Was the Cold War univetable for the US?

[u/Ill_Emphasis_6567]

As I have heard did the US join the Cold War beacuse the British could not keep Greece from getting Communist during the Greek Civil War themselves, but was the US really in a position after WWII that forced them to do this? Or was it just geopolitical considerations that made them more or less voluntarly joining Greece and Britain's conflict?

[u/AutoModerator]

Welcome to /r/AskHistorians. Please Read Our Rules before you comment in this community. Understand that rule breaking comments get removed.

Please consider Clicking Here for RemindMeBot as it takes time for an answer to be written. Additionally, for weekly content summaries, Click Here to Subscribe to our Weekly Roundup.

We thank you for your interest in this question, and your patience in waiting for an in-depth and comprehensive answer to show up. In addition to RemindMeBot, consider using our Browser Extension, or getting the Weekly Roundup. In the meantime our Twitter, and Sunday Digest feature excellent content that has already been written!

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[u/Unlikely_Cherry7211]

So, the first thing to understand is that by the time of the Greek crisis the Cold War was already underway. At its core, the Cold War was about the conflicting security interests of the US and USSR. During the Bolshevik revolution and ensuing civil war, the US sent troops to support the Russian whites in an ultimately futile effort to prevent a communist Russia. The US did not recognize the Bolshevik government until the 1930’s. As late as 1940, you will find President Roosevelt condemning the USSR as hopelessly despotic, in the wake of its invasion of Finland: “The Soviet Union, as everybody who has the courage to face the fact knows, is run by a dictatorship as absolute as any other dictatorship in the world. It has allied itself with another dictatorship, and it has invaded a neighbor so infinitesimally small that it could do no conceivable possible harm to the Soviet Union, a neighbor which seeks only to live at peace as a democracy, and a liberal, forward-looking democracy at that.”(will link to this speech at the end of post). What changed, of course, was the wartime alliance against Hitler. And without a common enemy acting as a glue, the alliance was doomed to failure. Both sides expressed mutual suspicion at the others’ intentions. Stalin was especially unwilling to trust the west after the devastation wrought by Germany during operation Barbarossa, and the US was made uneasy by Red troops on the march in Eastern Europe. Both states were emerging superpowers by the end of the war, and took actions that they believed to be in the interests of their national security. In turn, the actions of one aroused anger from the other, causing the relationship to deteriorate and tensions to rise. Early episodes such as Stalin’s attempts to wrestle territorial concessions from the Turks, or the continued presence of soviet troops in Iran, are illustrative of this. Both also predate the Truman doctrine of 1947, where the US pledged to prevent the fall of the Greek monarchy to communist rebels.(Here’s the Roosevelt speech https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-the-delegates-the-american-youth-congress-washington-dc )