The Cold War is the political and military confrontation between the capitalist United States and its allies and the communist Soviet Union. It raises a controversial question: Who started the Cold War? This question has led to three schools, who respectively blame the USSR, the US, or both, corresponding to the orthodox interpretation, the revisionist interpretation, and the post-revisionist interpretation. According to the evidence in the Long Telegram1, NSC 682, and Novikov Telegram3, the revisionist interpretation can be proven to be the best interpretation for the start of the Cold War. The Cold War is important for us to comprehend that the US and China are competing to see who has more influence on Taiwan and control it.

The three schools provide different reasons for the start of the Cold War. The orthodox interpretation believes that the USSR started the Cold War for two reasons. It believes the USSR wanted to control the surrounding countries to protect itself because it was afraid of being invaded and it wanted to help the spread of communism in this way. The revisionist interpretation blames the US for starting the Cold War. First, it thinks the US did not take into account Soviet unease about security issues. Second, the US opposed communism and spread capitalism in order to keep its own market from being overtaken by the Soviet economic system. The third school is post-revisionist interpretation. This school indicates that both countries should be blamed for their incompatible basic ideologies and the Cold War was the result of hostility between capitalism in the US and communism in the USSR.

George Kennan’s “Long Telegram” is a great illustration of the US’s aggressive and uncompromising view of the USSR following the Second World War for two reasons. First, Kennan acknowledges that the USSR has a basic and “neurotic” fear of invasion that predates the formation of the USSR. He also acknowledges that, as the Soviets understood, “Internal conflicts of capitalism inevitably generate wars.” One of the two kinds of war being, “wars of intervention against socialist world.” In this case, the USSR is only acting within its national interest in the same way the US might if a perceived threat were at its door. Second, Kennan acknowledges too that the Western, capitalist nations were worried the USSR would infiltrate their colonies and promote independence movements. What Kennan does not say explicitly, but implies here, is that access to markets and resources in colonies was more important to the US than the promotion of democracy beyond Europe. These two points show that the US was accommodating of the USSR’s legitimate security concerns, and showed their emphasis on not spreading democracy worldwide, but an open door for Western nations to extract resources from developing nations.

NSC 68 is a great example of why the US and its aggressive policies are to blame for the start of the Cold War, because it shows how aggressive US policy was towards the Soviets and how important economics was to the US’s thinking. The document makes no acknowledgement of the USSR’s security claims other than pointing out the US is the only major threat to the USSR. Knowing the US is seen as the only threat, calls for a build up in military, economic, and political influence by the US, clearly to antagonize the Rusians and “contain” their influence and, “foster the seeds of destruction within the Soviet system.” For a country such as Russia that has been invaded many times before, this clearly is taken as a threat to their security. The author of the document also illustrates that US officials were scared of the potential Soviet threat to the economy. According to the author, the Soviet system threatens a “free society” that is based on international trade and lowering tariffs. Keeping in mind that Geroge Kennan cautioned US officials on Soviet interference in Western colonies and markets, it is clear that the threat to the US was in the loss of pro-capitalist markets.4 This all shows US policy makers ignored Russian fears for security and that the US was fearful of losing markets essential for their own strength and prosperity over other nations’ strength and prosperity.

Novikov Telegram shows the foreign policy of the United States reflects the ambition of the US to expand capitalism and achieve world hegemony. Many representatives of the American ruling class believed that the US had the right to rule the world. Since they had this idea, they would inevitably take action. Their first action is diplomacy. After World War II, the losses in Europe and Asia were extremely severe. Therefore, they needed a lot of goods to restore the national economy. This provided a means for the US to import monopoly capital through the economy. As Novikov said, “such a development would mean a serious strengthening of the economic position of the United States in the whole world and would be a stage on the road to world domination by the United States”5. This approach would have given the US unimpeded expansion in Europe and Asia were it not for the fact that the USSR had not been destroyed in the war. Their second action is to strengthen the military. The size of the US military has been greatly increased by the system of military service. At the same time, they increased military spending and established a large number of bases between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. “A large number of these bases and points of support are located outside the boundaries of the United States”6, which indicates that the US navy had a strong sense of aggression. All this shows that the United States wanted to invade other countries and forced capitalism in order to oppose communism, and the USSR was the biggest obstacle for the US on this road. The purpose of the US was to eliminate the spread of communism by the Soviet Union7.

Because the United States desperately hoped to dominate the world, enter colonies and obtain resources, and was afraid of losing its market, it wanted to remove the Soviet Union's obstacle to the United States– communism. This is why the Cold War started. The US established a large number of bases at sea before the Cold War era, indicating that they wanted to prove their influence and dominate the world. This is like the current US warships crossing the Taiwan Strait. They want to disrupt the peace between China and Taiwan, in order to show that they can travel freely in the Taiwan Strait, and show that they have a huge influence on Taiwan.