Transcript

Wars often create strange alliances, and that was also true of the Second World War. The United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union were allies in their fight against Germany. But they were very different allies. The Soviet Union, of course, represented totalitarian Communism. The United States and Great Britain stood for democratic values and elected governments. They shared, of course, a common opponent in Nazi Germany. And that common opponent was powerful enough to forge this alliance between three very different nations.

The alliance was most threatened by the behavior of the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe. As Soviet armies pushed westward toward Germany, they liberated the nations of Eastern Europe from German control. As they did so they ensured that those nations would always be subordinate to the Soviet Union. They created puppet governments in Eastern Europe to ensure that the Soviet Union would never again be threatened by an invasion from Western Europe. However, in creating those governments the Soviets violated the democratic principles that the United States and Great Britain had been fighting for in the Second World War.

As a result, the alliance disintegrated no sooner than the war had ended, and a new Cold War began. The ideological differences that had been camouflaged by the common opponent of Germany surged to the surface after 1945. And the United States and the Soviet Union became locked in an ideological confrontation between two very different systems of government and two very different systems of political behavior. The Cold War ended up lasting much longer than the World War.

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