Was the Cold War all a Misunderstanding? And What About Ukraine

For all of my life, which started in 1958, the depths of the cold war, it has been an article of faith that the USSR was bent on global conquest, and only the containment of the West, led by the US, preserved the fate of the free world. According to this view, Stalin was second only to Hitler in desire for lebensraum. It was this view, articulated by George Kennan to Truman, and the resulting Truman doctrine, that started the cold war and produced the nuclear arms race. But how true was this interpretation? And if we misinterpreted the USSR and Stalin, and spent the cold war and almost 50 years and uncounted trillions of dollars, what does that say about our ability to interpret the current situation in Ukraine, or our relationship with China? I am currently reading A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, Neil Sheehan's biography of Bernard Schriever. Bernard Schriever, who also hailed from San Antonio, was an Army Air Corps officer in World War II who went on in the post-war Air Force to manage the development of the US ICBM forces, which had a very rocky development. In describing the transition from ally to enemy that occurred immediately after the war, Sheehan describes the view of the world that Stalin held, as has been determined by Russian historians Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, who sifted through Soviet archives that became available in 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union. That world view and associated territorial aims are different from that which I was told all my life. Stalin was a monster. He slaughtered millions of his own people, through paranoia and sadism. But he was not an expansionist monster in the likeness of Hitler.Stalin believed the post-war world would be multipolar, with Germany and Japan regaining their strength. He believed in the triumph of Socialism-Communism, but not through conquest. Rather, he believed that the Capitalist countries, such as the US and Great Britain, would eventually compete with each other over markets and colonies. He wanted control in Eastern Europe as a buffer with Germany. In Asia, he wanted the return of southern Sakhalin that Russia lost to Japan in 1904. He wanted to control access to the Mediterranean through the Turkish straits, and he wanted to stay in Northern Iran. He had no intention of invading Western Europe, the dash to the Channel through Fulda that every American Army officer would anguish over for the next 50 years. On February 9, 1946 Stalin gave his first major speech following the end of WW II. In it, he called for a return in economic development to the prewar emphasis with three five-year plans. In his speech, he praised the anti-fascist coalition of the Soviet Union, Great Britain, America, and freedom loving peoples. George Kennan, the US charge d'affaires, responded by sending the long telegram, which set into dogma an interpretation that became the doctrinal basis for containment. I remember reading the long telegram. I remember it being quoted as reality. The long telegram stated that coexistence between the USSR and the US was impossible. Kennan saw the USSR as "committed fanatically to the belief that with US there can be no permanent modus vivendi, that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken if Soviet power is to be secured." The long telegram argued that the Soviet Union was highly sensitive to the logic of force, and would withdraw when faced therewith. The long telegram was accepted eagerly and was widely read. George Kennan returned from Moscow and was given his own State Department planning section. His reputation was made. Meanwhile, with demobilization the US relied on its sole possession of the atomic bomb, and estimates that the USSR would take decades to produce their own. The work of the atomic spies, Klaus Fuchs and Ted Hall, would ensure that the Soviets would detonate their first atomic bomb, a copy of "Fat Man", in 1949. This became the threat driving the super, the H-bomb, and the cold war arms race was really on in earnest. If the world view outlined by the two Russian historians is true, if Stalin was not bent on world conquest, if Kennan misunderstood Stalin's Marxist-Leninist rhetoric, is it possible that the cold war didn't have to happen? Or at least not in the way it did? If we were able to misunderstand Stalin and send our country into 50 years of competition and spending for weapons of mass destruction, what does that say for our ability to understand Russia today? In America, we have this belief that we have the one true way for everything in life, that God made us unique, gave us something special. We have a tendency to travel the world and insist that everyone else be like us, become us. Yet as Americans, what's the one most important thing we want? We want to be left alone, to do things the way we want, to live our life the way we choose. Isn't it time we treated the world and other countries the way we want to be treated ourselves?