Cold War Escalation

I believe that there were three main events that caused the escalation of the Cold War. This essay is going to assess how these three events contributed to the escalation of the Cold War and how important they were to its continuation.

In my opinion the first strains in the relation between the two sides started at Potsdam more then at Yalta. When we look at Yalta we only see agreements such as "Hold free elections in Soviet occupied territory"; "Set up UN" etc. but it's in Potsdam that the first disagreements start to emerge. For example they did decide on a few new things but the main focus lies on the disagreements. The decision to set up a coalition government in Poland was not honored by the Soviets who removed all the ex-members of the
After the defeat of Nazi Germany the civil war that was going on in Greece between the monarchists and the communists came more into focus. The British helped restore the royal government into power despite resistance from the communists however the draining impact of WWII was being felt. In February 1947 they warned the USA that they could not maintain troops in Greece. Truman could not let yet another eastern European state fall into the hands of communists so in March 1947 Truman issued the Truman Doctrine, which was designed as a response to the situation in Greece. Since Stalin kept to his agreement with Churchill that Greece was an area of British influence and did nothing to directly help the Greek Communists one cannot really say that the Truman Doctrine further deteriorated relations between East and West. The Marshall Plan on the other hand which was a plan to provide US financial support to war-torn Europe had a more visible effect on the relations between the two sides. In theory the Marshal aid was available for any European country but in practice it went to only to countries that provided economic records ad opened up their economy to US capitalist interests i.e. Western Europe. The conditions imposed on the right to apply for the aid made it so that it was impossible for communist states to apply without a fundamental change to their system. The Soviet Union viewed the Marshall aid as nothing more than an attack on communism. The Soviet foreign minister, Molotov, condemned it as a foreign interference in the states of Europe and labeled the plan 'dollar imperialism.' The USSR effectively declared war on the Marshall Plan by tightening their hold over Eastern Europe through the setting up of two organizations. Cominform, an organization to coordinate communist parties and groups thought out Europe set up in 1947, and Comecon, an organization that