Choose a quote from the excerpt attached that is important for understanding the author's point and provide an explanation for what it illuminates about the start of the Cold War.

Reference: excerpt attached

090' THE COLD WAR But the great omission of the revisionistsand also the funda- mental explanation of the speed with which the Cold War escalated lies precisely in the fact that the Soviet Union was not a traditional na- tional state.' This is where the \"mirror image,\" invoked by some psychologists, falls down. For the Soviet Union was a phenomenon very different from America or Britain: it was a tetalitarian state, en- dowed with an all-explanatory, allconsuming ideology, committed to the infallibility of government and party, still in a somewhat messianic mood, equating dissent with treason, and ruled by a dictator who, for all his quite extraordinary abilities, had his paranoid moments. Marxism-Leninism gave the Russian leaders a view of the world according to which all societies were inexorably destined to proceed along appointed roads by appointed stages until they achieved the classless nirvana. Moreover, given the resistance of the capitalists to this development, the existence of any non-communist state was by denition a threat to the Soviet Union. \"As long as capitalism and socialism exist,\" Lenin wrote, \"we cannot live in peace: in the end, one or the other will triumphHa funeral dirge will be sung either over the Soviet Republic or over world capitalism.\" Stalin and his associates, whatever Roosevelt or Truman did or failed to do, were bound to regard the United States as the enemy, not because of this deed or that, but because of the primordial fact that America was the leading capitalist power and thus, by Leninist syl- logism, unappeasably hostile, driven by the logic of its system to oppose, encircle and destroy Soviet Russia. Norhing the United States could have done in 194445 would have abolished this mistrust, re- quired and sanctied as it was by Marxist gospelaanothing short of the conversion of the United States into a Stalinist despotism; and even this would not have sufced, as the experience of Jugoslavia and China soon showed, unless it were accompanied by total subservience to Moscow. So long as the United States remained a capitalist democracy, no American policy, given Moscow's theology, could hope to win basic Soviet condence, and every American action was poisoned from the soorce. So long as the Soviet Union remained a messianic state, ideol- ogy compelled a steady expansion of communist power. Russia's Responsibility 689 of the Kremlin debate; it would hardly have reversed deeper tenden- cies toward the deterioration of political relationships. Economic deals were surely subordinate to the quality of mutual political confidence; and here, in the months after Yalta, the decay was steady. The Cold War had now begun. It was the product not of a de- cision but of a dilemma. Each side felt compelled to adopt policies which the other could not but regard as a threat to the principles of the peace. Each then felt compelled to undertake defensive meas- ures. Thus the Russians saw no choice but to consolidate their secur- ity in Eastern Europe. The Americans, regarding Eastern Europe as the first step toward Western Europe, responded by asserting their in- terest in the zone the Russians deemed vital to their security. The Russians concluded that the West was resuming its old course of capitalist encirclement; that it was purposefully laying the foundation for anti-Soviet regimes in the area defined by the blood of centuries as crucial to Russian survival. Each side believed with passion that future international stability depended on the success of its own con- ception of world order. Each side, in pursuing its own clearly indicated and deeply cherished principles, was only confirming the fear of the other that it was bent on aggression. Very soon the process began to acquire a cumulative momentum. The impending collapse of Germany thus provoked new troubles: the Russians, for example, sincerely feared that the West was planning a separate surrender of the German armies in Italy in a way which would release troops for Hitler's eastern front, as they subsequently feared that the Nazis might succeed in surrendering Berlin to the West. This was the context in which the atomic bomb now appeared. Though the revisionist argument that Truman dropped the bomb less to defeat Japan than to intimidate Russia is not convincing, this thought un- questionably appealed to some in Washington as at least an advanta- geous side-effect of Hiroshima. So the machinery of suspicion and counter-suspicion, action and counter-action, was set in motion. But, given relations among tradi- tional national states, there was still no reason, even with all the postwar jostling, why this should not have remained a manageable situation. What made it unmanageable, what caused the rapid escala- tion of the Cold War and in another two years completed the division of Europe, was a set of considerations which this account has thus far excluded. VII Up to this point, the discussion has considered the schism within the wartime coalition as if it were entirely the result of disagreements among national states. Assuming this framework, there was unques- tionably a failure of communication between America and Russia, a misperception of signals and, as time went on, a mounting tendency to ascribe ominous motives to the other side. It seems hard, for example, to deny that American postwar policy created genuine difficulties for the Russians and even assumed a threatening aspect for them. All this the revisionists have rightly and usefully emphasized