| Why did the U.S. adopt Cold War policies in the early postwar period? This study makes use of theories at multiple levels of analysis--systemic, domestic political, and cognitive processes--to explain the adoption of American Cold War policies. Social psychological theories and hypotheses are used to account for variations in U.S. policymakers' information processing about the Soviet Union from 1944-47. The study identifies important changes in the beliefs of four men who were particularly influential in shaping the redirection of American foreign policy from cooperation with the Soviet Union to containment--Averell Harriman, Harry S. Truman, James F. Byrnes, and Dean Acheson. Content analysis techniques were applied to documentary evidence from 1944-47 to determine the timing and degree of change in each man's beliefs. Finally, various lower-level hypotheses and generalizations from alternative historical interpretations of the Cold War--realist, systemic, revisionist, and domestic political--are tested in the historical case studies. The results show that a multi-level explanation is needed to account for the development of American Cold War policies, including variables on the level of the international system, domestic politics, and individual policymakers' cognitive processes. In the early postwar period, systemic theory predicts Soviet-American conflict, but does not discriminate among various forms that the rivalry could have assumed. The American domestic political context and the Cold War ideology help to explain why U.S.-Soviet conflict took the form of a "zero-sum" game. In March 1947, to win public support for aid to Greece and Turkey, Truman portrayed the Greek civil war as part of an ongoing struggle between democracy and dictatorship. But the domestic political requirements of policy legitimation do not explain why Truman and other U.S. officials accepted the major premises of the Cold War rhetoric used to obtain public support for the containment policy. Neither systems theory nor the American political context can account for variations in the timing and degree to which Harriman, Truman, Byrnes, and Acheson adopted the Cold War ideology. Cognitive social psychological theories are needed to explain differences in information processing which led to variations in the timing and extent to which policymakers accepted major premises of the Cold War ideology. |
