One of the great historiographical disputes of the past century has focused upon the causality of the Cold

War, with intense scholarly attention being devoted to casting the blame for the historical ordeal upon either the Soviet Union or the United States. This essay expounds the moderate stance that neither camp shoulders clear culpability and therefore that the US and the USSR were jointly responsible for the outbreak of the Cold War. On the American front, the perception of Soviet expansionism was instrumental in the decision by members of Trumans administration to conceptualize and execute various measures in order to contain the spread of communism, including the economic lifeblood of post-war Europe, the Marshall Plan. The fears of Soviet expansionism, while certainly validated by the USSRs acquisition of East Germany and territories extending to the Curzon Line, were exaggerated in the American imagination as a result of widespread suspicion of the communist ideology, which was popularly understood to incorporate an offensive and militaristic element. In reality, what were construed to be Soviet expansionist tendencies might have been the defensive and pre-emptive moves of the USSR to secure itself against a German nemesis that had threatened it twice in its recent past. Hence, the possibility of an American overreaction to ideologically situated fears might have accelerated the onset of the Cold War. While ideology might have accidentally fuelled misperceptions in the strategic realm of the budding conflict, its role in creating an ideational rift within the alliance of Second World War victors was both purposive and influential during the opening phase of the Cold War. Americas seemingly ruthless use of the atomic bomb and its insistence on monopolizing nuclear technology seemed to confirmed Soviet misgivings about the forces of capitalism, while the brutalization and repression carried out by the Stalinist regime in Moscow contradicted the liberal vision America held for the post-war world. At their cores, the capitalistic democracy practiced in the West and the MarxistLeninist paradigm governing the Soviet Unions behavior were incompatible, leading to divergent views in each bloc about the political ideology that ought to prevail in the post-war world. The salience of ideology to both sides and their mutual refusal to budge from their ideological stations made conflict an imminent possibility. Finally, the culpability of both sides may also be established when seeing the Cold Wars genesis as the consequence of economic decisions. The United States, which by 1945 had cast off its formerly isolationist stance in order to fully embrace the vision of a global free trade environment, found that vision compromised by the Soviet Union, which closed itself off to the possibility of open trade, accompanied by an entire bloc of Eastern European nations. The USSR

envisioned a global economic environment that was based on a centralized, command-style economy, divorced from what was seen as the corrupting influence of capitalism. It was when both these economic ideologies came into collision around the fringes of the Iron Curtain that additional fuel was added to the stoking fires of the Cold War. In conclusion, the causality of the Cold War whether one is disposed to understand the event through ideological, strategic or economic lenses was evidently the consequence of a bipolar arrangement in which two great powers, endowed with post-war hegemony and devoted to divergent governing philosophies, came to collide, resulting in the regrettable events of the five decades of the Cold War.