Cold War
The consolidation of the cold war
The United States and the Soviet Union ended World War II as allies. Their joint action against the Axis was decisive in ridding Europe of the Nazi presence.
The clearest reason for the breakup was ideological. Capitalism and socialism, incompatible in their way of understanding different spheres of human life, from the role of the State to the priority rights of citizens, led to disagreement between the United States and the Soviet Union regarding the purposes of the political order and the methods of acting within it. Without constituting a homogeneous period, due to the aggravation of tensions followed by the distension between the rival poles, the Cold War lasted almost half a century, until the breakup of the Soviet Union, in 1991.
With the aim of fighting communism and Soviet influence, Secretary of State George Marshall launched the Marshall Plan, an investment and economic recovery program for European countries in crisis after the war. This offer extended to the countries of Eastern Europe, which had been liberated from Nazism by the Red Army. In all of them, the respective communist associations had taken power.
Understanding the Marshall Plan as an attempt to reduce its sphere of influence, the Soviet Union created the Kominform, an organism in charge of coordinating the action of European communist parties. It was also his task to remove the countries that were under its influence from North American supremacy, generating the "iron curtain" bloc (an expression used by Churchill). Complementing the Soviet reaction, in 1949 the Comecon was created, a replica of the Marshall Plan for socialist countries, aimed at their economic-financial integration.
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In August 1961, the Berlin Wall was built, which concretely separated the two sides of the city and became a symbol of German division and the Cold War.
Other significant facts added to this growing international tension. One of them was the creation, in April 1949, of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a political-military alliance of Western countries, opposing all of Western Europe to the Soviet Union. On the Soviet side, configuring the alignment with the communist bloc, the Warsaw Pact was created in 1955. The world bipolarization reached its fullness.
In the midst of this tense situation, the Chinese Revolution and the explosion of the first Soviet atomic bomb took place in 1949. The following year, the Korean War began, one of the heights of the Cold War and until then the most serious threat to world peace after World War II.
Reference
VICENTINO, Cláudio; DORIGO, Gianpaolo. General and Brazilian History: Volume 3. 2nd Edition. São Paulo: Editora Scpione, 2013.
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