In 1945, one particular global war ended and another began.
The Cold War lasted approximately forty-five years. There were no immediate military campaigns between the 2 main antagonists, the Soviet Union and the United States. Still, billions of dollars were wasted, millions of lives, mostly innocent, have been lost in the fight.
The United States had become the leader of the free-market capitalist world. Its allies and the United States fought to prevent the communist and totalitarian Soviet Union from growing in Europe, Asia and Africa. Theaters as remote as Vietnam and Korea, Granada and Cuba, Angola and Afghanistan, became battlefields between the two ideologies. A postwar style quickly became apparent. The United States would not retreat to its former isolationist stance as long as waging a Cold War was considered.
Winston Churchill’s 1946 speech to the Westminster College in Missouri contained the initial reference to the communist regimes of Eastern Europe as an “iron curtain.”
The long-term reasons behind the Cold War were obvious. Western democracies had always been aggressive with the concept of the communist state. The United States had rejected recognition of the USSR for sixteen years after the Bolsheviks took power. Domestic concerns about communism erupted in a red scare in America in the early 1920s. American business executives had feared the effects of a politically driven worker business. World War II also provided short-term causes.
There was also hostility on the Soviet side. 20 million Russians perished during World War II. Stalin was furious with the British and Americans who had waited so long to open a second front in France. This will have eased the tension in the Soviet Union through the German attackers. Additionally, the US canceled Lend Lease’s aid to the Soviet Union before the war was completed. Finally, the Soviet Union thought that communism was the best political system for all the countries of the world.
Stalin offered guarantees during the battle for the independence of Eastern Europe, which he blatantly denied. At the YALTA Conference, the USSR promised to enter the war against Japan, but no later than 3 weeks after the completion of the European battle. In retrospect, the United States had granted the Soviets special rights territorial concessions and Japan in Chinese Manchuria.
Although Stalin was there to collect Western promises, when the Soviet Union entered the war between the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombings, the United States did not need their help. All of these factors contributed to creating an environment of mistrust that intensified tensions at the outbreak of the Cold War.
During practically the entire second half of the 20th century, the USSR and also some other countries have been interested in a Cold War reflected in diplomatic and economic struggles. The communist bloc, as it emerged in 1950, included nations from both the west and southeast of the Soviet Union.
In Potsdam, the Allies agreed on the final postwar outcome for Nazi Germany. After the territorial changes, Germany was divided into 4 occupation zones, administered by the United States, France, Great Britain and the Soviet Union. Germany was being democratized and denazified. As soon as the Nazi leaders have been arrested and the war crimes trials begin, a day will be set for elections associated with a new German government, as well as the withdrawal of Allied soldiers.
This procedure was carried out in the areas held by the Western Allies. In the eastern Soviet zone of occupation, a puppet communist regime was elected. Usually there was no promise of repatriation with the West. Eventually those governments, with the help of the Soviet Red Army, came to tour all of Eastern Europe. Stalin was determined to develop a buffer zone to avoid any intrusion close to the heart of Russia.
Winston Churchill commented in 1946 that “an iron curtain had descended across the continent.”
