<P> After the Second World War, the United States and the Soviet Union were doomed to be antagonists . (...) There probably was never any real possibility that the post-1945 relationship could be anything but hostility verging on conflict . (...) Traditions, belief systems, propinquity, and convenience (...) all combined to stimulate antagonism, and almost no factor operated in either country to hold it back . </P> <P> From that view of "post-revisionism" emerged a line of inquiry that examines how Cold War actors perceived various events and the degree of misperception involved in the failure of the two sides to reach common understandings of their wartime alliance and their disputes . </P> <P> After the opening of the Soviet archives, John Lewis Gaddis began to argue that the Soviets should be held more accountable for conflict . According to Gaddis, Stalin was in a much better position to compromise than his Western counterparts, given his much broader power within his own regime than Truman, who was often undermined by vociferous political opposition at home . Asking if it would have been possible to predict that the wartime alliance would fall apart within a matter of months, leaving in its place nearly a half century of cold war, Gaddis wrote in his 1997 book We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History the following: </P> <P> Geography, demography, and tradition contributed to this outcome but did not determine it . It took men, responding unpredictably to circumstances, to forge the chain of causation; and it took (Stalin) in particular, responding predictably to his own authoritarian, paranoid, and narcissistic predisposition, to lock it into place . </P>

During the cold war the united states operated on the theory of