![]() ![]() This was developed into the Truman Doctrine. It must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. In that speech he promised that the USA would provide aid to any country standing up to oppression: Truman had to persuade the usually isolationist US government to grant American money to support Greece’s fight against communism and laid out his reasons in a speech to Congress in March 1947. However, Britain was forced to withdraw its support due to lack of funds. Britain had been giving support to the anti-communist forces of the Greek government. From 1946 a civil war had been happening in Greece between its western-backed government and pro-communist forces. The Truman DoctrineĪmerican and British politicians were concerned about events in Greece and Turkey. In a nutshell, what Churchill meant by this was that the Allies had spent six years fighting for the freedom from fascism in Europe, only to have half the continent now under Soviet dictatorship. In that speech he famously noted that from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent. On 5 March 1946, the by-now former British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, condemned the Soviet expansion in Eastern Europe in his famous Iron Curtain speech. Why do you think American politicians rejected the idea of rollback? The Iron Curtain Speech Consider what groups would have preferred each of the two policies. ![]() A rollback approach would have involved American intervention to overturn a communist government in another country.Įxplain the difference between the policies of rollback and containment. The Americans rejected a policy of rollback, which would have been much more aggressive and confrontational. The USA would commit to a policy of containment, which meant stopping the spread of communism into Western Europe. The USSR would attempt to dominate Eastern Europe and spread communism where possible. ![]() These two telegrams set the scene for the Cold War in Europe. As a result, the USSR needed to secure its buffer zone in Eastern Europe. The Soviet response to The Long Telegram was The Novikov Telegram, in which the Soviet ambassador to the USA, Nikolai Novikov, warned that the USA had emerged from World War Two economically strong and bent on world domination. However, the USA was stronger than the USSR and so communism could be ‘contained’. It was determined to spread communism and therefore there could be no peaceful co-existence between the USSR and the USA. In much fewer than 8,000 words, what Kennan’s telegram said was that the USSR was heavily armed and feared the outside world. The American State Department had to be alerted by a Moscow-based official of the Soviets’ activities. Kennan’s response became known as The Long Telegram because at 8,000 words, it was indeed long! The importance of the Kennan telegram is that it shows that at this point there was still no concept of a Cold War. In 1946, George Kennan, an official at the US Embassy in Moscow, was asked to provide a summary of what the Soviets were up to and their intentions in Eastern Europe. An exchange of Telegrams The Long Telegram ![]() Now it seemed that in many countries the hard-won freedom from Nazi dictatorship was being replaced by communist dictatorships. World War Two had been fought in the name of freedom. For the Western Allies the setting up of communist governments in Eastern Europe was a major concern. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |