A complex combination of ideological, political, and economic reasons drove relations between the Soviet Union and the United States throughout the years, resulting in movements between cautious collaboration and frequently hostile superpower competition.
The two nations’ divergent political systems often hindered them from establishing a shared understanding on crucial policy matters, and even took them to the brink of war, as in the instance of the Cuban missile crisis.
After World War II, the United States was not the sole dominating power on the global arena; it had a new rival in the Soviet Union. Tensions between the former allies swiftly escalated, resulting in a new kind of conflict—one heightened by the fear of nuclear weapons—that came to dominate global politics for the rest of the twentieth century.
Furthermore, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was always accessible to warn US elites that Stalin and the Soviet Union were the next adversaries to be defeated. In truth, he intended to employ German POWs to fight alongside British and American forces against the Soviets. Churchill had spent decades fighting socialism, and no conflict could have deterred him.
Still, there remained a point of conflict – the Iran crisis of 1946. The Soviet Union attempted to take over northern Iran, which was inhabited by Azerbaijanis and Kurds. The United States was opposed to this. In the end, the Americans won, but it was clear that the USSR still harbored expansionist ambitions. It has to be kept in check. Only one nation was permitted to house them.
The Red Army marched into Eastern Europe and refused to withdraw, according to the first hypothesis. The deployment of a powerful military machine in Central and Eastern Europe, along with Communist intervention in free and fair elections, led in the takeover of Eastern Europe, which the US heroically opposed.
The second hypothesis. During WWII, the military-industrial complex capitalists in the United States realized that a large military was a meal ticket to wealth. Profits skyrocket, and America’s political and economic dominance grows rapidly, to the point that Washington can dictate the rules of the postwar global economic system, which is based on a dollar standard worldwide currency.
All of this wealth, though, can only persist if there is a genuine, realistic challenge to contend with. As Truman prepares to disarm after 1945, the Military-Industrial Complex realizes what it stands to lose. Fortunately, North Korea invades the South, and Communism in Asia and Europe now seems to be a serious danger to the American way of life, so these manufacturers and politicians fabricate the Soviet Union menace in order to maintain power, money, and comfort.
The third hypothesis. By the conclusion of WWII, it is clear that a new global order will emerge. The United States and Russia will be superpowers, and imperialism will be extinct. The UK is fearful that the US would withdraw all of its forces, leaving Europe vulnerable to a surprise Soviet invasion that the UK and France will be unable to repel.
While the Russian Navy would have the same problems that Hitler did, the UK does not like the prospect of trading one hostile state for another across the channel. Britain, which is militarily and economically weak, has nothing to give the US or use to pacify the Soviets. However, the UK is aware that the US was fairly isolationist before to WWII: a country content with its own boundaries is unlikely to have spies outside of them.
Since the Great Game, the UK has maintained a vast network of intelligence operatives across Russia. The third argument holds that the UK distorted or cherry-picked intelligence from its Russian spies in order to magnify the danger posed by the Soviets in the eyes of the US government. In reality, the Cold War resulted from the United Kingdom duping America into thinking that the Russians were a genuine danger.
You might easily argue that any of these hypotheses is correct: personally, as is frequently the case with history, I’d have to say that there’s truth in all of them, and that the ultimate reality is that it’s all of these theories, as well as a million other reasons, some of which we’ll never know.
This resulted in the United States’ aggressive postwar containment strategy, which grew into a full-fledged Cold War when the Soviet expansion agenda moved out of Europe and into Asia and the emerging post-Colonial/Third World during the next few decades.
The Soviets promptly retaliated with their aircraft, and the Americans, mistaking the Yaks (plane) for Germans, shot one down after noting the large red star on the side.
The P-38s suddenly realized what they had done and formed a defensive circle around the city of Ni. The remaining Soviet Yaks flew low over the city, firing from below at the P-38s, one of which crashed in a ball of flames. After then, the Americans shot down another another Soviet Yak.
The arrival of Soviet reinforcements resulted in a 15-minute air fight between the Yaks and P-38s. According to estimates, five American planes and three Soviet planes were shot down. Despite the fact that the US apologized to the Soviet Union, the diplomatic situation never fully healed.
After WWII, with the Red Army occupying a number of nations in Europe, it was evident that the USSR had the muscle to march west into countries bordering the land it already occupied. The Western Allies lacked the military force to ensure their defeat.
The Soviets would maintain troop concentrations around the frontiers, particularly big tank formations. This maintained tensions, a pattern of belligerence, both quiet and vociferous threat, adopted in turn by the USSR, then the Chinese, and now the North Koreans (false bullying by a party actually suffering with an inferiority complex).
This issue remained the Western Allies’ primary preoccupation until the Warsaw Pact and eventually the Soviet Union collapsed. Putin’s actions were reminiscent until he attacked!!
The rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union was basically a battle between two global orders. One that advocated dispersed nodes in how government and economics are made (democratic-capitalism) and one that favored centralized nodes in how government and economics are made (capitalism) (totalitarian-communism).
The systems were completely incompatible and mutually exclusive by definition. Each was ecumenical and evangelical, advocating for global unification in that order. The existence of the other represented not only a continuing existential danger to them both (nukes), but also the representation that their particular idealistic system was defective and unneeded.
When the US discovered Stalin meant to retain what he had taken. That he betrayed every promise he made on fair Democratic elections. It’s safe to assume that tensions rose.
The United States government thought they had given up a lot of national wealth and blood to help liberate Europe from military dominance.
And, after all of that death and instability, half of Europe would be lost. Half of Europe was just exchanging one barbarous regime for another farther East.
This left many Americans with conflicting feelings. None of them were positive.
It was a convenient arrangement; we gave the wealth, and they supplied the blood. Stalin started setting his strategy in action in 1944, when the Red Army marched into Eastern Europe, while paying lip respect to democracy and self-determination.
He recognized that troops on the ground determined where postwar governments would go. The Soviets thought that the Asian war would go long enough to allow them to split Japan, as they had done with Germany and Korea.
As International War II turned both the United States and the Soviet Union into powerful world powers, rivalry between the two grew. Following the fall of the Axis forces, an ideological and political competition between the US and the USSR ushered in the Cold War.
The Cold War was a continuing political conflict that evolved after World War II between the United States and the Soviet Union, as well as their respective allies. George Orwell used the term “rivalry” to describe the rivalry between the two superpowers in a 1945 essay.
Tensions rose after the United States announced the deployment of Pershing II missiles in West Germany, followed by Reagan’s declaration of the United States Strategic Defense Initiative, and were worsened in 1983 when Reagan referred to the Soviet Union as a “evil empire.”
How did the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union evolve in the decade after WWII? During WWII, the two nations were allies; thereafter, they were foes. Both nations were democracies during WWII, but the Soviet Union afterwards became a dictatorship.
https://bowie1983book.com/ will answer what caused the tension between the soviet union and the us after the war