Cold War Foreign Policy
Uploaded by surfshorty21 on Mar 25, 2001
Introduction
“Their [Russia’s and America‘s] starting-point is different, and their courses are not the same; yet each of them seems marked by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe,” Alexis de Torqueville, late 19th century. De Torqueville’s prophecy came true by the 1940s when the two super powers, the United States of America and the Soviet Union, had come head to head, swaying the “destinies of half the globe” and more. (de Torqueville, chapter 18)
The United States had recently participated in the second World War resulting in an Allied and American victory. Europe, however, was devastated, economically, politically, and socially.
“The United States [stood] at this time at the pinnacle of world power. It [was] a solemn moment for American democracy,” former Britain Prime Minister Winston Churchill stated in a speech delivered at Westminster College in 1946. (Churchill, page 1) At that time, American and Russian tensions had evolved into a full-throttle push into the Cold War.
The Cold War refers to the tensions that arose between Russia and America that became a strategic and political struggle that developed after World War II. It lasted for 35 years and it was the battle that determined the fate of democracy and communism.
The never-back down attitudes pushed into a stand-off between the two super powers. (Cold War: The Cause, par 1) To intensify to the hostility, the Soviet Union had taken a policy that shutting out any other nations from the Union’s internal affairs metaphorically known as the Iron Curtain.
What emerged was a war that “entailed much greater activism and a correspondingly larger commitment of resources to foreign policy than the United States had previously undertaken in peacetime.” (Ford, page 1) The United States was asked to form policies in to deal with its doppelganger's atomic power and communistic government.
The Cold War significantly changed the way foreign policy is administered today. The United States was forced to make strategic plans to help other countries regain economic stability, contain communism, and not end up in a ruinous global nuclear war. The war was what pushed America from the Monroe Doctrine’s limited jurisdiction to Truman's National Security Council's reponse to the endangering communsim and warfare with NSC 68, Containment's and the Marshall Plan’s economic intervention in volatile nations, and Dulles' "brinkmanship." Three policies and two ideologies formed the backbone to what became the outline for foreign policy...