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Cold War Hot Spots

Cold War Geopolitics

Map of Europe During the Cold War

Harry Truman & The Truman Doctrine

Allies Became Enemies

Harry Truman is the 33rd president of the United States. He assumed presidency upon Roosevelt's death in 1945. He helped Western Europe rebuild after the war and form the United Nations, NATO, and more. He embraced the idea of containment, announcing his Truman Doctrine on 1947. It suggested that the United States battle Communism abroad and promote Democracy (or at least anti-Communist governments) worldwide.

An Iron Curtain Divides East & West

During WWII, the United States and the Soviet Union had joined forces to fight against the Germans. Their leaders, however, regarded each other much more coolly. The tension caused by competing ideological differences led to nearly half a century of conflict called the Cold War.

A major aim of the Soviet Union was to protect itself from another invasion from the west. Therefore, Stalin secured communist governments in Czechoslavia, Yugoslavia, Romania, Albania, Bulgaria, Hungary, East Germany, and Poland. He regarded these countries as a necessary wall of protection. Europe now lay divided between democratic Western Europe and communist Eastern Europe.

Differing U.S. and Soviet Goals

The war had affected the U.S. and the Soviet Union very differently. The United States suffered fewer fatalities and destruction of infrastructure than the USSR. These contrasting situations led to differing postwar goals.

Goals of the

Goals of the

Soviet Union

United States

Dwight Eisenhower & The Domino Theory

Nations Form Rival Alliances

  • Encourage democracy in other countries to help prevent the rise of communist governments
  • Rebuild European governments to promote stability
  • Reunite Germany to stabilize it and increase the security of Europe
  • Encourage communism in other countries as part of a worldwide worker's revolution
  • Control Eastern Europe to protect Soviet borders and to balance the U.S. influence in Western Europe
  • Keep Germany divided to prevent its waging war again

Cold War Enemies

Dwight Eisenhower was a WWII hero and former commander of NATO. He was elected U.S. president in 1953 after Truman. His foreign policies emphasized the threat of a massive retaliation against the Soviet Union in order to prevent the further spreading of Communism abroad. Furthermore, he is known for coining the Domino Theory. This theory stated that if the US allowed one country to succumb to Communism, then many more will follow suit, like a row of dominoes. Many foreign policy thinkers supported this theory at the peak of the Cold War, and this led to the US to support anti-Communist governments, whether or not they advocated democratic standards.

The Berlin wall intensified Western Europe's fears of Soviet hostility. As a result, Western European countries formed an alliance called the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The Soviet Union saw this as a threat and formed its own alliance called the Warsaw Pact.

George Kennan & the Containment Policy

The Cold War Thaws

Joseph McCarthy & McCarthyism

George Kennan was a State Department analyst during the Truman administration. He is best known for formulating the U.S. foreign policy of “containment.” This policy reasoned that the Soviet Union needed to be contained to prevent the spread of Communism throughout the globe. Kennan’s idea ultimately developed into the single most important principle of American foreign policy throughout the Cold War until the collapse the Soviet Union many years later.

The Cold War Divides the World

The Cold War began to thaw as the superpowers entered an era of uneasy diplomacy. The United States under President Ronald Reagan crippled the U.S. economy with spending on the military. The Soviets tried to keep up but it was to no avail. This eventually led to the collapse of the Soviet Union as well as the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Russia historically had no secure borders, no rivers, no mountains, no desserts, no seas that separate them from their war neighbors. With the fear of invasion and the idea of buying time through land is one of the reasons why Russia became so big. The borders got pushed farther away from the heartland, and they wanted to keep it was far from Moscow as possible.

During the Cold War, the world's nations were divided politically into three "worlds."

  • The First World consisted of the industrialized capitalist nations, including the U.S. and its allies.
  • The Second World consisted of the Soviet Union and its satellite states.
  • The Third World consisted of developing and often newly-independent nations who were not aligned with either superpower. These nations provided another arena of competition between the two superpowers.

Joseph McCarthy was a republican senator from Wisconsin who exploited on Cold War fears of Communism by accusing hundreds of government employees of being Communists and Soviet agents. Although McCarthy had no proof to support his claims, Americans supported him and McCarthyism swept through the nation. Eventually, McCarthy was blacklisted and fired from his job.

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