Government Papers
astham38
discussion5.docxForum 5 Prompt
For this fifth forum:
· Answer the following question:
· What is the most significant historical thing you learned in this class?
· I will leave this open ended, but I ask that you avoid simply repeating things you’ve already said in previous posts and assignments, including your term paper.
· Use and cite from the textbook, i.e. (Montoya, pp 156).
· Follow the usual forum guidelines below.
· And don’t forget to comment on your peer’s work.
Your response should be coherent, informative, and analytical and must provide evidence from your textbook and/or other materials. I expect you to write a minimum of 2 paragraphs that are 4-5 complete sentences each. Short sentences and short paragraphs will lose points.
You won’t be able to see anyone else’s response until you post your own, but you will be asked to respond to at least one of your peers. This should be a substantive conversation that goes beyond simply posting “I agree” or “Interesting response.” This is worth 10 points of your grade.
This assignment will be graded using the 100% scale and missing a whole paragraph will result in the loss of 50%. You will also be graded on content, grammar, and punctuation, so make sure your response is written at the college level.
One of the chapters from book that I have not said in previous posts and assignments, including term paper is this:
The Cold War 1945–1965
22-1From Allies to Enemies
In this cartoon, published in France in 1949, Uncle Sam and Soviet Premier Stalin stare warily at each other across a pair of conjoined twins. The French caption, which has not been printed here, reads: “My Dear, your sister has some strange friends.”
The Granger Collection, New York
Why is there tension between the two national figures, and what do the conjoined twins represent?
World War II marked the height of cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Allies downplayed ideological differences and conflict over military strategy to be unified in fighting the Axis Powers and to plan a postwar world in which each nation received a sphere of influence. But, at the end of the war, distrust deepened over U.S. possession of atomic weapons, which, to the Soviets, created a dangerous imbalance of military might. Exacerbating the tension was the U.S. booming wartime economy, which as the war ended gave the United States both economic and military supremacy over the Soviet Union where cities and factories lay in ruin. Stalin used the Red Army’s occupation of eastern Germany to rebuild the Soviet economy and protect the nation from future attack. Problems arose when U.S. officials sought to counter Soviet influence in Europe by advocating democratic governments and free markets whereas Stalin insisted on protecting Soviet borders by controlling neighboring countries.
As you read, focus on the way the U.S.–Soviet alliance, forged during World War II, dissolved into an intense international rivalry. What soured U.S.–Soviet relations, and what were the major effects of this conflict?
22-1aLegacies of War
The outcome of World War II transforms the global order and puts the United States and the Soviet Union on a collision course.
Both Americans and Soviets hoped to continue their functioning partnership after the war. Despite persistent disagreement as allies, especially over the opening of a second front in Western Europe, the two powers negotiated agreements for the postwar world at the Yalta and Potsdam conferences. The establishment of the United Nations, in which both the United States and Soviet Union played a crucial role, was another basis for prolonged cooperation.
But within less than two years of V-J Day, U.S.–Soviet cooperation unraveled, devolving into an intense, if not entirely new, ideological struggle that marked the first phase of the Cold War . The two powers had clashed since the 1917 Communist Revolution in Russia despite a shared antipathy to European power politics and the nineteenth-century imperial order. While the Soviets saw America’s faith in free-market capitalism as producing global inequality and perpetuating poverty, Americans considered the Soviets’ command economy, single-party system, and suppression of personal freedoms as a violation of basic human rights. Added to these core differences were unrealistic fears on both sides that each was bent on destroying the other.
Another reason for the collapse of the wartime alliance went beyond ideology. For the first time, the United States had become actively involved in the internal affairs of European nations during peacetime. There were three reasons for this reversal of U.S. foreign policy principles in place since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823. First, the development of long-range bombers (and later missiles) shattered forever the protection provided by the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Second, because U.S. officials believed that the origins of World War II lay in the worldwide depression in the 1930s, they pushed to rebuild war-torn Europe to prevent another economic collapse. Third, the war taught U.S. officials about the need to stand up early and forcefully to aggressive expansionists such as Adolf Hitler. In 1945, for example, Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal warned that Stalin’s desire to control Eastern Europe should not be appeased. “We tried that once with Hitler,” he said. “There are no returns on appeasement.”
The sustained U.S. involvement in European affairs, something that Stalin did not expect, set it on a collision course with the Soviet Union. An important source of U.S.–Soviet conflict involved the reconstruction of the world’s economy under the Bretton Woods economic system, which was designed to ensure open borders and free trade. The Americans welcomed these arrangements that aligned with the nation’s manufacturing preeminence, but the Soviets refused to place the free market above the socialist goal of economic equality. The Soviets also recognized that their nascent industrial economy could not withstand free competition with U.S. manufacturers.
Another source of U.S.–Soviet friction involved nuclear weapons. Although Stalin had expressed little interest in the new weapon that President Harry Truman had revealed to him at Potsdam, Soviet officials reacted with alarm at the prospect of a U.S. monopoly on atomic weapons. They feared that it could be used as blackmail to threaten their nation with nuclear destruction. U.S. officials, in turn, faced pressures from within and outside the nation to prevent the further development of nuclear technology by turning over its atomic weapons and technology to the newly established UN Atomic Energy Commission, which sought to safeguard atomic energy development and use. Yet Truman, along with Secretary of State James Byrnes, made the fateful decision to oppose sharing atomic secrets or relinquishing control over the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
The main U.S.–Soviet conflict in the months after World War II involved the political status of Eastern Europe and occupied Germany. Although agreements reached at Yalta required free elections in Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe, Stalin had never intended to give up control. Having been invaded by Germany twice in the twentieth century, he sought a protective buffer that would guarantee Soviet security. In addition, Stalin sought compensation for what World War II had cost the Soviet people: nearly 27 million soldiers and civilians dead, more than 10 percent of the nation’s total population. For every two Americans killed in the war, the Soviets lost one hundred. Moreover, Stalin’s firm grip on Eastern Europe was immensely popular with the Soviet people, who revered him as the champion of what they called the Great Patriotic War and who blamed the United States for compromising the nation’s hard-won security.
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22-1bReconstruction of Europe
The first phase of the Cold War centers on competing U.S. and Soviet visions of postwar Germany and Eastern Europe.
The impasse over Eastern Europe set the stage for a shift in U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union that came to be called containment . In February 1946, George F. Kennan, a leading U.S. diplomat in Moscow and a historian of Russia, sent a secret “long telegram” to the secretary of state reporting that U.S.–Soviet cooperation was not possible. Instead, he recommended a strategy focusing on rebuilding the industrial centers of Western Europe and Japan and doing everything short of war to restrain Soviet designs on promoting a world Communist revolution. The next month, Winston Churchill described an “ iron curtain ” descending across the continent of Europe, “from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,” behind which the nations of Eastern Europe were subject to “control from Moscow.” This warning was intended for President Truman, who had invited Churchill to speak at Westminster College in his home state of Missouri and was in the audience.
Europe was not the only region in which U.S. and Soviet plans for the future clashed. In Iran, which was divided into British and Soviet occupation zones, Stalin sought to retain control of the country’s northern oil fields and to keep the British and Americans away from his nation’s southern border. But Britain, the United States, and the United Nations pressured him to remove Soviet troops from the country. Stalin sought to gain access to the Mediterranean through Turkey’s Sea of Marmara, an ambition that reached back to Czarist Russia, but here, too, he met stiff U.S. opposition. Greece was a different matter because Stalin relied on Yugoslavian Communists to foment socialist revolution in its southern neighbor.
Truman knew that Communist victories in Greece and Turkey would destabilize the oil-rich Middle East, home to two-thirds of the world’s reserves. Whoever held the eastern Mediterranean, he worried, could cut off the vital oil supply to Western Europe and Japan. Formerly, the British had controlled vast regions of the Middle East as well as the Suez Canal, but after World War II, they could no longer afford to sustain their empire and stopped supplying anti-Communist forces in Greece and Turkey. Truman committed the United States to assuming Britain’s burden.
In March 1947, the president addressed a joint session of Congress to articulate a sweeping vision of a bipolar world in which those who favored freedom and democracy stood against the supporters of totalitarian repression (he concealed concerns about Middle Eastern oil). Although not naming the Soviet Union, Truman warned that without U.S. aid, Communist victory was assured in Greece, and “like apples in a barrel infected by one rotten one, the corruption of Greece would infect Iran and all to the east.” This was an early version of the domino theory , an explanation for how a Communist revolution in one nation sets up a chain reaction that spreads, toppling one regime after another. To prevent this from happening, the president asked for and received $400 million from Congress to provide economic and military aid to the governments of Greece and Turkey. In what came to be known as the Truman Doctrine , he committed the nation to “support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” This was the hard-line stance against the spread of Soviet influence that Churchill, Kennan, and others had been advocating.
The soft side of U.S. Cold War policy came in the form of massive economic aid that reasserted the Four Freedoms by combatting “freedom from want.” Also in 1947, Truman’s secretary of state, General George C. Marshall, called on the United States to take a bold step to fight “not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos” in postwar Europe. Reconstructing European economies, Marshall claimed, was necessary to diminish the appeal of communism, especially in France and Italy, by permitting “the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.” The Marshall Plan’s aid of more than $13 billion ($103 billion in 2014 dollars) from 1948 to 1952 required a degree of economic integration that laid the foundation for the European Common Market (established in 1958), and it carried the bonus of benefiting U.S. manufacturers by enabling European nations to purchase goods from the United States.
The Marshall Plan drove a final wedge between the Americans and Soviets, dividing Europe into eastern and western spheres of influence known as “blocs.” Although the Soviets desperately needed American money to recover from the war, U.S. planners did not expect Stalin to agree to the free-trade principles of Bretton Woods, a requirement for receiving aid. Stalin indeed rejected aid and forbade Eastern European nations from accepting much-needed reconstruction funds. Instead, he launched the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON) in 1949 as an eastern bloc alternative to the Marshall Plan. More importantly, the prospect of massive U.S. aid pushed Stalin to take bolder, more overt measures to shore up the Soviet sphere, including an overthrow of Czechoslovakia’s elected government in February 1948 and the installation of a Communist regime. Stalin also took a hard line in Germany.
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22-1cOccupation of Germany
The reconstruction of Germany brings the United States and Soviet Union into direct conflict.
In June 1948, seeking to push the Western nations out of Berlin altogether as a precondition for German reunification, Stalin cut off Western road, rail, and canal access to the city. The blockade was provocative, but he did not want war. Truman, although giving serious thought to resolving the Berlin crisis with atomic weapons, also wanted to avoid military conflict. Instead, he opted for a massive airlift that for one year flew thirteen thousand tons of supplies per day to West Berlin. Stalin did not challenge the Berlin airlift and ended the blockade in May 1949.
The blockade and airlift made the division of Germany inevitable because the occupation zones hardened into separate countries. The Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) was established in September 1949 as a capitalist democracy. The Soviet zone became the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), a socialist state in the Soviet bloc. Berlin and Germany remained divided for the next forty-one years, a constant source of U.S.–Soviet friction. East Germany suffered under heavy Soviet war reparations and restrictions while West Germany, the beneficiary of Marshall Plan aid, became the economic powerhouse of Europe.
Styling Hair during Power Cut Because of Berlin Blockade, 1948
Stalin’s blockade of West Berlin set back the city’s postwar recovery and threatened military conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States. To conserve resources, power in West Berlin operated for only two hours in the morning and two hours at night.
AP Images/dpa DENA
Japanese Women Visiting Lincoln Memorial, 1951
The U.S. occupation of Japan resolved wartime conflict with Japan serving as the junior partner to the victorious Americans. The women in this photograph are advertising the first Hollywood film, Tokyo File 212, set in postwar Japan. Approved by SCAP leader General MacArthur, the plot reflects the fear of losing Japan to communism.
AP Images/Charles Gorry
22-1dU.S. Occupation of Japan
Massive U.S. aid ensures Japan’s stability and pro-Western stance.
Unlike Germany, the United States took sole possession of Japan. The Soviet Union had joined the war against Japan right after the atomic destruction of Hiroshima, but against the spirit of the Potsdam declaration, the United States excluded the Soviets from the occupation, although it allowed them to reclaim territories in Manchuria and Sakhalin Island. The future of Japan thus served as an early pivot toward the Cold War. The massive economic aid the United States gave Japan to reconstruct its economy and reintegrate it into the global economy was similar to what would come later with the Marshall Plan. U.S. officials saw a stable and prosperous Japan as an essential counterbalance to Soviet, and later Chinese, expansionism in East Asia.
SCAP initiated a revolution from above that included breaking up concentrations of big businesses, such as the Mitsubishi conglomerate, maker of the well-known Zero fighter plane. The transformation also included democratizing land ownership, severing ties between religion and the state, ensuring women’s rights, and writing a new constitution that prevented Japan’s ability to make war. But MacArthur could not always control the reform process. Faced with rampant inflation, unemployment, and no legitimate market economy, the public sought alternatives to capitalism and increasingly flocked to Japan’s newly legalized Communist Party. As U.S.–Soviet relations dissolved, the new U.S. objective for Japan, like the Marshall Plan for Western Europe, was to combat “freedom from want” by quickly rebuilding the nation’s considerable industrial capacity. Beginning in the winter of 1947, SCAP initiated a reverse course , removing labor advocates, Communists, and other leftists from official positions while relying on right-wing business and political leaders who had supported the old imperial regime. The right-wingers, in turn, worked with SCAP to generate stability and prosperity through a conservative, U.S.-backed political order. Thus, the foundation was laid for Japan’s postwar “economic miracle” that propelled it, along with West Germany, to become one of the world’s leading economic powers.
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