The German Origins of the Cold War

What follows is less a conventional book review than an abridged summary of Marc Trachtenberg’s A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945–1963, along with some essential contextualization. Trachtenberg’s singularly comprehensive account of the Cold War, backed by his exhaustive command of the documentary record and a compelling narrative, renders such an approach entirely appropriate. At the center of the work stands a single thesis about the purpose of the NATO system: the dual containment of the Soviet Union and of Germany. It could well be summed up by the NATO Secretary General Lord Ismay’s famous adage that the alliance existed “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down.”

The first half of the book traces the disintegration of the Washington–Moscow concords following the Second World War. Trachtenberg attributes the demise of this entente in a bold tone-setting assertion: “The Cold War did not develop out of the quarrel over eastern Europe. It was the dispute over Iran and Turkey that instead played the key role in triggering the conflict.” With the Red Army occupying half of postwar Europe, Stalin was ever more emboldened to press Soviet claims in keeping with his conviction that the bourgeois powers would sooner or later turn on one another. As a result, he abandoned his demand for a Soviet occupation zone in Japan and turned instead against British interests in Turkey and Iran. It was American firmness over Turkey, in the crisis that peaked in August 1946, that induced the Soviets to withdraw their demands—among them a rather imperious claim to the former Italian Libya. Those demands did much to bury the original conception of a four-power Germany administered under a common import-export program.