The Opposing Ideologies of the US and the Soviet Union

• US wants to encourage democracy in other countries to help prevent the rise of Communism
• The Soviet Union wants to keep Germany divided
• Stalin ignored the Yalta Agreement and installed or secured Communist governments in Albania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Poland, and Yugoslavia.
• Stalin regarded countries such as, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, etc., as a necessary buffer, or wall of protection.
• Truman pressed Stalin to permit free elections in Eastern Europe.

  The Soviet leader refused.
• In a speech in early 1946, Stalin declared that communism and capitalism could not exist in the same world.
• • Europe now lay divided between East and West. Germany had been split into two sections. 
• Churchill’s phrase “iron curtain” came to represent Europe’s division into mostly democratic Western Europe and Communist Eastern Europe.
• The Soviets controlled the eastern part, including half of the capital, Berlin. Under a Communist government, East Germany was named the German Democratic Republic.
• Truman’s support for countries that rejected communism was called the Truman Doctrine.
• An increasingly worried United States tried to offset the growing Soviet threat to Eastern Europe. President Truman adopted a foreign policy called containment.
• Containment was a policy directed at blocking Soviet influence and stopping the expansion of communism. Containment policies included forming alliances and helping weak countries resist Soviet advances.
• 1948, France, Britain, and the United States decided to withdraw their forces from Germany and allow their occupation zones to form one nation. The Soviet Union responded by holding West Berlin hostage.
• Although Berlin lay well within the Soviet occupation zone of Germany, it too had been divided into four zones. The Soviet Union cut off highway, water, and rail traffic into Berlin’s western zones. The city faced starvation. Stalin gambled that the Allies would surrender West Berlin or give up their idea of reunifying Germany.
• But American and British officials flew food and supplies into West Berlin for nearly 11 months. In May 1949, the Soviet Union admitted defeat and lifted the blockade.
• These conflicts of political ideologies and goals lead to what we called Cold war.
• A cold war is a struggle over political differences carried on by means short of military action or war.
• Beginning in 1949, the superpowers used spying, propaganda, diplomacy, and secret operations in their dealings with each other.
• Much of the world allied with one side or the other. In fact, until the Soviet Union finally broke up in 1991, the Cold War dictated not only U.S. and Soviet foreign policy, but influenced world alliances as well.
• 1949, ten western European nations joined with the United States and Canada to form a defensive military alliance.
• It was called the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
• An attack on any NATO member would be met with armed force by all member nations.
• • The Soviet Union saw NATO as a threat and formed it’s own alliance in 1955.

  It was called the Warsaw Pact and included the Soviet Union, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania.
• In 1961, the East Germans built a wall to separate East and West Berlin. The Berlin Wall symbolized a world divided into rival camps.
• • In 1949, the Soviet Union exploded its own atomic weapon.

  President Truman was determined to develop a more deadly weapon before the Soviets did. He authorized work on a thermonuclear weapon in 1950.
• • The hydrogen or H-bomb would be thousands of times more powerful than the A-bomb. Its power came from the fusion, or joining together, of atoms, rather than the splitting of atoms, as in the A-bomb. In 1952, the United States tested the first H-bomb. The Soviets exploded their own in 1953.
• Dwight D. Eisenhower became the U.S. president in 1953.
• • He appointed the firmly anti-Communist John Foster Dulles as his secretary of state. If the Soviet Union or its supporters attacked U.S. interests, Dulles threatened, the United States would “retaliate instantly, by means and at places of our own choosing.”
• This willingness to go to the brink, or edge, of war became known as brinkmanship.
• Brinkmanship required a reliable source of nuclear weapons and airplanes to deliver them. So, the United States strengthened its air force and began producing stockpiles of nuclear weapons. The Soviet Union responded with its own military buildup, beginning an arms race that would go on for four decades.
• • The Cold War also affected the science and education programs of the two countries.
• In August 1957, the Soviets announced the development of a rocket that could travel great distances—an intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM.
• On October 4, the Soviets used an ICBM to push Sputnik, the first unmanned satellite, above the earth’s atmosphere.
• Americans felt they had fallen behind in science and technology, and the government poured money into science education. In 1958, the United States launched its own satellite.
• In 1960, the skies again provided the arena for a superpower conflict. Five years earlier, Eisenhower had proposed that the United States and the Soviet Union be able to fly over each other’s territory to guard against surprise nuclear attacks.
• The Soviet Union said no. In response, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) started secret high-altitude spy flights over Soviet territory in planes called U-2s.
• In May 1960, the Soviets shot down a U-2 plane, and its pilot, Francis Gary Powers, was captured. This U-2 incident heightened Cold War tensions. While Soviet Communists were squaring off against the United States, Communists in China were fighting a civil war for control of that country.
• Harry S. Truman, Stalin’s reluctance to allow free elections in Eastern European nations was a clear violation of those countries’ rights.
• Truman, Stalin, and Churchill met at Potsdam, Germany, in July 1945.
• America wants to gain access to raw materials and markets to fuel booming industries.