China Is Spying On Israel russian foreign policy journal Steal U. To be successful, so must diplomacy with Moscow today.
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. He feared losing control not just of Germany but of Eastern Europe, too. Prior to the launch of the Marshall Plan, Stalin had never been dogmatic about the forms of socialism pursued by countries within the Soviet sphere.
Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Romania were all allowed to form coalition governments of one sort or another. Truman had wanted to use the Marshall Plan as a tool to reduce U. The following month, the United States, Britain, and France accepted the constitution for a new West German state. The Soviets responded by creating their own East German state in October. The dialectic of each side’s suspicions of the other having played out as far as it could without war, the European borders of the Cold War conflict would remain frozen for the next 40 years. West Berliners crowd in front of the Berlin Wall as they watch East German border guards demolishing a section of the wall in order to open a new crossing point between East and West Berlin, near the Potsdamer Square on Nov. When a worried and confused border guard complied, tens of thousands began pouring into the West.
Millions more would do so in the coming days. Nearby, a nervous but determined 37-year-old KGB officer had spent weeks burning mounds of documents in preparation for possible attacks on his station by angry mobs. The enormous volume of ash destroyed the building’s furnace. Years later, Russian journalists interviewed the former officer about his work in Germany. By early 1990, the East German Communists, imploding under the weight of popular revulsion and infighting, were a spent political force, and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev had begun to reconcile himself to German unification. What he still demanded was that a reunified Germany not be part of the Atlantic alliance. Gorbachev and his Russian successors have maintained that they were misled over whether the alliance would be permitted to expand eastward.
With the demise of Gorbachev and the Soviet Union in 1991, Russian President Boris Yeltsin continued to press the issue with his American counterpart. NATO membership in front of former Warsaw Pact states. Russia’s resistance left Clinton two sensible options. The other was to sit tight until Russian behavior belied its pledges to respect its neighbors’ sovereignty. Russians that NATO enlargement has nothing to do with Russia?
