Why was there a cold war? The West hated the Bolshevik/Communist revolution in 1905-1918 Russia from the very first — after all, the Russian and British monarchies had blood ties. King George V and Tsar Nicholas II were cousins. Aside from the family ties of the rulers, Communism/socialism was to be the very antithesis of monarchy, oligarchy, and capitalism. Rule by royals had to be maintained.
To prevent Cold War from happening, Churchill, a protege of Edward V, and his tens of thousands of Western allied forces, including 13,000 US troops, should never have been sent in to try and put down the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1918. This military action to try and retain the White Russian monarchy (Tzar Nicholas II — the Romanovs) was a failure, and cost the lives of thousands of American soldiers, in addition to the other countries involved. This military action severely alienated the new Russian leadership from the West right from the start, and was the very germination of the Cold War; and in my opinion, might well have led to Stalin's tragic rise to power. Countries that feel threatened by outside forces will tend to install strongman leaders as a defensive measure.
And this too: There were about 15 high-profile assassinations worldwide prior to World War 1, culminating in the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, which set off the catastrophic series of alliances that launched World Wars 1 and also WW2. Circumstantial evidence would tend to suggest that covert forces in league with the British Crown and the worldwide organizations of Freemasons (of which King Edward the 7th was the official head) were behind the assassinations, since so many of the assassinated leaders opposed British imperialism, British Freemasonry and its allies. In the 15 years leading up to the war, there was an average of one head of state assassinated every year.
President of France (1894)
The Shah of Persia (1896)
President of Uruguay (1896)
Prime Minister of Spain (1897)
President of Guatemala (1898)
Empress of Austria (1898)
President Dominican republic (1899)
King of Italy (1900)
President of the United States (1901)
King and Queen of Serbia (1903)
Prime Minister of Greece (1905)
Prime Minister of Bulgaria (1907)
Prime Minister of Iran/Persia (1907)
King of Portugal (1908)
Prime Minister of Egypt (1910)
Prime Minister of Russia (1911)
Prime Minister of Spain (1912)
President of Mexico (1913)
King of Greece (1913)
"The big war-mongers don't seem to be the targets...but rather those who were anti-war, or anti-British," says author and historian Webster Tarpley. Of course, the assassinations were usually attributed to anarchists or loners. But how can a “lone assassin theory” hold up when you’ve got 20 of them in a row?
Nearly 30 years later, a pivotal moment in American history came when party bosses, in a collusion at the Democratic Party convention in 1944, aced progressive candidate Henry Wallace out of the vice-presidential nomination to succeed Franklin Delano Roosevelt (who by this time was in very ill health), even though Wallace had widespread support. Many believe that the most destructive, divisive, and costly phase of the Cold War could have been averted had Truman not been kibbitzed into the nomination. His "National Security Act" of 1947 created the CIA and set the stage for the Cold War.
Truman later lamented in a 1961 Washington Post op-ed, "I never would have agreed to the formulation of the Central Intelligence Agency back in '47, if I had known it would become the American Gestapo. "
Indeed, as another respondent to this question has pointed out, American intelligence absorbed many Nazis into its ranks at the conclusion of World War 2, chief among them Nazi intelligence chief Reinhard Gehlen. It was called “Operation Paperclip.”