Who do different historians see as being responsible for initiating the Cold War?

The Cold War was characterised by two decades of antagonism predominantly between the rigidly hostile blocs, the Soviet Union and the United States. Post World War Two peace making resulted in clashing views of the world order, as both blocs held that their ideologies applied to all nations and people. Their stance against each other has resulted in mixed historiography over the responsibility of initiating the Cold War. The Orthodox American View argues that the USSR initiated the Cold War, and the American reaction was a brave and essential response of free men against communist aggression. Post WWII, Stalin was unwilling to cooperate with the west, as it was the communist belief that fascism was the logical outcome of capitalism. Therefore it saw the USA as moving on the path towards fascism that was recently trodden by Germany. Because the USSR lacked natural means of defence, it adopted a protocol of enlargement and surrounding itself with satellite states. Revisionist historiography, however, tends to see the USA as responsible for initiating the Cold War. American policy-makers quickly abandoned the wartime policy of collaboration, and encouraged by the creation of the atomic bomb, the US pursued a course of aggression designed to establish democratic-capitalist states on the border of the Soviet Union. This new radical American policy forced the USSR to take measures to protect itself and promote its own ideology. Americans saw any defensive action taken by the Soviets as an encroachment on freedom and responded with aggression through the development of weapons, justified by the argument that if the USA didn’t develop weapons, the Soviets would. America’s anti-communist measures were not defensive; rather they were a “fully-fledged neo-colonialist” campaign to establish American domination in Asia and Europe. The USA had no desire to cooperate with the Soviet Union and was therefore responsible for initiating the Cold War. Henry A. Wallace made the observation that the Russians and Americans were simultaneously attempting to increase their sphere of influence, and therefore as guilty as each other for initiating the Cold War. The intricacies of the two ideologies were no longer important; rather it was the interpretations of each other’s worldviews that resulted in aggressive policies and ultimately resulted in the Cold War.