ULUSLARARASI İLİŞKİLER TARİHİ

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.

For starters, because each country had fought a different war. Though the United States had fought valiantly on land and at sea on three continents (Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Africa), it had entered the war relatively late, in December 1941, and ‘only’ lost around 300,000 men. Not only was none of the conflict (outside Hawaii) fought on American soil, but its economy emerged as the world’s most powerful as a direct result, accounting for over 50% of global gross domestic product (GDP) by 1945.

President Truman wasted little time in presenting what would become known as the Truman Doctrine, announcing on March 12, 1947 that it was henceforth “the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are  resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures,” i.e. communism—starting with Turkey and Greece (Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, 1963: 178–79).

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 April 4, 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was signed in Washington by Canada, the US, the 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.

The policy of destalinization was formulated during this period, especially once Prime Minister Malenkov introduced the policy of peaceful coexistence with the West in August 1953—though the policy has since come to be more associated with Khrushchev.

The creation of the Baghdad Pact was another significant development in the institutionalization of the Cold War insofar as it extended the goal of militarily containing the Soviet Union far into the Middle East. Established in 1955 after an agreement between Turkey and Iraq, it also included Britain, Pakistan, and Iran. As a rule, the general purpose of this pact was to prevent the spread of communism into the Middle East and keep the Soviets away from vital Middle East oil. Yet following the overthrow of anti-Soviet rule in Iraq in 1959, the Pact began to crumble. Iraq immediately left the organization, and when the US joined as an associate member, its name was changed to the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO).

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.

This ease in tensions also had an impact on intraregional and international relations. Both France and West Germany entered into independent diplomacy with the Soviet Union, marking the beginning of a series of independently declared détentes with the USSR from 1964 onward (Zickel, 1991: 420-425).

Brezhnev Doctrine is “expounded by Leonid Brezhnev in November 1968 affirming the right of the Soviet Union to intervene in the affairs of communist countries in order to protect communism,” (Best et al., 2008: 280).

Despite the differences, the Cold War is generally considered to have started in 1945 following the Second World War.

For the cultural determinist, the Cold War was a struggle between civilizations, with an Orthodox authoritarian collectivist East pitted against a liberal individualistic Catholic and Protestant West.