=Origins of the Cold War.= In retrospect it is easy to argue that the Communist system has been fighting all non-Communist systems ever since 1848; that the Soviet system has been in a moral condition of war with all other governments since 1917; that the democratic-Soviet alliance against the Fascist powers during 1941-45 was a sham and a fraud covering a three-cornered war; and that therefore attempts at a good alliance between non-Communists and Communists were shams, mistakes, or frauds. This is easy to say in the 1950s; it was not so apparent in the 1940s. It can even be argued that Yalta, and everything for which Yalta stands, was a tragic mistake and yet a blessed one. If the Western powers had not attempted to deal amicably with the Soviet Union at Yalta the Western peoples, already hypersensitized in matters of conscience, might have attributed to themselves and to their posterity an unbearable burden of guilt. We and our children might have gone down fighting while wondering in our innermost hearts, "Why didn't we make a _real_ try to avoid war with Soviet Russia?" Though the Teheran and Yalta agreements have been violated by the USSR almost from the moment they were concluded, it can be argued that the Western world was wise in experimenting with appeasement because it liberated our consciences for future struggle. No one can possibly argue that we did not try to get along with the Communist system, that we failed to offer the Communists a reasonable share in the world of power politics, or that we threatened the Communists with aggression during the course of our anti-fascist struggle. For better or for worse, we _did_ try to get along with them. We have failed. Why have we failed? The failure seems to be much more on the side of the Communists than on the side of the free nations. Though it is possible for Left-liberals or hypercritical intellectuals to find fault with the U.S. and British position in this respect or that, short of extreme nit-picking it must be argued that the Communists jumped the gun on the Western powers in almost every case. Tito, while still in agreement with Moscow, proved implacable toward the constitutional Yugoslav government and the Church as they had existed before 1941. While Roosevelt was still living the Lublin Poles prepared a savage double-cross of the London Poles. Whether Communist action arose from a lamentable fear of our own aggressiveness, or a Machiavellian plan to conquer the world does not, at any time, matter very much; what matters is the almost indisputable fact that in many parts of the world the Communists undertook the initiative against the anti-Communists.