美苏冷战英文

Cold WarThe Cold War began after World War Two. The main enemies were the United States and the Soviet Union. The Cold war got its name because both sides were afraid of fighting each other directly. In such a "hot war," nuclear weapons might destroy everything. So, instead, they fought each other indirectly. They played havoc with conflicts in different parts of the world. They also used words as weapons. They threatened and denounced each other. Or they tried to make each other look foolish. Over the years, leaders on both sides changed. Yet the Cold War continued. It was the major force in world politics for most of the second half of the twentieth century. Historians disagree about how long the Cold War lasted. A few believe it ended when the United States and the Soviet Union improved relations during the nineteen-sixties and early nineteen-seventies. Others believe it ended when the Berlin Wall was torn down in 1989, or when the Soviet Union collapsed in late 1991. The United States and the Soviet Union were the only two superpowers following the Second World War. The fact that, by the 1950s, each possessed nuclear weapons and the means of delivering such weapons on their enemies, added a dangerous aspect to the Cold War. The Cold War world was separated into three groups. The United States led the West. This group included countries with democratic political systems. The Soviet Union led the East. This group included countries with communist political systems. The non-aligned group included countries that did not want to be tied to either the West or the East. From the Western perspective, during the Second World War, the Soviet Union was an ally of the Western democracies, in their struggle against the Axis Powers of Germany, Japan and Italy. From the Soviet perspective, the Western democracies had provided material assitance to the Soviets during the Great Patriotic War, their struggle to expell the forces of Hitlerite Fascism which had invaded the Soviet Union. As the War neared its conclusion, the future of Eastern Europe became a point of contention between the Soviet Union and its Western allies. The Soviet Union had been invaded via Eastern Europe in both the First and Second World Wars. In both conflicts, some of the nations of Eastern Europe had participated in those invasions. Both Wars had devastated the Soviet Union. An estimated twenty-five million Russians were killed during the Second World War. The Soviet Union was determined to install "friendly" regimes throughout Eastern Europe following the War. The strategic goal was to protect its European borders from future invasions. Since the Soviet Union was a communist state, the Soviet government preferred to install communist regimes throughout Eastern Europe. The Red Army was liberating the nations of Eastern Europe and therefore, the Soviet Union was in a position to influence the type of governments that would emerge following the War. The Soviets believed that they had an agreement with the western democracies that made Eastern Europe a Soviet sphere of influence, i.e. the Soviet Union would have dominant influence in that region. In 1945 Joseph Stalin pronounced that any freely elected governments in Poland, Czechoslovakia and other Eastern European states would be anti-Soviet and he refused to allow this. In March 1946 Winston Churchill referred to an iron curtain descending across the continent. The cold war began because of this struggle for control of the politics of these nations. By 1948, pro-Soviet regimes were in power in Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and Czechoslovakia. The Western democracies, led by the United States, were determined to stop the spread of communism and Soviet power. While not being able to stop the Soviets in Eastern Europe, the U.S. and Britain were determined to prevent communist regimes from achieving power in Western Europe. During the Second World War, communists parties throughout Western Europe, had gained popularity in their resistance to Nazi occupation. There was a real possibility the communist parties would be elected in both France and Italy. Harry Truman was the first American president to fight the Cold War. Probably the most important, certainly the most forgotten, and surely the most controversial, was the decision to concentrate on the European theater, rather than the Pacific. Avoiding a two front war has long been a fundamental strategic choice. Germany during the 20th Century was bedeviled by two front wars, and the Allies gave preference to the European theater [where the Soviet Union was engaged with Germany] over the Pacific theater [where the Soviets remained at peace with Japan]. Truman was in a sense re-affirming the geographical preferences of the struggle against the Axis in his priorities in the struggle against Communism. George Catlett Marshall was chief of staff of the United States Army from 1939 through 1945 and the principal American military architect of Allied victory. Marshall was special representative of the president to China, from 1945 until 1947. He concluded that no describable amount of American aid could save Chiang Kai Chek from the communists, and returned to Washington to propose a strategy that concentrated on Europe. Marshall retired from active service February 1947, and served as Secretary of State from 21 January 1947 until 21 January 1949. In March 1947, President Truman asked Congress for $400 million in aid for Greece and Turkey. “It must be the policy of the United States,” he argued in what became known as the Truman Doctrine, “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” The Truman Doctrine was a plan to give money and military aid to countries threatened by communism. The Truman Doctrine effectively stopped communists from taking control of Greece and Turkey. And in April 1948 the Marshall Plan was announced, to provide financial and economic assistance to the nations of Western Europe. This strengthened the economies and governments of countries in western Europe, and as the economies of Western Europe improved, the popularity of communist parties declined. The conflict came to center on the future of Germany, and the Soviet Union blockaded all surface transport into West Berlin in June 1948. In June 1948 the Soviets blocked all ways into the western part of Berlin, Germany. President Truman quickly ordered military planes to fly coal, food, and medicine to the city. The planes kept coming, sometimes landing every few minutes, for more than a year. The United States received help from Britain and France. Together, they provided almost 2.5 million tons of supplies on about 280,000 flights. Gradually there was a massive build up of an airlift of supplies into that city through until September 1949, although the blockade was officially lifted in May 1949. The United States also led the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949. NATO was a joint military group. Its purpose was to defend against Soviet forces in Europe [or, as the saying went, "to keep Russia out, America in and Germany down"]. The first members of NATO were Belgium, Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, and the United States. The Soviet Union and its east European allies formed their own joint military group -- the Warsaw Pact -- six years later. The passing in 1953 of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin gave the new American president, Dwight Eisenhower, a chance to deal with new Soviet leaders. In July 1955 Eisenhower and Nikolai Bulganin met in Geneva, Switzerland. The leaders of Britain and France also attended. Eisenhower proposed that the Americans and Soviets agree to let their military bases be inspected by air by the other side. The Soviets later rejected the proposal. Yet the meeting in Geneva was not considered a failure. After all, the leaders of the world's most powerful nations had shaken hands. Cold War tensions increased, then eased, then increased again over the years. The changes came as both sides actively tried to influence political and economic developments around the world. For example, the Soviet Union provided military, economic, and technical aid to communist governments in Asia. The United States then helped eight Asian nations fight communism by establishing the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization. In the middle 1950s, the United States began sending military advisers to help South Vietnam defend itself against communist North Vietnam. That aid would later expand into a long period of American involvement in Vietnam. The Cold War also affected the middle east. In the 1950s, both east and west offered aid to Egypt to build the Aswan High Dam on the Nile River. The west canceled its offer, however, after Egypt bought weapons from the communist government of Czechoslovakia. Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser then seized control of the company that operated the Suez Canal. A few months later, Israel invaded Egypt. France and Britain joined the invasion. For once, the United States and the Soviet Union agreed on a major issue. Both supported a United Nations resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire. The Suez Crisis was a political victory for the Soviets. When the Soviet Union supported Egypt, it gained new friends in the arab world. In 1959 Cold War tensions eased a little. The new Soviet leader, Nikita Khruschchev, visited Dwight Eisenhower at his holiday home near Washington. The meeting was very friendly. But the next year, relations got worse again. An American military plane was shot down over the Soviet Union. Eisenhower admitted that such planes had been spying on the Soviets for four years. In a speech at the United Nations, Khruschchev got so angry that he took off his shoe and beat it on a table. John Kennedy followed Eisenhower as president in 1961. During his early days in office, Cuban exiles invaded Cuba. They wanted to oust the communist government of Fidel Castro. The exiles had been trained by America's Central Intelligence Agency. The United States failed to send military planes to protect them during the invasion. As a result, their mission failed. In Europe, tens of thousands of East Germans had fled to the west. East Germany's communist government decided to stop them. It built a wall separating the eastern and western parts of the city of Berlin. Guards shot at anyone who tried to flee by climbing over. During Kennedy's second year in office, American intelligence reports discovered Soviet missiles in Cuba. The Soviet Union denied they were there. American photographs proved they were. The Cuban Missile Crisis easily could have resulted in a nuclear war. But it ended after a week. Khruschchev agreed to remove the missiles if the United States agreed not to interfere in Cuba. Some progress was made in easing Cold War tensions when Kennedy was president. In 1963, the two sides reached a major arms control agreement. They agreed to ban tests of nuclear weapons above ground, under water, and in space. They also established a direct telephone line between the white house and the kremlin. Relations between east and west also improved when Richard Nixon was president. He and Leonid Brezhnev met several times. They reached several arms control agreements. One reduced the number of missiles used to shoot down enemy nuclear weapons. It also banned the testing and deployment of long-distance missiles for five years. A major change in the cold war took place in 1985. That is when Mikhail Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev held four meetings with President Ronald Reagan. He withdrew Soviet forces from Afghanistan. And he signed an agreement with the United States to destroy all intermediate range nuclear force [INF] missiles and short-range [SRINF] missiles. By 1989 there was widespread unrest in Eastern Europe. Gorbachev did not intervene as these countries cut their ties with the Soviet Union. In less than a year, East and West Germany became one nation again. A few months after that, the Warsaw Pact was dissolved. November 9, 1989, will be remembered as one of the great moments of German history. On that day, the dreadful Berlin Wall, which for twenty-eight years had been the symbol of German division, cutting through the heart of the old capital city, was unexpectedly opened by GDR border police. In joyful disbelief, Germans from both sides climbed up on the Wall, which had been called "the ugliest edifice in the world." They embraced each other and sang and danced in the streets. Some began chiseling away chips of the Wall as if to have a personal hand in tearing it down, or at least to carry away a piece of German history. On December 22, the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin was opened for pedestrian traffic. Perhaps the most central conflict of the Cold War, probably the defining conflict, was the division of Germany. Thus, arguably, 09 November 1989 marked the end of the Cold War, as it marked the effective end of the division of Germany between east and west. The DoD Cold War Recognition Certificate was approved for service during the "Cold War era" from 02 September 1945 to 26 December 1991. By this account, after 45 years of protracted conflict and constant tension, the Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union. This is, upon reflection, a rather tendentious reading of history, since it takes the central conflict of the Cold War to have been the struggle between the two competing social systems, which could only end with one or the other being consigned to the ash heap of history. President Bush presented the Medal of Freedom award to former President Ronald Reagan at a ceremony in the East Room on January 13, 1993. President Bush said that Rreagan " ... helped make ours not only a safer but far better world in which to live. And you yourself said it best. In fact, you saw it coming. We recall your stirring words to the British Parliament. Here were the words: ``the march of freedom and democracy . . . will leave Marxist-Leninism on the ashheap of history.'' Few people believe more in liberty's inevitable triumph than Ronald Reagan. None, none was more a prophet in his time. Ronald Reagan rebuilt our military; not only that, he restored its morale."