The Cold War

3 Pages 760 Words

After a century of friendship, Americans and Russians quarreled over Asian questions in the 1890s, and became enemies in 1917 when the Communists seized power, established the Soviet Union, and declared ideological war on the capitalist nations of the West. The United States intervened in the Soviet Union, sending some 10,000 troops between 1918 and 1920, and then refused to recognize the new state until 1933. The two countries fought against Germany during World War II, but this alliance began to dissolve in 1944-1945, when the Russian leader Joseph Stalin, seeking Soviet security, used the Red Army to control much of Eastern Europe. U.S. President Harry S. Truman opposed Stalin's policy and moved to unite Europe under American leadership. Mistrust grew as both sides broke wartime agreements. Stalin failed to honor pledges to hold free elections in Eastern Europe. Truman refused to honor promises to send reparations from the defeated Germany to help rebuild the war-devastated Soviet Union.
U.S. officials, concerned over Soviet pressures against Iran and Turkey, interpreted a 1946 speech by Stalin as declaring ideological war against the West. In 1947 the president proposed the Truman Doctrine, which had two objectives: to send U.S. aid to anticommunist forces in Greece and Turkey, and to create a public consensus so Americans would be willing to fight the cold war. He achieved both goals. That same year, journalist Walter Lippmann popularized the term cold war in a book of the same name. In Congress there was a series of highly publicized inquiries into pro-Communist activity in the United States. The best-known investigator, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, gave his name to an era of intense anticommunism. In 1948 the United States launched the $13 billion Marshall Plan to rebuild Western and Central Europe. When Stalin responded by extending his control over Eastern Europe and threatening the West's position in Germany, Truman helped to...