President Truman's Outbreak Of The Cold War

The Cold War really began in 1945 after the end of WWII with the defeat of Germany and Japan, and in 1946 it really began to take hold after speeches and the ideology that communism and capitalism were incompatible. Then soon after, “Stalin and Churchill issued their declarations of cold war” (LaFeber 44). After the general elections of 1945, Winston Churchill was voted out and replaced by Clement Attlee, so Harry Truman invited Churchill to go to the U.S. to give a speech and let the people see him. During the visit, on March 5, 1946, while visiting Westminster College in Missouri, Churchill gave his famous iron curtain speech, and claims that there is an iron curtain on the border where the red army occupies. He continues, saying that there

During this, Truman presented his Truman Doctrine in which he called all the American people to join him in the fight for the containment of communism and prevent the advancement of communism. This ideology fueled American foreign policy as a whole for years to come, and in some ways, is still visible today. In 1948, the Berlin blockade begins as Stalin thinks that the U.S. is trying to push them out, so he retaliates by making a blockade and trying to starve out West Berlin in an effort to make the allies move out from the pressure of no supplies being there, but this leads into the Berlin airlift. (Wilson Lecture). The Berlin airlift began with Curtis Lemay scrounging the world for allied planes in order to try and supply the city just by using planes, and a plane landed every thirty seconds to bring in supplies an after a couple months, Stalin began to look not as tough so he retracted the blockade in 1949 (Wilson Lecture). The Korean war start on June 25, 1950, and is a UN flag war, but often known as the forgotten war and American troops are put in South Korea to stop communism from

Marshall, and was known as the Europe recovery program of where he provides massive economic aid packages to western Europe. (Wilson Lecture). Also around this time, the alphabet soup of Washington occurred with tons of new agencies being created as well as a permanent military buildup for the U.S. to fight communism anytime, with an influx of defense spending (Wilson Lecture). In 1956, Nasser “seized the Suez Canal” (LaFaber 189) which was simply unacceptable to the British and French who refused to risk their 67 million tons of oil that traveled through the Suez in 1955, in the hands of Nasser. In 1961, the Berlin Wall goes up, and the Bay of Pigs invasion occurs, which was a full-scale military invasion against Cuba by the U.S. that failed miserably with the U.S. troops being quickly outnumbered and they surrendered within 24 hours. In 1959, Fidel Castro takes over Cuba soon later in 1962, the Cuban Missile crisis really takes hold with the U.S. terminating diplomatic relations between