Cold War: Clash Of Ideologies

Onset of the Cold War: Clash of Ideologies

The Cold War is an important milestone in the world’s history; for almost 45 years it divided the world into two antipodal camps: the West-bloc headed by the USA and the Soviet-bloc led by the USSR. While its timeframe has been more or less agreed on, its origins are still a disputable matter (cf. Cox 26-27). Naturally, the difficulty in assessment and interpretation of possible factors – political, economic, military and ideological – originates in the extreme complexity of the issue: as an international affair, the Cold War, in this or that sense, influenced the whole world. Taking into account the above-mentioned complexity of the case, this assignment focuses only on one issue: the interdependence

In his “Moscow and the Marshall Plan”, published in 1994, Geoffrey Roberts seems to have combined his research interests by writing about the origins of the Cold War and particularly the role of the USSR in it. To be more precise, he argues that the ideological shift within the Soviet Union after the World War II with the following misinterpretation of the U.S. foreign policy in general and the Marshall Plan in particular led to the USSR “embarking on its Cold War” (Roberts 1381; italics added); i.e. since “Soviet ideology, like any other, was more than a set of beliefs”, but “a language of political communication” (1382), it influenced the USSR’s reception of the Marshall Plan and led to the eventual estrangement of the two superpowers and, finally, to the Cold War. He also argues that prior to 1947 both sides – the USSR, as well as the USA – were trying to cooperate and coexist peacefully with each other (Roberts 1382).Thus, as well as Leffler, Roberts does not seem to believe in the inevitability of the Cold War proceeding only from the mutual exclusiveness of the USA’s and the USSR’s ideological natures from the very beginning. Yet, as already mentioned, the author claims that ideology was the main reason why the Soviet Union did eventually launch the conflict. However, as Roberts ‘hints’, not only Soviet ideology allowed for biased actions; it is possible to assume that the USA was also extremely loyal to its ideology: it developed and initiated the Marshall Plan, in such a way indirectly catalysing the outbreak of the Cold War. Arguing his case, the author moves chronologically through the case of Marshall Plan, explaining in the context of political history the escalation of the situation in 1947, which, after all, ended with the Cold War. His research Roberts bases on