wat0n wrote:You have yet to explain why is it the West
No,
I did here - you just ignored it in favor of the last thirty posts of bullshit that just got us back to the same initial point.
Fasces wrote:And yes, I do blame Truman - FDR's administration had gone to great lengths to repair the relationship with the Soviet Union during the World War, a legacy that Truman deliberately threw away due to personal anti-communist tendancies and his choice in cabinet. Given Western rhetoric, and Western interference in the Russian Civil War, it is reasonable that the first step to building trust should have (and for a time did) come from Western concessions. They failed to build a world where the strong can't take what they want and are reaping what they sow.
I'll repeat it more explicitly for you:
Because the West regarded the Soviets as a rouge state and had either delayed recognition, or severed recognition, a variety of times in the 1920s and 1930s. Because the West did not invite the Bolsheviks to Versailles, and did not give them a voice regarding former Russian territories. Because the West interfered in the Russian civil war, financially and militarily, in an effort to defeat the Soviets. Because Western politicians frequently voiced their concern that the USSR was a worse evil than Nazi Germany well into WW2, and in some cases, past it.
Given the hostility the West treated the USSR with in the first twenty years of existence, it is understandable that the USSR would not be willing to trust the West and take the first step themselves, so frankly, I blame them less - in much the way that re-establishing trust in former post-colonial territories probably requires the West to be the one apologizing, giving reparations, stopping interference, and so forth.
But sure, @wat0n, tell me why it makes sense that the Soviets were the ones responsible for repairing a relationship they didn't break and offering concessions to Western powers that, under Truman, explicitly and vocally wanted to see them destroyed. To me it sounds a lot like asking the abused wife to stop disobeying her husband to avoid getting beat, but that's just me.