The US foreign policy from 1945-1991 Case Study

The US foreign policy from 1945-1991 - fountain Study ExampleThis research will begin with the statement that the term ice-cold War was coined by Pulitzer prize-winning publicist Herbert Bayard Swope and refers to the intense feelings of hostility and the profound international tension and struggle for power between the the ground forces and then the USSR, both of which headed formidable alliances i.e. Allies and Russian satellites, respectively. It started in 1945 and ended in 1989. It was cold because the relations between the two superpowers were icy but never came to a flashpoint verging on a crack war. The conflict involved political rivalry and advantage as well as an upper impart in the balance of power. The conflict was replete with clashes of competing ideologies i.e. between the democratic capitalist system of America and its associate and the socialist/communist system of the USSR and the satellite nations comprising the nations of the Warsaw Pact. The rivalry consi sted of propaganda, military alliances, atomic arms development, reconstructive memory programs and the rivalry to win the hearts and minds of the neutral countries, most especially the third world countries which might turn in military bases, natural resources, and markets. As early as 1929, the ground forces and the USSR had kept each other at bay and at arms length despite differences in political ideologies. This estrangement was intensified by the USAs policy of isolationism in the 1930s which muted whatever feelings of mistrust they had for each other. But relations were improved when the USA and the Soviet Union unexpectedly found themselves fighting side by side against fascist Germany in demesne War II. The warm relations, however, rapidly dissolved when midway through the war, the USA realized that the USSR was determined to bump all the territories in Eastern Europe that it lost prior to World War I and these ar eastern Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and parts of Romania and Finland. It became clear to USA that Stalin in his paranoid fear of Germany and its military might urgency all of Eastern Europe to serve as its buffer states and shields from German aggression. President Roosevelt stressed that USA as adherent of the principle of self-determination wanted these states to choose for themselves the kind of government they want. The other western sandwich allies looked at Poland as strategically the bulwark of Europe which when falling into the hands of the Soviets would open the floodgates of Russians invade Western Europe. The US fears were vindicated during the 1943 Teheran multitude when Stalin finally laid his cards on the control panel that he expected territorial concessions in the form of the states of Eastern Europe. Justice, to Stalin demanded that Russia be recompensed from the deaths of 16 million Russians and the monumental destruction and damage to Soviet properties and machinery during the first three years of war. It dawned on President Roosevelt that reality, tradition and annals dictated that self-determination among the eastern European states would be anathema to Russia as any freely elect government in Eastern Europe would be hostile to Soviet ideology. Both the Yalta Conference and the Potsdam Conference in 1945 further strained the relations almost to the breaking point as Russia treacherously make out up a communist government in Lublin, Poland followed by its undermining of elected non-communist governments in Czechoslovakia and Hungary. It was inevitable that the Cold War ensued in early 1946 after Berlin and Germany were divided into 4 factions i.e. Russian, American, British and French.