In a way, the fault for beginning the Cold War partially lies with Roosevelt as well. During the Yalta Conference, Franklin Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin, and Winston Churchill all agreed to fight Germany until it unconditionally surrendered. Stalin also agreed to free elections in Eastern Europe, and promised to enter the war against Japan after the war in Europe was finished.
Stalin already occupied Eastern Europe and his armies were starting to round up local leaders for imprisonment and replace them with Communists. Roosevelt knew this but also wanted Stalin to enter the war against Japan. Roosevelt's plan was to agree to anything Stalin wanted as long as he got a pledge of support for his war against Japan and to negotiate the fate of Eastern Europe later. Sadly, "later" never came because Franklin Roosevelt died of a brain hemorrhage weeks after the Yalta Conference.
Stalin never introduced fair elections in Europe at the war's end, his armies occupied Eastern Europe and were in the process of stripping Eastern Berlin of anything of value. When Truman called Stalin on this, Stalin insisted that his country was severely weakened by the war (which it was) and that he needed a buffer zone. Stalin kept this land under that pretense and even felt justified in doing so by the fact that the United States maintained a sphere of influence in Latin America.
Stalin also authorized the espionage needed to build the atomic bomb, thus touching off a nuclear arms race between his country and the United States. And of course, Stalin killed millions of his own people, thus leaving him open for criticism with Eastern Europeans and groups in the United States.
https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/yalta-conference
Friday, July 19, 2019
In what ways did Stalin make the Cold War inevitable ?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Why is the fact that the Americans are helping the Russians important?
In the late author Tom Clancy’s first novel, The Hunt for Red October, the assistance rendered to the Russians by the United States is impor...
-
There are a plethora of rules that Jonas and the other citizens must follow. Again, page numbers will vary given the edition of the book tha...
-
The only example of simile in "The Lottery"—and a particularly weak one at that—is when Mrs. Hutchinson taps Mrs. Delacroix on the...
-
A good thesis statement presents a claim (an interpretive stance on a story that can be defended using textual evidence) and is a position w...
-
The given two points of the exponential function are (2,24) and (3,144). To determine the exponential function y=ab^x plug-in the given x an...
-
What does the hot air balloon symbolize? To the Assad son who buys the hot air balloon, it symbolizes a kind of whimsy that he can afford. B...
-
The play Duchess of Malfi is named after the character and real life historical tragic figure of Duchess of Malfi who was the regent of the ...
-
Allie’s baseball mitt is extremely important to Holden in The Catcher in the Rye. It is a symbol of Allie since it was important to his brot...
No comments:
Post a Comment