Essay Outline
I : Yalta t he
Yalta Conference was a meeting of British prime minister Winston
Churchill, Soviet premier Joseph Stalin, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt early in February 1945 as World War II was winding down.
● WWII Allies wish to keep good relations & keep working together in post war era ● Yalta conference created agreements about postwar europe that pleased all
● Germany would be divided into occupation zones
● there would be free elections in the liberated countries of Eastern
Europe (even though Soviet troops now controlled this territory)
● the Soviets would enter the war against Japan, which they did on
August 8, 1945—just as Japan was about to surrender
● the Soviets would control the southern half of Sakhalin island and the
Kurile Islands in the Pacific and would also have special concessions in
Manchuria
● a new world peace organization (the future United Nations) would be formed at a conference in San Francisco.
● Russia renege in Poland
1. ● Iron Curtain
On the east side of the
Iron Curtain were the countries that were connected to or influenced by the Soviet Union. On either side of the
Iron Curtain
, states developed their own international economic and military alliances: This iron curtain was an alignment of soviet controlled
“states” which acted as buffers of protection for Russia as well as an expanding boundary of communism. II: US response:
● Containment, define!, whose idea?
containment policy, which was to govern U.S. foreign policy for decades, was formulated by the secretary of state, General George Marshall; the under secretary of state, Dean Acheson; and an expert on Soviet affairs, George F.
Kennan. In an influential article, Kennan had written that only “a longterm, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies” would
eventually cause the Soviets to back off their Communist ideology of world domination and live in peace with other nations.
● Truman Doctrine MILITARY AID! the principle that the US should give support to countries or peoples threatened by Soviet forces or communist insurrection. First expressed in 1947 by US President Truman in a speech to
Congress seeking aid for Greece and Turkey, the doctrine was seen by the communists as an open declaration of the Cold War
● Marshall Plan A program by which the United States gave large amounts of economic aid to European countries to help them rebuild after the devastation of
World War II. It was proposed by the United States secretary of state, General
George C.
Marshall
. the following measures were necessary for fighting the
Cold War: quadruple U.S. government defense spending to 20 percent of GNP form alliances with nonCommunist countries around the world convince the
American public that a costly arms buildup was imperative for the nation’s defense, economic AID!
III: A: National Security Act creates 4 new agencies
● Department of defenseto coordinate the operations of the Army, Navy, and Air
Force;
●National Security Council(NSC) to coordinate the making of foreign policy in the Cold War,
●Central Intelligence Agencyto employ
