Download cold war conflicts

Problems between the Soviet Union and the United States had
been building before and during World War II.
The two countries’ economic and political systems were
incompatible.
They had built-up resentments toward each other over previous
events.
The Americans
The Soviets were deeply resentful that the United States had
not recognized their Communist government until 16 years after
the Revolution.
The United States was furious with Joseph Stalin for signing a
non-aggression pact with Hitler.
Still hopes for world peace were high at the end of the war.
The United Nations was formed in 1945 and the headquarters
were built in New York City.
The UN was intended to promote
peace, but it soon became the place
where the two superpowers
competed to spread their influence
throughout the world.
Potsdam Conference
The Soviets had agreed in vague
language at Yalta to allow free
and open elections in Poland and
other Eastern European nations.
In 1945, the Soviets prevented
free elections in Poland and
democratic parties, resulting in a
pro-communist government in
Poland.
Stalin: “…not only a question of
honor for Russia, but one of life or
death.”
The Soviet army occupied
Eastern European nations
refusing to permit free
elections and selfdetermination, and there
was little the West could
do.
U.S. Establishes a Policy of Containment
Policy of containment---an effort to block the Soviets’ attempts
to spread their influence by creating alliances and supporting
weaker countries.
This policy began to guide the Truman administration’s foreign
policy.
Winston Churchill was the first to use the term “iron curtain” to
describe the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe and closing
off the East from the West.
Cold War: state of
hostility short of direct
military confrontation that
developed between the
two superpowers.
During the Cold War,
the United States and
the Soviet Union tried to
spread their political and
economic influence
wherever they could.
The conflicting U.S. and Soviet aims in
Eastern Europe led to the Cold War.
Eventually the Cold War
spread to Asia, Africa,
and Latin America.
President Truman declared that the United States should
support free peoples throughout the world who were resisting
takeovers by “armed minorities” or “outside pressures”.
Western Europe was in economic chaos. Most of its
factories had been bombed or looted.
Many Europeans could not find work. Millions of people
lived in refugee camps.
The winter of 1946-1947 was the worst in centuries, with
below-zero temperatures and record-breaking snow.
June 1947, Secretary of State George
Marshall proposed that the United States
provide aid to all European nations that
needed it.
Marshall: this move directed “…not against
any country or doctrine but against hunger,
poverty, desperation, and chaos”.
The plan was a great success both economically and politically.
Nutrition improved. Industry grew. By 1952, Europe was flourishing
and Communist parties had lost much of their appeal to voters.
• At the close of World War II, the Soviet Union occupied eastern
Germany, including Berlin, and the Western powers—France,
England, and the United States—controlled western Germany.
• As part of post-war negotiations, the Russians agreed to divide
Berlin among the four powers as well.
• Berlin became an “island” in the middle of Soviet-controlled East
Germany.
History Alive
• The Western powers agreed to plan a separate West
German government without the Soviets and began printing
new, stable, ad deflated German currency.
• The Russian response was to shut down the railways and
highways from the Western zones into Berlin.
• They argued that since the Western powers no longer
sought to unite Germany, they had no reason to stay in
Berlin.
The West began flying round-the-clock
missions into Berlin, supplying up to
13,000 tons of goods at a cost of $5
million per day.
• The American flyers succeeded in supplying Berlin with 2.5
million people entirely from the air.
• To the world, the Russians looked like monsters trying to
starve women and children.
• Ten months later, Stalin lifted the Berlin blockade in
exchange to some concessions from the West.
Berlin Airlift
This is a young Mao Zedong (Tse-Tung), a
Communist revolutionary in China.
• In 1949, the corrupt Nationalist
government in China fell to the longstanding Chinese communist revolution
led by Mao.
• Within a month, the new Communist
government signed a mutual defense and
economic aid package with the Soviet
union.
• The United States had strongly supported
the Nationalist government against the
communists.
• Now China, a nation of 500 million
people, and a strong ally during the war,
had “turned communist.”
This event
fueled Cold War
tempers in the
U.S.
• A few weeks following the end of the Berlin blockade, the
United States entered the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO).
• NATO pledged to regard an attack on the U.S., Great Britain,
France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Portugal, Denmark,
Iceland, Norway, or Canada as an attack on itself.
• NATO and the Marshall Plan began an era of American
military, political, and economic dominance over Europe.
• The treaty divided the world into two superpower camps.
NATO headquarters
located in Brussels,
Belgium was opened in
October 1967.
• In September of 1949, the Soviets
exploded their first atomic bomb,
thus ending the American nuclear
monopoly.
• Truman immediately announced
this to the American people and
indicated that the U.S. would
begin to produce a more powerful
hydrogen bomb.
• National Security advisors
counseled Truman to increase
peacetime military spending to
$50 billion a year because of the
fear that Soviet military capability
was now superior to the West.
American soldiers in Korea