This paper will analyze the most significant events of the Cold War. On March 5, 1946, Winston Churchill delivered the banking Iron Curtain speech (Fink, 2017). This speech was the West’s Cold War manifesto against Russia. Churchill called for a fraternal union of the Anglophone nations and announced the rise of the Iron Curtain. The next turning point in the Cold War was the Truman Doctrine, proclaimed by US President Harry Truman on March 12, 1947.
The president requested $400 million from the government for Turkey and Greece. Eventually, the Greek and Turkish governments became under the control of the United States. In the same year, 1947, on June 5, the American politician George Marshall put forward a program to help Europe after the Second World War. The aim was to rebuild Europe’s economy and expel communists from power structures.
The confrontation between the US and the Soviet Union during the Cold War resulted in international crises. One such crisis was the Berlin Airlift, which lasted from June 24, 1948, to May 12, 1949 (Fink, 2017). This was due to the Soviet Union’s blockade of the Western Allies’ road routes through East Germany. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was created on April 4, 1949, to safeguard the world against the risk of military confrontation amidst the Cold War. The main aim was to ensure the security of all NATO members. At the end of June 1950, the Korean War broke out (Fink, 2017). The preconditions for the war were set immediately after World War II, when Japan, which had controlled the Korean peninsula since 1910, withdrew its troops.
In the late 1940s and mid-1950s, the phenomenon of McCarthyism was born in the US (Fink, 2017). It is named after its creator Joseph McCarthy. McCarthyism was a policy of administrative harassment to combat the Communist Party of the United States. The USSR made a scientific breakthrough in the field of space during the Cold War. On October 4, 1957, the first artificial satellite was launched by a Sputnik launch vehicle. For the first time, rocket engines with a total power of millions of horsepower were tested. Apart from the technical confrontation, a military one was still in force. In response to the Soviet Union’s attempt to use the Suez crisis as an excuse to invade Egypt, the Eisenhower Doctrine was issued on January 5, 1957. Under this doctrine, any country could request economic or military assistance from the US.
Another Cold War episode that took place on May 1, 1960, is the U-2 Incident. During the incident, a Lockheed U-2 reconnaissance aircraft was shot down in Soviet airspace. The incident took place two weeks before the East-West meeting and was a severe blow to the reputation of the United States. On April 7, 1961, an operation organized by the Americans in the Bay of Pigs took a decisive turn in Cuba. The attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro’s government ended with the victory of pro-Communist forces. Another sharp deterioration in the international situation took place between 16 and 18 October 1962. The crisis was triggered by the threat of war between the USSR and the USA over the deployment of Soviet missiles in Cuba. However, the American and Soviet leaders – John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev – agreed on a peaceful solution.
Reference
Fink, C. K. (2017). Cold War: An international history (2nd ed.). Routledge.