America and the Cold War, 1941-1991: A Realist Interpretation

When the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7,1941, brought the United States into the Second World War, one of the greatest military confrontations of all time was raging along an eight hundred mile front stretching across the Soviet Union from the Baltic to the Black Sea. That gigantic Soviet-German clash on the Eastern Front endangered what remained of Europe's internal balance that had long underwritten America's historic security in the Atlantic world. The old European equilibrium could not survive a total victory of either Germany or the U.S.S.R. over the other, for the potential strength of these two giants vastly exceeded that of France and Britain. The Western democracies had disposed of German and Russian expansive power during the Great War of 1914; they would not do so again. As late as 1945 the U.S.S.R. carried the full burden of the war against Germany in the East, a war four times as massive as the war in the West. The Western Allies could not emerge from the war victorious without leaving their ally, the Soviet Union, the predominant power on the European continent