This chapter discusses Stalin's intentions and actions in the second half of 1945, and how they contributed to the Cold War. The chapter argues that Stalin did not have plans for turning the world red and instead looked forward to a prolonged period of great power cooperation after the war. Stalin was willing to give up opportunities for advancing Soviet influence, for power without legitimacy was insecure power. Legitimacy required external, especially American, recognition. Stalin had no one-fit-all solution for projecting Soviet influence; his arsenal included anything from outright annexation to indirect control through Communist-dominated coalition governments. The chapter contends that Stalin was determined to resist perceived American pressure, not least during the ill-fated London Conference of Foreign Ministers (September 1945), believing that concessions under pressure implied weakness. That was especially true now that the United States had the A-bomb, which gave Washington huge leverage in talking to Stalin from a position of strength.

Looking at the Korean and Vietnam Wars, we evaluate the influence of casualties disaggregated by space/hometowns and time on mass opinion in both the Korean and Vietnam wars and on individual opinion in the Vietnam War. We find a powerful connection between US casualties and public support for a war consistent with our expectations about the importance of casualty trends, the geographic locations of casualty hometowns, and the interaction of these dynamics. Disaggregated casualties are better able to capture variation in mass public and individual wartime opinion than are logged cumulative national casualties – the standard wartime measure employed. We also find that the wartime information-opinion process operates more strongly in the ex ante identifiable early stages of a conflict, and less effectively later in a conflict when casualty expectations (and thus the value of new information) begin to harden. These results strongly support the general notion that casualty patterns act as an observable proxy for our RP/ETC process by capturing information that individuals draw on to generate ETC and formulate wartime positions, improving our ability to understand and predict wartime opinion.

Chapter 2 addresses the diverse ways American diplomats employed their ideas of modernization when crafting policy and propaganda for Turkey. While Americans’ general understanding of what it meant to be modern remained consistently democratic, it was sufficiently malleable that it could accommodate contradictory conclusions about Turkish democracy as US interests shifted. State Department documents also reveal how American ideas about modernity were, with the cooperation of the Turkish government, consciously transformed into propaganda aimed both at encouraging Turkish modernization and advertising America’s modernity.