Rise of the Superpowers (USA USSR) from events p Essay Example For Students

Rise of the Superpowers (USA USSR) from events p Essay rior to and duringWWIIWorld War II: the process of superpowerdomIt is often wondered how the superpowers achieved their position ofdominance. It seems that the maturing of the two superpowers, Russiaand the United States, can be traced to World War II. To be asuperpower, a nation needs to have a strong economy, an overpoweringmilitary, immense international political power and, related to this, astrong national ideology. It was this war, and its results, that causedeach of these superpowers to experience such a preponderance of power. Before the war, both nations were fit to be described as great powers,but it would be erroneous to say that they were superpowers at thatpoint.To understand how the second World War impacted these nations sogreatly, we must examine the causes of the war.The United Statesgained its strength in world affairs from its status as an economicpower.In the years before the war, America was the worlds largestproducer. In the USSR at the same time, Stalin was imp lementing hisfive year plans to modernise the Soviet economy. From thesesituations, similar foreign policies resulted from widely divergentorigins. Roosevelts isolationism emerged from the wide and prevalent domesticdesire to remain neutral in any international conflicts. It commonlywidely believed that Americans entered the first World War simply inorder to save industrys capitalist investments in Europe. Whether thisis the case or not, Roosevelt was forced to work with an inherentlyisolationist Congress, only expanding its horizons after the bombing ofPearl Harbour.He signed the Neutrality Act of 1935, making it illegalfor the United States to ship arms to the belligerents of any conflict. The act also stated that belligerents could buy only non-armaments fromthe US, and even these were only to be bought with cash. In contrast, Stalin was by necessity interested in European affairs, butonly to the point of concern to the USSR. Russian foreign policy wasfundamentally Leninist in it s concern to keep the USSR out of war. Stalin wanted to consolidate Communist power and modernise the countrysindustry. The Soviet Union was committed to collective action forpeace, as long as that commitment did not mean that the Soviet Unionwould take a brunt of a Nazi attack as a result. Examples of this canbe seen in the Soviet Unions attempts to achieve a mutual assistancetreaty with Britain and France. These treaties, however, were designedmore to create security for the West, as opposed to keeping all threesignatories from harm.At the same time, Stalin was attempting topolarise both the Anglo-French, and the Axis powers against each other. The important result of this was the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact,which partitioned Poland, and allowed Hitler to start the war. Anotherside-effect of his policy of playing both sides was that it causedincredible distrust towards the Soviets from the Western powers after1940. This was due in part to the fact that Stalin made several dema ndsfor both influence in the Dardanelles, and for Bulgaria to be recognisedas a Soviet dependant.The seeds of superpowerdom lie here however, in the late thirties. R.J. Overy has written that stability in Europe might have been achievedthrough the existence of powers so strong that they could impose theirwill on the whole of the international system, as has been the casesince 1945.At the time, there was no power in the world that couldachieve such a feat. Britain and France were in imperial decline, andmore concerned about colonial economics than the stability of Europe. Both imperial powers assumed that empire-building would necessarily bean inevitable feature of the world system.German aggression couldhave been stifled early had the imperial powers had acted in concert. The memories of World War One however, were too powerful, and thegeneral public would not condone a military solution at that point. The aggression of Germany, and to a lesser extent that of Italy, can beexplained by this decline of imperial power. They were simplyattempting to fill the power vacuum in Europe that Britain and Franceunwittingly left. After the economic crisis of the 1930s, Britain andFrance lost much of their former international standingas the worldmarkets plummeted; so did their relative power. The two nations weredetermined to maintain their status as great powers however, withoutrelying on the US or the USSR for support of any kind.They went towar only because further appeasement would have only served to removefrom them their little remaining world standing and prestige. The creation of a non-aggression pact between the Soviet Union andGermany can be viewed as an example of imperial decline as well. Stalinexplained the fact that he reached a rapprochement with Germany, and notone with Great Britain by stating that the USSR and Germany had wantedto change the old equilibrium England and France wanted to preserveit. Germany also wanted to make a change in the equilibrium, and thiscommon desire to get rid of the old equilibrium had created the basisfor the rapprochement with Germany.The common desire of many of thegreat European powers for a change in the world state system meant thateither a massive war would have to be fought; or that one of the greatpowers would need to attempt to make the leap to superpower statuswithout reaping the advantages such a conflict could give to the powermaking the attempt. Such benefits as wartime economic gains, vastlyincreased internal markets from conquered territory, and increasedaccess to resources and th e means of industrial production would helpfuel any nations drive for superpowerdom.One of two ways war could have been avoided was for the United States orRussia to have taken powerful and vigorous action against Germany in1939. Robert A. Divine, holds that superpowerdom gives a nation theframework by which a nation is able to extend globally the reach of itspower and influence.This can be seen especially as the ability tomake other nations (especially in the Third World) act in ways that thesuperpower prefers, even if this is not in the weaker nations selfinterest. The question must then be raised, were the United States andRussia superpowers even then, could coercive, unilateral actions takenby them have had such significant ramifications for the internationalorder? It must be concluded that, while they were not yet superpowers,they certainly were great powers, with the incredible amount ofinfluence that accompanies such status. Neither the United States northe Soviet Union posse ssed the international framework necessary to be asuper power at this time. It is likely that frameworks similar to Natoor the Warsaw Pact could have been developed, but such infrastructureswould have necessarily been on a much smaller scale, and withoutinfluence as the proposed Anglo-American (English speaking world) pactwas. At this time, neither the United States nor Russia had developedthe overwhelming advantages that they possessed at the end of the war. There are several factors that allowed them to become superpowers: apreponderance of military force, growing economies, and the creation ofideology-backed blocs of power. The United States, it seems, did not become a superpower by accident. Indeed, Roosevelt had a definite European policy that was designed fromthe start to secure a leading role for the United States. The USnon-policy which ignored Eastern Europe in the late thirties andforties, while strongly supported domestically, was another means toRoosevelts plans to achie ve US world supremacy. After the war, Roosevelt perceived that the way to dominate worldaffairs was to reduce Europes international role (visvis the UnitedStates, as the safest way of preventing future world conflict), thecreation of a permanent superpower rivalry with the USSR to ensure worldstability.Roosevelt sought to reduce Europes geopolitical role byensuring the fragmentation of the continent into small, relativelypowerless, and ethnically homogenous states. When viewed in light ofthese goals Roosevelt appears very similar to Stalin who, in Churchillswords, Wanted a Europe composed of little states, disjointed, separate,and weak.Roosevelt was certain that World War Two would destroycontinental Europe as a military and economic force, removing Germanyand France from the stage of world powers. This would leave the UnitedStates, Great Britain, and the USSR as the last remaining European worldpowers. Underground Railroad Argumentative EssayAmerica has tried to achieve an open world economy for over a century. From the attempts to keep the open door policy in China to Article VIIof the Lend-Lease act, free trade has been seen as central to Americansecurity. The United States, in 1939, forced Great Britain to begin tomove away from its imperial economic system. Cordell Hull, thenSecretary of State, was extremely tough with Great Britain on thispoint. He used Article VII of the Lend-Lease, which demanded thatBritain not create any more colonial economic systems after the war. Churchill fought this measure bitterly, realising that it would mean theeffective end of the British Empire, as well as meaning that GreatBritain would no longer be able to compete economically with the UnitedStates.However, Churchill did eventually agree to it, realising thatwithout the help of the United States, he would lose much more thanGreat Britains colonies. American leadership of the international ec onomythanks to theinstitutions created at Bretton Woods in 1944, its strong backing forEuropean integration with the Marshall Plan in 1947 and support for theSchuman Plan thereafter (both dependent in good measure on Americanpower) created the economic, cultural, military, and political momentumthat enabled liberal democracy to flourish in competition with Sovietcommunism. It was the adoption of the Marshall Plan that allowed Western Europe tomake its quick economic recovery from the ashes of World War II. Theseeds of the massive expansion of the military-industrial complex of theearly fifties are also to be found in the post war recovery. Feelingthreatened by the massive amount of aid the United States was givingWestern Europe, the Soviet Union responded with its form of economic aidto its satellite counties. This rivalry led to the Western fear ofSoviet domination, and was one of the precursors to the arms-race of theCold War. The foundation for the eventual rise of the Superpower s is clearly foundin the years leading up to and during World War II. The possibility ofthe existence of superpowers arose from the imperial decline of GreatBritain and France, and the power vacuum that this decline created inEurope. Germany and Italy tried to fill this hole while Britain andFrance were more concerned with their colonial empires. The UnitedStates and the Soviet Union ended the war with vast advantages inmilitary strength. At the end of the war, the United States was in thesingular position of having the worlds largest and strongest economy. This allowed them to fill the power gap left in Europe by the decliningimperial powers. Does this, however, make them Superpowers? With the strong ideologiesthat they both possessed, and the ways in which they attempted todiffuse this ideology through out the world after the war, it seems thatit would. The question of Europe having been settled for the most part,the two superpowers rushed to fill the power vacuum left by Japan in Asia. It is this, the global dimension of their political, military andeconomic presence that makes the United States and the USSRsuperpowers. It was the rapid expansion of the national andinternational structures of the Soviet Union and the United Statesduring the war that allowed them to assume their roles as superpowers. BibliographyAga-Rossi, Elena. Roosevelts European Policy and the Origins of theCold War Telos. Issue 96, Summer 93: pp.65-86. Divine, Robert A. The Cold War as History Reviews in American History. Issue 3, vol. 21, Sept 93: 26-32. Dukes, Paul. The Last Great Game: Events, Conjectures, Structures. London: Pinter Publishers, 1989 Le Ferber, Walter. The American Age: US Foreign Policy at Home andAbroad 170 to the Present. New York: W.W. Norton Company, 1994. Morrison, Samuel Elliot. The Two-Ocean War. Boston, MA: AtlanticLittle, Brown, 1963. Overy, R.J. The Origins of the Second World War. New York: LongmanInc, 1987. Ovyany Igor. The Origins of World War Two. Moscow: Novosti PressAgency Publishing House, 1989. Smith, Tony. The United States and the Global Struggle for Democracy,in Americas Mission: The United States and Democracy in the TwentiethCentury (New York: Twentieth Century Fund Press, 1995)http://epn.org/tcf/xxstru 03.html. 1995Strik-Strikfeldt, Wilfried. Against Stalin and Hitler. Bungay,Suffolk: Richard Clay (The Chaucer Press), 1970.1. Overy R.J. The Origins of the Second World War (Longman: NewYork) 1987 p.7 Overy pp. 88-89 2. Overy p .8 3. Ovsyany, Igor. The Origins of World War Two (Novosti PressAgency: Moscow) 1989 pp. 31-34. 4. Overy p. 70 5. Overy p. 85 6. Overy p. 89 7. Overy p. 91 8. Aga-Rossi p. 81 9. Divine, Robert A. The Cold War as History Reviews inAmerican History, Sept 93, vol 21. p. 528. 10. Aga-Rossi, Elena. Roosevelts European Policy and theOrigins of the Cold War Telos Summer 93. Issue 96 pp. 65-66 11. Aga-Rossi p. 66 12. Aga-Rossi p. 69 13. Aga-Rossi p. 72 14. Aga-Rossi p. 73 15. Aga-Rossi p. 77 16. Aga-Rossi p. 70 17. Divine p. 528 18. Aga-Rossi p. 80 19. Aga-Rossi p. 68 20. Aga-Rossi pp. 74-75 21. Aga-Rossi p. 79. 22. Aga-Rossi p. 83. 23. Tony Smith, The United States and the Global Struggle forDemocracy, in Americas Mission: TheUnited States and Democracy in the Twentieth Century (New York:Twentieth Century Fund Press, 1995)http://epn.org/tcf/xxstru 03.html. 1995 24. Dukes, Paul. The Last Great Game: Events, Conjectures,Structures (Pinter Publishers: London) 1989p. 107. 25. Le Ferber, Walter. The American Age: US Foreign Policy atHome and Abroad 170 to the Present. (W.W. Norton Company: New York) 1994 p. 417-418. 26. Tony Smith, The United States and the Global Struggle forDemocracy, in Americas Mission: TheUnited States and Democracy in the Twentieth Century (New York:Twentieth Century Fund Press, 1995)http://epn.org/tcf/xxstru 03.html. 1995