To be successful, so must diplomacy with Moscow russian foreign policy 2018. At his dacha, standing before a map of the newly expanded Soviet Union shortly after Germany’s surrender in May 1945, Josef Stalin nodded with approval.

The vast buffer he’d carved out of Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe would now protect his empire against future Napoleons and Hitlers. Stalin then took the pipe from his mouth, waving it under the base of the Caucasus. He shook his head and frowned. Soviet republics of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan met the hostile powers of Turkey and Iran. Over the next year and a half, U.

Soviet relations would collapse as Stalin pressured Ankara and Tehran for territorial concessions and U. Truman pushed back by sending a naval flotilla to the Mediterranean. In February 1947, a penniless Britain told the State Department that it could no longer defend the Greek government in its civil war with Yugoslav-backed Communist rebels, prompting Truman to pledge U. In March 1947, the new U.

Marshall, embarked on six grueling weeks of negotiations in Moscow with his Soviet counterpart, Vyacheslav Molotov, over the future of occupied Germany. With neither side willing to accept the possibility of such a dangerous, strategically situated country becoming an ally of the other, the talks ended in stalemate. Marshall left Moscow convinced that cooperation with the Soviets was over. The time had come, Marshall decided, for unilateral U. Stalin denounced the plan as a vicious American plot to buy political and military domination of Europe.