The Cold War

Cold War

Europe at the end of 1945 was devastated. There was no real strong government, millions of people had been killed, and much of Europe's infrastructure as completely broken, most public services ineffective, and starvation was rampant. However, because the United States had never been invaded, and the war won by the Allies, President Truman and his staff were more determined than ever to bring democracy to the rest of the world. The Marshall Plan, for instance, was an economic incentive to help Europe rebuild. However, because Europe was in such turmoil and there was somewhat of a power vacuum that France, England, the United States, and of course, the Soviet Union, wished to fill.

Because of the disaster after World War I and the ineffectiveness of the Versailles Treaty and Reparations, Truman's administration believed that it was crucial to allow Germany to move back into the Greater European environment. However, the Soviet occupation of 1/2 of Germany and Eastern Europe made that impossible. In the political arena, Europe had the difficult task of setting up complete new governments; economically, they had to rebuild their own infrastructure and transportation network; socially, the situation was even more dire -- missing persons, displaced populations, and refugees complicated the already underperforming systems.

This was now called the Cold War, a period of tension between the West (the U.S. And Allies - NATO) and the Soviet Union (the Warsaw Pact). Tensions heightened after the surrender of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy when Josef Stalin of the U.S.S.R. occupied Eastern Europe and created, as Winston Churchill called it, "An Iron Curtain." On one side, the Cold War was seen as a reaction to American aggression after World War II. America had not been invaded, and had an economy that was growing stronger and indeed was one of the only major powers whose homeland was untouched by the ravages of World War II (with the exception of Pearl Harbor). Compare this to the Soviet Union, with 30+ million dead, 25 million homeless, almost 1 million acres of productive agricultural land destroyed, and the infrastructure of the transportation system in shambles, and most major cities and industry ravaged. After the fall of Germany, the Soviets may have been on the winning side, but their economy was in shambles and they were in a position in which their entire internal structure was at risk -- and facing an ever powerful United States who, in one fell swoop, became the only nation on earth to harness the power of atomic weaponry.