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Tensions between the Soviet union and the Western powers escalated twine 1945-1947, especially when in Potsdam, Yalta, and Tehran, Stalin’s plans to consolidate Soviet control of Central and Eastern Europe became manifestly clear. On March 5, 1946 Winston Churchill delivered his landmark speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri lamenting that an “iron curtain” had descended on Eastern Europe. Historians interpret the Soviet Union’s Cold War intentions in two different manners. One emphasizes the primacy of communist ideology and communism’s foundational intent, as outlined in the Communist Manifesto, to establish global hegemony.
The other interpretation, advocated notably by Richard M. Nixon, emphasized the historical goals of the Russian state, specifically hegemony over Eastern Europe, access to warm water seaports, the defense of other Slavic peoples, and the view of Russia as “the Third Rome. ” The roots of the ideological clashes can be seen in Mar’s and Engel’s’ writings and in the writings of Vladimir Lenin who succeeded in building communism into a political reality through the Bolshevik seizure of power in the Russian Revolution of 1917.
Walter Labeler stresses Russian’s historic interests, going back to the Czarist years when the United States and Russia became rivals. From 1 933 to 1 939 the United States and the Soviet Union experienced dtenet but relations were not friendly. After the USSR and Germany became enemies in 1 941, Franklin Delano Roosevelt made a personal commitment to help the Soviets, although the U. S. Congress never voted to approve any sort of alliance and the wartime cooperation was never especially friendly. For example, Josef Stalin was reluctant to allow American forces to use Soviet bases. Cooperation became increasingly strained by
February 1945 at the Yalta Conference, as it was becoming clear that Stalin intended to spread communism to Eastern Europe-??and then, perhaps-??to France and Italy. Some historians such as William Appleton Williams also cite American economic expansionism as one of the roots of the Cold War. These historians use the Marshall Plan and its terms and conditions as evidence to back up their claims. These geopolitical and ideological rivalries were accompanied by a third factor that had just emerged from World War II as a new problem in world affairs: the problem of effective international control of nuclear energy.
In 1946 the Soviet Joins rejected a United States proposal for such control, which had been formulated by Bernard Burch on the basis of an earlier report authored by Dean Achaeans and David Alienated, with the objection that such an agreement would undermine the principle of national sovereignty. The end of the Cold War did not resolve the problem of international control of nuclear energy, and it has re-emerged as a factor in the beginning of the Long War (or the war on global terror) declared by the United States in 2006 as its official military doctrine.