The Cold War: The Berlin Blockade And Airlift

During World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union fought together as allies against the Axis powers. However, the relationship between these two nations continued to be a tense one. The Cold War, during the years of 1947-1991, was a state of political and military tension created after World War II between powers in the Western Bloc and powers in the Eastern Bloc. The Western Bloc was the United States, its NATO allies and others. The Eastern Bloc was the Soviet Union and its satellite states. The Berlin Blockade and airlift were substantial events that were the product of great power rivalry between the USA and the USSR, with extent of these two events intensifying the conflicts of the Cold War. These tensions were fuelled by the

Soviet Russia had increased its military strength which was a threat to the Western Countries and America started to manufacture the bombs and other deadly weapons, consequently, other European Countries also participated in this race of rivalry. In accordance to these events, the whole world was divided into two power alliances and paved the way for the Cold War.
The Berlin Blockade and Airlift was a substantial event during the Cold War that intensified the conflict. The Blockade was one of the first conflicts during the war, fuelled respectively by conflicting ideologies, but more so great power rivalry. In June 1948, the Russians, who wanted control of Berlin, closed all highways, railroads and canals from Western-occupied Germany into western-occupied Berlin. Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union, was taking over Eastern Europe and Czechoslovakia had just converted to Communism in March 1948, this was the start of the fear of

It would be easy to say that it was more ideological that rival-fuelled, though the extent to which the two factors caused the events and the intensification is a more accurate representation. However, historians over the decades have argued the origins of the Cold War and its events in regard to these two factors. George Kennan believed that the origins of the cold war lay in the Marxist-Leninism’s class struggle leading to revolution on a world scale. Soviet behaviour on the international stage, argued Kennan, depended chiefly on the internal necessities of Joseph Stalin's regime; according to Kennan, Stalin needed a hostile world in order to legitimize his own autocratic rule. However, Revisionists such as William A. Williams and Gar Alperovitz have the belief that the blame of the intensification of the war was Truman's foreign policy, in opposition to the idea of the USSR. The USA's significant implication in Europe’s' reconstruction was firstly motivated by a desire to strengthen its economic dominance over Europe, forcing the Soviets to consolidate all their assets in Eastern and Central Europe, regardless of the consequences of using force, to contain American expansion, this was based on the rivalry of the two