Top Highlights

• the war had been won by a coalition whose principal members were already at war—ideologically and geopolitically if not militarily—with one another.
• the pursuit of compatible objectives by incompatible systems.
• Both the United States and the Soviet Union had been born in revolution. Both embraced ideologies with global aspirations: what worked at home, their leaders assumed, would also do so for the rest of the world.
• Both, as continental states, had advanced across vast frontiers:
• both had entered the war as the result of surprise attack: