Cultural Conflict: Why our diplomatic endeavors with the USSR between 1943-1946 may have led us to war

I say everyone has a favorite war. It's a silly thought, isn't it? But, still, everyone has a conflict that calls to them for whatever reason. For me, that conflict is the Cold War. Now, do not take that to mean I love the violence and terror that it perpetuated. What I love is the mechanics of it. Never before in history have we seen such a large scale conflict where the two parties involved, the US and the USSR, couldn't escalate the conflict. It forced us to relook at our diplomatic efforts and find a new way to fight wars.

Why am I talking about this? Mostly because I am starting a new project. Often, we give credit to the power vacuum created after the end of World War 2 as the catalyst for the start of the Cold War. That, or we think of the conflict as an inevitability given a difference in ideology. I, personally, agree with a mix of both. However, one thing I believe people do not give enough credit to in the causation of the Cold War is the diplomatic situation between the US and USSR during WW2. So, in my effort to explore this, I am beginning a novel investigation into the American ambassador to the USSR from 1943-1946 (during the shift between alliance in WW2 and hatred in the Cold War), W. Averell Harriman.

Published in 1975, Harriman wrote the book Special Envoy to Churchill and Stalin, 1941-1946. This details his time being an unofficial representative of FDR and the US to Churchill during 1941-1943. Then, it proceeds to intimately recount his time serving as the ambassador to the USSR from 1943-1946. He had passion, no doubt about that, and was a skilled politician. However, he also seemed a perfect candidate to upset the USSR. He had been chairman on multiple company boards that funded the rise of the Nazi Party indirectly. He was born incredibly wealthy in New York and admits in his book to have been good at flaunting it in the way he dressed. What's more, he is often described as a "warmonger", which may not have aligned very well with the war exhaustion that the Soviets were experiencing by the end of WW2. These perfect misalignments in culture led me to raise the question of whether our diplomatic programs, specially in regards to Harriman's administration, were part of what inflamed our conflict with the USSR. By comparing the developments of the respective cultures of the US and USSR, then considering how these differences impacted Harriman's ambassadorship, I hope to quell my curiosity for just why our cultural differences, expressed by Harriman, may have led us into one of the most significant conflicts of the late 1900s, the Cold War.

If that interests you, stick around!