Cold War Outline

What was the Cold War and how did it start? “When Ivan meets G.I. Joe” ~Joe Strummer, The Clash The Cold War described in the simplest way was the intense ideological conflict between the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, with each side vying for dominance and exploiting any opportunity for expansion. In reality it involved the Western Bloc, which included the United States and its NATO allies, pitted against the Eastern Bloc, the Soviet Union and its allies in the Warsaw Pact. It should be noted that the use of the term “allies” for the members of the Warsaw Pact is slightly incorrect, as these countries were satellite states of the Soviet Union, while formally independent they were brutally controlled by the Soviets politically, economically …show more content…
Explain what each policy was in your answer. What did that policy concede to the Soviets? The principles of the policy of containment outlined by Keenan’s “long telegram” were turned into action by the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the creation of NATO, and eventually the support of Chiang Kai-shek in China and the Korean War. The first of these actions, the Truman Doctrine, which Truman laid out in his speech to Congress in 1947. Truman called on America to set aside its traditional non-interventionist stance and take a more expansive view of its global responsibilities. The Truman Doctrine was a foreign policy initiative that the United States adopted to stop the global spread of communism by supporting “free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” Truman followed Republican Senator Arthur Vandenberg’s suggestion “to scare [the] hell out of the American people, thus pitting “us” against “them” in the struggle to save the world from communism and protect the American way of