ULUSLARARASI İLİŞKİLER TARİHİ - Deneme Sınavı - 14

Containment was a United States policy using numerous strategies to prevent the spread of communism abroad. Kennan’s analysis was one of the factors that influenced Washington’s containment policy for the next half-century.

Though most point to 1946-47 as the beginning of the Cold War, the US and USSR.

The Cold War  had very strained ties since the Russian Revolution of 1917

At the Soviet Black Sea resort town of Yalta in February 1945.

The Allies could agree upon German demilitarization, denazification, and the establishment of an Allied Control Council.

With Britain’s post-war finances severely strained, it could no longer shoulder the burden of feeding and administering its zone, already the most densely populated of Germany. Thus, it merged its zone with that of the US in January 1947 to create the Bizonia.

Meeting in Moscow a month later in April 1947, the US, British, French, and Soviet foreign ministers equally failed to resolve the status of Germany and Eastern Europe (Gaddis, 2005:54). Newly appointed as Truman’s secretary of state, the brinkmanship was too much for former general George C. Marshall. Greatly perturbed by what he saw in Moscow—a seemingly indifferent Stalin in whose hands the fate of Europe rested— Marshall turned once again to George Kennan. If the young diplomat could diagnose the disease, went his reasoning, then surely he must prescribe a remedy. In response, Kennan gave Marshall the outline of what would soon become the European Recovery Program. Seeking nothing less than the reconstruction of a war-torn Europe, when Marshall announced his program during the Harvard Commencement speech of June 1947, it immediately became known as the Marshall Plan.

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. This was followed by the creation of the Democratic Republic of Germany (in German: GDR, or East Germany) by the Soviets out of its former occupation zone. The partition of Germany and division of Berlin was thus completed, which became the symbol of the Cold War division in the world.

Brussels Pact powers –namely Belgium, Britain, France, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands-, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Italy, and Portugal. Before the end of the Cold War, Greece (1952), Turkey (1952), West Germany (1955) and Spain (1982) also entered the alliance.

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 group’s original members included the USSR, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Poland. Albania joined in 1949, but would leave in 1961 after the Soviet-Albanian split. East Germany joined in 1950, followed by the Mongolian People’s Republic in 1962, Cuba in 1972, and Vietnam, its tenth and final member, in 1978.

These developments motivated US President Eisenhower, who launched an economic and military aid program in January 1957 to protect Middle Eastern countries from military threats and internal (communist-inspired) turmoil. Known as the Eisenhower Doctrine, this policy was a direct response to the perceived increase in Soviet influence in the region and, as such, promised aid to any Middle Eastern country “threatened by armed aggression,” i.e. communism, whether from within or without.

The world was on high alert, given the potential of a nuclear war. The tension was eased, however, on October 26, when Moscow declared that it would remove its missile pads in Cuba if the US promised not to attempt another invasion of the island (Dockrill and Hopkins, 2006: 85). Even more important was the secret US promise to dismantle its nuclear arsenal in Turkey. In the end, the crisis revealed that open channels of diplomacy and communication could go an extremely long way to bringing a situation back from the brink, setting a powerful precedent for détente a decade later.

The Thirty Years’ War started in Bohemia as an uprising of Protestants against the Spanish authorities.

The term Cold War is used to define the period of nearly fifty years following the Second World War during which the United States and Soviet Union competed for world supremacy under the guise of Western bloc and Eastern Bloc.