To what extent was Churchill’s ‘Iron Curtain’ speech the root cause of the Cold War?
After the end of the Second World War Germany was split by the victorious powers in four occupied zones. Between 1945 and 1949 the allied controlling advice took over the management. In the Potsdam conference the USA, Great Britain and the Soviet Union negotiated about the future of the German empire. However, differences between the west powers and the Soviet Union led fast to the fact that from the cooperation a cold war became which divided Germany into two states.
The cold war is a name for the discussion continuing from 1945 to 1991 between both power blocs west and the east which was delivered with all means, but below the threshold of an open, direct war. The fight ran in economic, diplomatic, ideological, technological, cultural and sporty areas. Leaders of the western power bloc were the USA. In the eastern power bloc the Soviet Union took the leading position.
Contradicting interests caused mutual mistrust and hostility. To important components of the cold war the arms race and a purposeful policy of alliances (NATO, Warsaw Pact) developed.
The east west conflict escalated during on the regional level restricted conflicts (e.g., Berlin blockade, Korea war, Cuba crisis), nevertheless, dominated the international politics till 1989/90.
The cold war can be divided into several phases:
• The staggering of the fronts (1945 - 1947)
• The education of power blocs and the escalation of the cold war (1948 - 1953)
• The attempt of a ‘peaceful coexistence’ between the east and west (1953 - 1961)
• Relaxation (1961 - 1980)
• New confrontation (1980 - 1989)
• Resolution of the Eastern bloc (1989 - 1991)

Stalin Lenins thesis of the inevitability of wars with capitalism confirms in a speech before the colonel Sowjet on the 9th of February, 1946.
British prime minister Winston Churchill used in his famous speech from the 5th of March, 1946 in Fulton the concept ‘iron curtain’ which he had used already once - exactly on the 12th of May, 1945 - in a telegramme to US-president Truman. Two passages from this speech: “It seems that an iron curtain above the continent came down from Szczecin on the Baltic Sea to Trieste at the Mediterranean Sea” and “The communist parties try to receive everywhere totalitarian power”. Stalin insulted Churchill, therefore, as racists, as “new Hitler”.
From April to July, 1946: With the second foreign minister conference over Germany US Secretary of State James Byrnes suggests the economic union of four occupied zones. Soviet foreign minister Molotow persists on the reperation claims of his government and causes with the departure of his delegation the demolition of the conference.
January, 1947: The American one and the British occupied zone unite to the Bizone and form the core of the later federal republic.

In November 1954, the Soviet Union convened a security conference in Moscow. In the Moscow Declaration, the delegates of the Eastern bloc countries warned the West against ratifying the Paris Treaties. One week after the entry into force of the Paris Treaties, the Soviet Union, together with the Eastern Bloc states, founded the Warsaw Pact as a separate military alliance in May 1955. The members of the Warsaw Pact included the Soviet Union, Poland, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Albania, Romania, Hungary and the GDR. They provided each other with military assistance in the event of an attack. The Warsaw Pact was strongly dominated by the Soviet Union and served as its political support in the Eastern bloc.
The term Iron Curtain not only describes the real border fortifications, but also, in a figurative sense, the politics of demarcation. In contrast to the fortifications erected only by the respective Eastern Bloc states, this policy was also pursued by the West in various fields in the post-war years. It was thus not only physically present, but also present in politics, at the UN, in the media, in sport and in business, and found its extension to the countries of the Third World, where numerous proxy wars were fought between East and West
The Warsaw Pact was the military counterpart to NATO from 1955 to 1991. It served the Soviet Union as a security belt against the West and supported it in suppressing popular uprisings such as the Prague Spring of 1968. In this regard, the riots in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 were violently suppressed by Warsaw Pact troops. After Gorbachev’s change of course from perestroika to glasnost, the end of the Cold War was initiated in the mid-1980s. The collapse of the Soviet Union also meant the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, which took place on 1 July 1991.
There are at least three different approaches to finding reasons for the Cold War. The traditionalists see the Soviet Union and its allies as the only culprits. Their explanation takes up the thoughts of KENNAN. Consequently, they refer to the offensive expansion policy of the leading power of the socialist states as the main cause of the Cold War, which is part of the nature of communism.
The revisionists argue exactly the opposite. They see the main culprit of the Cold War in the USA. In their opinion, capitalism tends by its very nature to dominate the whole world, which makes it imperialism. In this respect, for revisionists the capitalist leading power USA can be entirely responsible for the Cold War. But at least it is a group of U.S. politicians whose expansionist policies caused the Cold War to begin.
Both approaches ultimately reflect the fundamental ideological opposition between the blocs and their two leading powers.
A third approach, that of the postal revisionists, on the other hand, aims more strongly at problems of mutual perception of concrete politics by the other side as the cause of the Cold War. According to this approach, it was wrong assessments of the intentions of the other side that led to an ever greater alienation of the two former war allies and ultimately to the Cold War.