This is something that historians have debated pretty heatedly since the beginning of the Cold War. The most prominent historian who advocates the inevitability thesis is John Lewis Gaddis. Gaddis has argued that the clash of ideologies between the US and USSR made the Cold War inevitable. Many historians disagree with this. Melvyn Leffler argues that the Cold War was not inevitable, but a mixture of geopolitical security concerns and ideology eventually led to Cold War. Frank Costigliola has recently offered a novel interpretation in his attempt to refute claims that the Cold War was inevitable. He shows that FDR and Stalin seemed to have an understanding about how the post-WWII global system should be structured. This understanding arose out of the amicable relationship between the two leaders and among their staffers. This changed with the Truman administration, which was much more bellicose toward Soviet officials. This cleavage in the personal relationships between American and Soviet officials, Costigliola argues, played a pivotal role in leading to the Cold War. There are many other arguments historians have made regarding such varied issues as Stalin's personality, impersonal structural forces, the Third World, U.S. domestic politics, and more. It would take way too long to spell out the arguments of all of them. Instead, listed below is a very select number books that address this issue of the Cold War's inevitability:

John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment

John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History

John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History

Wilson Miscamble, From Roosevelt to Truman: Potsdam, Hiroshima, and the Cold War

Melvyn Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War

Melvyn Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State

Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times

Joel Isaac and Duncan Bell, eds. Uncertain Empire: American History and the Idea of the Cold War

V.M Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev

Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin's Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939-1945

Jonathan Haslam, The Russian Cold War: From the October Revolution to the Fall of the Wall

Frank Costigliola, Roosevelt's Lost Alliances: How Personal Politics Helped Start the Cold War

Fredrik Logevall and Campbell Craig, America's Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity

Relevant chapters in Frank Ninkovich, The Global Republic: America's Inadvertent Rise to World Power