Cold War Conflicts - Postwar Goals

Cold War Conflicts HIST 1301 | History Postwar Goals Coming out of the ashes of the war, both the US and the USSR believed they were the legitimate leaders of the world. Even though they had come together to defeat Hitler, their long-standing disagreements were now once again prominent. For the United States, the perfect world included democratically run countries living in harmony and experiencing economic growth as a result of capitalist activities. According to the Soviet Union's vision of the future, communism would bring prosperity and peace to all nations, and it would eliminate any need for fear of western invasion. Stalin pushed on creating satellite states in Eastern Europe, nations the Soviet Union would rule by putting communist, pro-Soviet governments in power, in order to achieve the latter objective. Prime Minister Winston Churchill consented to allow Stalin to impose Soviet-allied communist parties in charge of the governments of Romania and Bulgaria, which had been German allies throughout the war, during the Moscow Conference of 1944, at which US President Franklin D. Roosevelt was not present. Stalin agreed to give the British authority over the Balkans in return. By the summer of 1945, when the victorious Allies convened in Potsdam to finalise preparations for dividing Germany with Berlin as its capital, Churchill had become weary of Stalin's dominance over Eastern Europe. He forewarned Harry Truman, the incoming American president, of the peril of letting the Soviet Union rule the area as he was ignorant of the agreements made at the Moscow Conference. However, Stalin went on to solidify his hold on Eastern Europe by installing a pro-Soviet administration in Poland. Churchill forewarned his audience in a speech given in Fulton, Missouri, in March 1946 that "an iron curtain" had divided Europe in two, locking half of the continent under Soviet rule. The Cold War, a struggle for ideological, social, economic, military, and technical superiority that lasted until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, was defined by this partition of the globe into halves associated with the United States and the Soviet Union. The reason the war was referred to as "cold" was that there was no real combat between American and Soviet forces. (A battle in which nations fight each other with weapons is referred to as a "hot" war.) When an all-communist administration loyal to Moscow overthrew a government in Czechoslovakia that was made up of both communists and non-communists in 1948, the division of Europe that Churchill had predicted became even more apparent. In 1949, a communist party that was closely associated with the Soviet Union also gained control of Hungary. The main tactic employed by the US throughout the Cold War was containment, or attempting to limit Soviet sway to Eastern Europe. U.S. ambassador George F. Kennan, who was based in Moscow, first brought up containment in a communication he sent to the State Department that became known as the Long Telegram. According to Kennan, the Soviet leadership is obsessed with destroying capitalism and is paranoid. He thought that Soviet authorities knew only force and were incapable of being persuaded by argument. Thus, there must be a fierce opposition to their attempts to propagate communism. Following World War II, the Soviet Union had foreign policy objectives that were diametrically opposed to American ones. The USSR aimed to increase its authority over the communist nations of Eastern Europe in order to defend itself and support its economy. It also preserved tight connections with communist parties around the globe and promoted communist revolution in other nations. The Soviet Union backed independence movements in colonies in Asia and Africa because it saw itself as the main foe of American and European imperialism. The Soviet leadership believed that the United States was an aggressive country seeking global dominance and that the expansion of communism lessened the likelihood of further conflicts. The Soviet Union needed to be technologically and militarily dominant in order to defend its interests as well as those of its allies.