ULUSLARARASI İLİŞKİLER TARİHİ - Deneme Sınavı - 13

While some scholars accept the end of the Second World War in 1945 as the starting point of the Cold War, others think it started with the “Long Telegram” sent by US diplomat George F. Kennan in 1946 from Moscow to the US. Kennan’s analysis was one of the factors that influenced Washington’s containment policy for the next half-century. When British Prime Minister Winston Churchill famously made reference to the “Iron Curtain” descending across Central and Eastern Europe during his speech in Fulton, Missouri on March 5, 1946, the imagery stuck, and Russian historians cite Churchill’s speech as the starting date of the Cold War.

When the victors met 15 months after Tehran at the Soviet Black Sea resort town of Yalta in February 1945 to begin negotiating the post-war status of Europe, more tangible disagreements about the future.

Truman Doctrine is the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.

The Marshall Plan would serve a two-fold purpose: first, provide a material basis that would disabuse Europeans of the promise of communism; second, force the Soviet Union to either accept American aid, thus tacitly admitting the strengths of the capitalist system—or throw up its “own wall” and thus justifying the creation and existence of a Western bloc.

On March 17, 1948, in response to the Czech coup, Belgium, Britain, France, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands signed a mutual defense pact called the Treaty of Brussels.

On May 12, 1949, in return for renewed talks to be held on the sidelines of the UN in New York, Stalin finally lifted the blockade. Eleven days later, the Federal Republic of Germany (in German: FDR, or West Germany) was established.

As a final institutional measure to solidify the emerging eastern bloc and counter the Marshall Plan, in January 1949 Moscow launched the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, better known as COMECON. With the aim of facilitating the economic development of the eastern bloc.

The former, the Australian-New Zealand- United States Pact (ANZUS), signed in 1951, committed Australia, New Zealand, and the United States to a nonbinding collective defense treaty in which each country considered an attack on one of them to be an attack on all.

The communist and capitalist bloc aimed at the détente, a policy aimed at setting adequate political safeguards for both powers to live in peace.

Though the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary on June 28, 1914 by Serbian nationalist-anarchist Gavrilo Princip was a sui generis incident, the erosion of the European system since 1904 had removed too many barriers to potential armed conflict. Unlike like the other two crises, developments generated in the Balkans caused a chain reaction this time.

Germany began the war with great speed. Employing the Schlieffen Plan, which proposed attacking through neutral Belgium in order to take out the French as quickly as possible before moving against Russia.

The Paris Peace Conference was convened on January 18, 1919 in order to shape the content and terms of post-war peace settlements with the defeated countries, namely Germany, Austria- Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria.

After the German occupation of Czechoslovakiain 1939, Hitler turned his attention to Poland,demanding the annexation of the Free City ofDanzig and the abolition of the Polish Corridor,a narrow strip linking Poland with the Baltic Seaand dividing East Prussia from the rest of Germany(Gilbert, 2004:15). The Second World War began with the German attack on Poland on September 1,1939.

Hitler had decided to attack the Soviet Union, since this would indirectly force Britain out of the war. Hitler’s aim was to deprive Britain of any hope of allies. Besides the geopolitical and ideological reasons for attacking the Soviet Union, an immediate factor was the impracticability of a cross-Channel invasion. Hitler discarded Sea Lion and turned to Operation Barbarossa against Soviet Russia.

Before the outbreak of the war in the Pacific, the Japanese economy had become increasingly dependent on America’s iron, metals, and oil to supply its army between 1931 and 1941. Since the US government recognized this dependency, it imposed certain economic sanctions and restrictions on Japan in response to its belligerence against China.

Napoleon’s greatest failure, it must said, remained Britain, which refused to bend the knee. Remaining outside of the continent, Britain effectively fought
both Napoleon’s political ventures and economic model.

In June 1942, in an attempt to divide and destroy the US fleet, the Japanese fleet moved to Midway, eleven hundred miles northwest of Pearl Harbor, while another section sailed toward the Aleutian Islands. However, the American fleet had certain advantages that became crucial in the Battle of Midway. First, the Americans had known the Japanese plans since cracking their naval code. Second, the Americans had radar, which would enable them to forecast Japanese attacks and locate Japanese targets. Third, the Americans had Midway island itself (Rich, 2003:256). On June 4, 1942, the American and Japanese navies entered into a naval battle. As the two fleets were too far from each other, they could not use their big guns or even see each other. Yet American pilots still destroyed four aircraft carriers and downed 322 Japanese planes, gaining superiority over Japanese forces in the process (Perry, et.al. 2008:840). By the end of the battle, the Americans had destroyed Japan’s heavy aircraft carriers, 7 battleships, 12 cruisers, 44 destroyers, and 234 planes (Rich, 2003:257). With the battle of Midway, Japan also seemed to lose its initiative (Perry, et.al., 2008:840). In August, American forces gained beachheads at Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands before moving towards New Guinea. By February 1943 Guadalcanal was retaken by American troops, and New Guinea was recaptured by the end of that year. In October 1943, the Americans won the greatest navalmbattle of the war in the center of the Philippine archipelago (Thomson, 1990:802-803).

Not long after the American Seventh and British Eight armies landed on Sicily, a palace revolution took place in Rome on 25 July in which Mussolini’s 21 years of rule were brought to an end.

The British Eight Army, commanded by General Bernard L. Montgomery, drove the Germans from Egypt at the Battle of El Alamein in October 1942.

The Big Three then decided to prepare a plan for the post-war world order. Representatives from each country, namely British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, US Secretary of State Cordell Hull, and Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, met in Moscow from October 19-30, 1943 to work on draft proposals (Rich, 2003: 276). Chaired by Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov, the Moscow Conference greatly bolstered the Soviet Union’s diplomatic reputation after its military victories against the Germans in Stalingrad and Kursk (Bell, 2011:155). It was here that the Soviets gave priority to securing a firm Western commitment to opening a second front in France. The three foreign ministers also agreed about the need to punish the Germans and separate Austria from Germany.