ULUSLARARASI İLİŞKİLER TARİHİ

As often happens in human history, a crucial unforeseen event, unrelated to the war, happened between Yalta and Potsdam: the death of US President Roosevelt.

Truman Doctrine, announced  on March 12, 1947  was “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.

There were 16 countries, including Turkey and Greece, in the Marshall Plan’s new economic orbit, which, if successful, would soon morph into a more permanent structure of economic—and, gradually, political—interdependence.

After the failure of the London Foreign Ministers’ Conference in late 1947, the US, France, Britain, and the Benelux states (Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg) met again from February to June 1948 in what would be called the London Six Power Conference to hammer out an agreement on the formulation of a unified West German state.

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. Vietnam, its tenth and final member, in 1978.

The possibility of peaceful coexistence only increased with the success of the Camp David Summit held in September 1959, when US President Dwight D. Eisenhower invited Soviet leader Khrushchev on a several-week tour of the United States to calm tensions that had been mounting over the fate of Berlin.

Glasnost means openness.

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.

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.

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. According to Malenkov, speaking after Stalin’s funeral, “we stand as we have always stood for the peaceful coexistence of the two systems. We hold that there are no objective reasons for clashes between the United States of America and the Soviet Union”

Many Arabs, however, perceived the doctrine as an arrangement aimed at protecting Western interests in the region.

Kennedy first put Cuba under a naval blockade, despite Cuba’s protests that the missiles deployed were purely for defensive purposes. While the Soviet Union offered to broker a diplomatic solution, Khrushchev was looking for new ways to use the Cuban Missile Crisis.

According to the NPT, member states were divided into two categories. Within these categories, Nuclear-Weapon States were the privileged few allowed to have nuclear weapons in their arsenals—France, the US, China, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union. The rest of the world were Non-Nuclear Weapon States.

After visiting Beijing, President Nixon travelled to Moscow in May 1972 for a summit. The mood or détente had already been set, and both powers wanted to halt the arms race to relieve their economies from the strain thereof. As a result, the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I) was concluded to limit the amount of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs).

Though most point to 1946-47 as the beginning of the Cold War, the US and USSR had had very strained ties since the Russian Revolution of 1917. Washington, for example, had long refused to recognize the Bolsheviks as the rightful rulers of post-czarist Russia, and did not diplomatically recognize the USSR until Franklin D. Roosevelt came to power in 1933.

Yalta’s wording was so vague—and ‘democracy’ meant such different things to each of the power—that the most difficult questions for the post-war settlement of Germany was left for Potsdam.