Dr. Simeon Paravantes

War Historian (Utrecht University)

‘‘The Cold War was not a mistake. This is the most important lesson. The administration of Harry Truman reacted decisively to the realities of post-WWII Europe and the world as a whole, without triggering a third “hot” war. The effectiveness of those policies is gauged by the fact that they were followed by every successive American President, regardless of which party they were from, until the Cold War in Europe ended. We can easily get caught up in the narrative that the Cold War was just a misunderstanding, and that things would have been better if “we could all just get along,” but the evidence clearly shows that the Soviet and American systems, not only were completely incompatible, but also determined to defeat the other. In other words, the choice was not cold war or peace, but rather cold war or hot war between the two. It is very fortunate in my view that the period from 1945 to 1991 therefore remained ‘cold’ between these two intractable enemies. This is not to say that those 46 years were free of conflict, quite the contrary. Anyone who has studied the Cold War, even superficially, will note the many violent conflicts (Korean, Suez, Vietnam, Afghanistan, to name a few) that erupted and claimed the lives of millions of people. But, in the age of thermonuclear weapons, where casualties could have been numbered in the billions, a Cold War is, to me, the much better of the two options.’’