Cold War (World War II)???

Question

How did the Cold War ideology crystalize after Worl War II change wartime alliances that had existed during the war?

Thank you, I work at a retirement resort and want to talk some facts with the residence =) and understand where they are coming from. =)

Answer 1

The west were always suspicious of the Soviet Union and only allied with them out of desperation.  The west would never have won the war without the help of the Soviet Union.

Before the war the Soviet Union was never considered a military threat.  The USSR couldn't even successfully invade                          Finland.  But after years of fending off the n***s, by the end of the war the Soviet Union had a tempered, efficient and experienced military.  On top of this, Joseph Stalin was an evil, power-hungry tyrant that was easily comparable to Hitler.

In the post-war years the USSR was obsessed with expanding it's empire and achieving global domination.  The west were obviously terrified of the idea of Communism spreading across the globe.  Things didn't change after the death of Stalin because by then the military industrial complex in the USA had become so gigantic that it had become it's own entity and to keep the money rolling in for the defence contractors, the Cold War had to be maintained.

Everything from 9-11 to Gulf wars #1 and #2 to the war of words with Iran to the current troubles in Georgia are all operations that were either planned or allowed to happen by the US military industrial complex and the Cold War is again heating up.........all to make more money for the dogs of war.  

Answer 2

Good idea.  It is easy to misunderstand people's opinions if you don't know about the time they grew up in.

Both America and particularly Britain had always opposed the bolshevik revolution.  After WWI Britain sent soldiers to attempt to overthrow the soviet government in conjunction with counter-revolutionaries.  Naturally enough, the Bolshevik leaders regarded the western capitalist powers as an enemy.

The communist ideology was that the western democracies would fall to communism, and Stalin's policy was expansionist.  Initially Germany and the USSR allied so that Germany could expand Westwards.  The USSR swallowed up most of Poland.

Churchill never trusted Stalin, and even during WWII itself, the British and Russians (and to a lesser extent the Americans) were attempting to expand their spheres of influence.

In 1945, the Western powers and USSR raced to swallow up as much of Europe as possible. Friction along the lines of demarcation started almost at once.

Roosevelt was extremely ill by the Yalta conference at which Post war Europe was divided.  Partly due to this illness, much of Eastern Europe fell to the USSR by default - although there was not a great deal the US or Britain could do to expel the red army from territory it controlled by that time anyway.  Later American political leaders regarded Roosevelt's policy as misguided and were determined to take a much tougher line.

Berlin was divided between the Four Allied powers, but it was within the Soviet part of Germany.  In 1948 the Soviets tried to pressure the West by cutting off access to the west through the corridor that supplied Berlin.  Britain and America responded by using vast fleets of aircraft to supply the city (see "Berlin Airlift").  

By that time it was clear that the old allies were now implacably opposed and that the wartime alliance had only been a temporary relationship of convenience.

In terms of outlook, Hitler and Stalin had a great deal in common, and the western powers were determined not to repeat the policy of "appeasement" that Chamberlain, the British PM had followed with Hitler prior to the war, which was perceived as having contributed to the rise of the n***s.

How much of this was Ideology and how much of it just power politics ?  In retrospect, hard to say.  You can see that even with the Communists gone Russia today is an expansionist great power that regards the states around its borders as being within its sphere of influence, so a lot of the cold war may have happened even if Stalin did not happen to be communist but just another dictator.

However, from the perspective of people that had very nearly lost the war to Hitler because they did not take a tough enough line early on, nor maintain their military strength during the rise of the Reich and Japanese empire, you can see that the Cold War policy of preparation and opposition was a fairly sensible response, even if it nearly did lead to a nuclear disaster.

On the Soviet side, who had suffered more than any other nation during the war, they wanted a wide ring of buffer states controlled by them surrounding their borders to give them added protection.  They too were heavily influenced by the lessons of the war and determined to use their new empire to protect them.