several reasons. First, he was grossly inexperienced with foreign relations. Paterson recounts that "Truman as vice president had never been included in high-level foreign policy discussions; between the inauguration and the president's death, Truman had only met three times with Roosevelt".

Truman, according to Paterson, responded to his inexperience with force of character, assuming an almost cartoonish bravado to disguise his ignorance of foreign affairs. Paterson also attributes some of Truman's confidence to his knowledge of the first successful detonation of an atomic bomb. The bomb represented superiority for Truman, and allowed him to proceed in a cocky, egotistical manner. Paterson quotes Henry Stimson, Truman's Secretary of War, from his personal diary: "When he got to the meeting after having read this report [about the atomic test] he was a changed man. He told the Russians just where they got off and generally bossed the whole meeting". That is the power of the atomic bomb, that it can transform a simple salesman from Missouri with no worldly experience into a powerfully confident world leader who can verbally berate superpower allies.

Unlike the rest of the combatants in World War II, the United States fought no battles on its own soil, and so not only remained intact, but emerged from the war wealthier and more powerful than it had ever been, with a booming economy. Paterson suggests that Truman was worried about his nation's economy when he considered his stance on Communism, saying that "they believed that a

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