IMMEDIATE ORIGINS OF THE COLD WAR

THE IMMEDIATE ORIGINS OF THE COLD WAR

·         AMONG IMPORTANT AREAS OF CONCERN BETWEEN RUSSIA AND UNITED STATES: 1. Desires of superpowers to gain a strategic advantage in the region. 2. The fact the region contained some 2/3s of the worlds oil reserves in a context where oil was becoming increasingly vital to the economy of the western world. 3. In a novel way, that made it different from previous pwer struggles, the cold war represented an ideological conflict between two very different political, social, and economic systems. 

·         Stalion: “ this war(WW2) is not as in the past, whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system.

·         The US was allies with Iran and turkey and soviets did not have allies from which to launch attack from any western hemisphere country close to the US.

·         Soviets instead would train and supply nearby countries to set up perimeter of defensearound actual soviet union. For example train and supply greek furillas from Bulgaria and Yugoslavia.

·         Greece was becoming communists. Greeks opposed American plan to reinstate their exiled king and so did the british.

·         By end of 1944 soviets occupied Bulgaria and Romania at the same time soviets pput pressure on Tehran for oil concession in northwestern iran.

·         Due to an armed leftist movement with powerful external support, and a parallel movement occurring in turkey the US announces the Truman doctorine.

·         Truman Doctorine- march/feb 1947. “we shall not realize our objectives, however, unless we are willing to help free peoples to maintain their free institutions and their national integrity against aggressive movements that seek to impose upon them totalitarian regimes. This is no more than a frank recognition that totalitarian regimes imposed on free peoples, by direct or indirect aggression, undermine the foundations of international peace and hence the security of the US.

·         In august 1941, after Germany invades Russia, british and Russian forces enter and occupy Iran. The british were in the south while the Russians were in the north.

·         December 1943 was the joint aliied declaration regarding iran(signed by Churchill, Roosevelt, and stalin, which guaranteed interalia, irans future sovereignty and territorial integrity.

·         Russians wanted oil in northern iran and prolonged their withdrawal as much as possible because the soviet union wanted to take whatever fairly limited measures it could to assure the safety of its frontiers.

·         The US found itself equally obliged to defend ‘free-peoples’ wherever it judged that freedom was being threatened.