The Impact Of The Cold War On American Foreign Policy

15 Pages 3775 Words

ts roots in the waning moments of World War I. Soon after the Bolsheviks (later Communists) overthrew the existing Russian government in October 1917, Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin resolved to withdraw Russia from the war. In 1918 the United States, along with Britain, France, and Japan, intervened militarily in Russia. They did so to restore the collapsed Eastern Front in their war effort against Germany; however, to Lenin and his colleagues, the intervention represented an assault on Russia’s feeble new revolutionary regime. In fact, the European powers and the United States did resent Russia’s new leadership, with its appeals against capitalism and its efforts to weld local Communist parties into an international revolutionary movement. In December 1922, the USSR was formed as a federal union of Russia and neighboring areas under Communist control. The United States refused to recognize the Soviet state until 1933. The leadership of Joseph Stalin, who came into power in 1929, exacerbated the deep ideological differences between the USSR and the United States.
In August 1939, on the eve of World War II, Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with German dictator Adolf Hitler. The two leaders pledged not to attack one another and agreed to divide the territory that lay between them into German and Soviet spheres of influence. Hitler betrayed the agreement, however, and in June 1941 he launched his armies against the USSR. Britain and the United States rallied to the USSR’s defense, which produced the coalition that would defeat Germany over the next four years. This American-British-Soviet coalition was an uneasy affair, marked by mistrust and, on the Soviet side, by charges that the USSR bore a heavier price than the other nations in prosecuting the war. By 1944, with victory approaching, the conflicting visions within the alliance of a postwar world were becoming ever more obvious.
Even before the defeat of Nazi ...