1. What were the goals of the Soviet Union after WWII? How did American media respond to the Soviet Union 's actions?
The Cold War represented a global competition that established political hostility between the United States and the Soviet Union for almost 45 years. From the times of Czarist Russia and the beginning of the American nation, these countries have taken seriously their mission to expand and shape global order. After World War II, both countries emerged as two major military powers, which encouraged them to compete for the control of the economic and political world. The post-war goals of the United States and the Soviet Union were mainly influenced by their desire to sell to the world their ideologies of capitalism and communism respectively. The Soviet Union goals after World War II were based on the superiority of communism as a political and economic system over capitalism, and the United States used the
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Once the war ended, Germany was temporarily divided into four different sectors for England, France, USA and the USSR. By 1946, when the Soviets were in control of Eastern Europe, an “Iron Curtain” consolidated the division of Europe into a West bloc that incorporated the western democracies, including the United States, and an Eastern bloc with the Soviets. Yet in 1949 Germany witnessed another division with the creation of West and East Germany, which put an end to any dialogue in favor of a reunified nation. These ideological conflicts and divisions that took place in Germany, particularly the creation of the Berlin Wall in 1961, symbolized the main conflict of the Cold war. Germany was not only the center for the conflict between capitalism and communism, but the outcomes of the separation of Berlin demonstrated to the world the superiority of capitalism over Soviet communism in the