After the end of the Second World War the two war time allies THE USA and SU became involved in a war of ideologies the cold war. The US saw communism as a threat to democracy and capitalism. Therefore the US set out a new foreign policy that was of containment of communism in the Truman doctrine. There were however other reasons for the USA’s involvement such as their military confidence, UN agreement, domestic pressure which called for the T admin to be more tough on communism and their economic interest in Japan which led to the US governments decision to use military intervention in the K war. The main reason for the USA’s military intervention in the Korean war was that of containment.
The communist takeover in China, the pronouncement of the Truman Doctrine, the advent of a Soviet nuclear weapon, tensions over occupied Germany, the outbreak of the Korean War, and the formulation of the Warsaw Pact and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as rival alliances had all enhanced the Cold War's military dimension. .Paranoia then reached its limit with
Author PJ Larkin can be quoted saying that this war "was a mixture of religious crusade in favour of one idealogy or the other... striking out for advantage or expansion not only in Europe but all over the world." As tensions in the war became more and more tense, President Dwight D. Eisenhower had appointed John Foster Dulles as secretary of the state, whom created new foreign policies in which fought Communism aggressively and effectively. The United States and the Soviet Union's relations helped create tensions between the two largest superpowers in the world, and the race for dominance had soon
Such as in source 8 which claims the USA wanted a war with the USSR to help its economy, emphasising the impact of the Military Industrial Complex on aggressive foreign policy which played a huge role in the development of the Cold War. Furthermore it can be argued that it was the misunderstanding and confusion between the two nations which owed more to the development of the Cold War in the years 1945-8.
1949 was probably the worst year. After the Soviet atomic test in August 1949 and Mao Zedong’s victory in China, communism became an even greater threat. The Truman administration orchestrated NSC 68′s famous call to arms. To move the public to spend more on the Cold War strategy, NSC 68 portrayed the Soviet challenge as a contest pitting good against evil. American strategy remained torn between simply containing Communism or rolling it back by actively supporting the Soviet Union’s opponents.
The Korean War was extremely popular domestically because it was part of the Cold War. The Cold War was a result of World War Two, it caused the two ideologies, capitalism and communism to each struggle for control over the Post war world. This is important because America as the leader of the capitalist ideology could not afford to let Korea fall to the North, as they believed that to do so would essentially relinquish control to the communists. America gained UN
Communism in the Cold War "The seeds of totalitarian regimes are nurtured by misery and want, they spread and grow in the evil soil of the poverty and strife. They reach their full growth when the hope of a people for a better life has died. We must keep that hope alive." as said by Harry S. Truman on march 12, 1947 in The Truman Doctrine. While Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy all had the same same Cold War intention of ending communism, their ways of achieving their goal were different.The Cold War was an angry dispute between the United States and the Soviet Union about whether we should spread or contain communism (Ayres 817).
Along with fears of the past came the difference of politics as the Soviet Union, also known as the USSR was a communist country and the United States was a capitalist society. These two nations became very dominant over each other and chose to start a nuclear arms race that would make both countries continue to fight in a form of competition. Unlike other countries, America made a decision to remain allies with the Soviet Union. This decision is one that haunted them for the next 46 years. David Halberstam, in “The Fifties” speaks strongly about the drastic changes that our society dealt with as a result of these hard times, and the ways in which the average individual worked with struggles in society.
Within Asia the war was a regional conflict over the future security of two Chinas, one Communist and one Nationalist, and the containment of Japan, while for the United States and the Soviet Union, the war for Korea was a limited part of a post-1945 global competition for power. The underlying reason that the Korean War broke out was because it was just another episode in the on-going Cold War between the USA and the USSR. On the surface, the Korean War seemed to be a war between South Korea and North Korea, but really the superpowers were just using it as a front to combat each other without actually going into a ‘hot war’ which ,as both had the atomic bomb ,would have been mutually assured destruction. In 1945, Korea was freed from the Japanese. The division of Korea into South Korea and North Korea stems from the 1945 Allied victory in World War II, ending the Empire of Japan's 35-year colonial rule of Korea.
Both sides eventually picked sides in the region and supported opposing forces. These opposing alignments became more clear when power struggles in Asia occurred. Events such as the Chinese Civil War and then the Korean War polarised the two superpowers and would serve as a precursor for future Cold War conflicts. Hence it will be argued that the power vacuum which occurred in Asia in the wake of WWII was a necessary precondition, but not the sole cause, of the Cold War in Asia. The desire of both the United States and USSR for primary influence in the region and the effects of the Chinese Civil War and Korean War must also be explored in order to fully explain the origins of the Cold War in Asia.