Us – Russia Relations

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in 1946 by American and Soviet ambassadors and officials. In February 1946, George Kennan wrote The Long Telegram while serving as an ambassador in Moscow and sent it to American officials in Washington. The telegram articulated the increasing degradation of Soviet relations and became the foundation for the United States’ Cold War strategy against the USSR. In the telegram, Kennan states that Communism in the Soviet Union is "undoubtedly [the] greatest task our diplomacy has ever faced and probably greatest it will ever have to face." Later that year, the Soviet Ambassador to the US, Nikolai Novikov, sent a similar telegram to Soviet officials in Moscow. The Novikov Telegram is now accepted by many scholars and historians as the equivalent of Kennan’s Long Telegram. In it, Novikov describes that United States as a “monopoly capital,” and that “US foreign policy has been characterized in the postwar period by a desire for world domination.” Compounding these inflammatory telegrams was Winston Churchill’s infamous “Iron Curtain” speech in March 1946. In his speech, Churchill decried the Soviet Union’s annexation actions and called for an alliance between the United States and the United Kingdom against the Soviet Union. Stalin responded to his speech with a staunch denial of Churchill’s accusations. In an interview with the Soviet newspaper Pravda, Stalin rebuked Churchill and compared his actions to Hitler, further claiming that his speech was “calculated to sow the seeds of dissention among the Allied States.” These speeches and telegrams charged up the political atmosphere in the United States and Soviet Union, expanding the foundation of Yalta and Potsdam and eventually leading to the start of the Cold War.

The telegrams sent by Kennan and Novikov outlined the new foreign policy of the United States and Soviet Union. In a further report that Kennan published in 1947, he explicitly outlines the need for containment by writing that “the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.” This idea of containment framed every foreign policy decision taken by the United States for the rest of the Cold War. Novikov’s report discusses American containment, saying that the foreign policy of the United States is “directed at limiting or displacing Soviet influence from neighboring countries.” Building off Kennan’s bold rhetoric, President Truman addressed Congress and declared a new American policy of strict anticommunist action against any state or region that is “resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” This policy was soon renamed the Truman Doctrine, and further established America’s policy of containment against the Soviets. To prevent the spread of Communism throughout the war-torn nations of Europe following World War II, the United States enacted the Marshall Plan. This policy provided over $13 billion to European countries in the years immediately following the War, and gave Europe the opportunity to get back on its feet. The goal of the Marshall Plan was to perpetuate democratic institutions in Europe, preventing Communist revolutions and perpetuating Soviet containment. By aiding European countries, the United States was able to fend off Communism throughout most of the vulnerable countries in Europe. After rebuilding the economic and political institutions in the region, the United States began focusing on creating military alliances to further bolster their security and tip the balance of power in their favor.

The United States and the Soviet Union began forming alliances and organizations to counteract enemy aggressions around the world. In April 1949, the United States formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, known as NATO. The nations that signed the treaty and formed NATO were the United States, England, France, Canada, Denmark, Portugal, Norway, Belgium, Iceland, Luxembourg, Italy, and the Netherlands. The goal of NATO was to form a collective defense of its member nations, which guaranteed that if one of the nations was attacked by a non-member nation the other NATO members would agree to defend the attacked state. The organization served mainly as a political partnership until 1950, when the Korean War began. The new conflict caused NATO to evolve into a militaristic organization, guided by the direction of American military commanders. The treaty that NATO was founded upon was directed to be open to any nation that desired membership, however the rules that member states had to agree to in order to join NATO were intentionally written in a manner that would make the Soviet Union refuse the terms to join. NATO gave the Western allies more security, tipping the balance of power away from the Soviet Union. This angered the leaders of Eastern European nations, and caused them to begin resisting NATO’s legitimacy. The Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Romania created Comecon, which integrated the economies of their nations and was an attempt to combat the Marshall Plan. The goal of Comecon was to strengthen cooperation between developing Eastern European nations and support their nations on an economic level. Only five months after the creation of NATO, the Soviet Union successfully detonated its first atomic bomb in September 1949. In an address to the American people, President Truman reported that the development of atomic weapons by foreign powers was expected, and that the United States was prepared to face the challenge directly. In 1954, the USSR discussed the possibility of joining NATO as a means to combat the influence of the United States in Europe. However, Soviet leaders declined this option, fearing that the European Defense Community would eventually rearm European nations and be directed to combat the Soviet Union’s influence in European countries. This led to the formation of the Warsaw Pact in 1955, the Eastern European response to NATO. The Warsaw Pact was a collective defense organization comprised of Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and the Soviet Union, and served as the military counterpart to Comecon. Although NATO and the Warsaw Pact never engaged in direct conflict, they waged ideological battles by means of proxy wars throughout the duration of the Cold War. These military alliances spread the struggles of the Cold War to previously unaffected regions of the world, and established the bipolar balance of power between the two conflicting ideological factions.

History: Wars

The most crucial aspect of Cold War ideology was based on National Security Council Report 68, known by its acronym NSC-68. NSC-68 was a top secret 58-page document created by the National Security