Superpowers

16 Pages 3893 Words

e point of concern to the USSR. Russian
foreign policy was fundamentally Leninist in its concern to keep the
USSR out of war. Stalin wanted to consolidate Communist power and
modernise the country's industry. The Soviet Union was committed to
collective action for peace, as long as that commitment did not mean
that the Soviet Union would take a brunt of a Nazi attack as a result.
Examples of this can be seen in the Soviet Unions’ attempts to achieve
a mutual assistance treaty with Britain and France. These treaties,
however, were designed more to create security for the West, as
opposed to keeping all three signatories from harm. At the same
time, Stalin was attempting to polarise both the Anglo-French, and the
Axis powers against each other. The important result of this was the
Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact, which partitioned Poland, and allowed
Hitler to start the war. Another side-effect of his policy of playing
both sides was that it caused incredible distrust towards the Soviets
from the Western powers after 1940. This was due in part to the fact
that Stalin made several demands for both influence in the
Dardanelles, and for Bulgaria to be recognised as a Soviet dependant.

The seeds of superpowerdom lie here however, in the late
thirties. R.J. Overy has written that “stability in Europe might have
been achieved through the existence of powers so strong that they
could impose their will on the whole of the international system, as
has been the case since 1945….” At the time, there was no power in
the world that could achieve such a feat. Britain and France were in
imperial decline, and more concerned about colonial economics than the
stability of Europe. Both imperial powers assumed that empire-building
would necessarily be an inevitable feature of the world system.
German aggression could have been stifled early had the imperial
powers had ac...