In American politics the stars were not aligned for a strong reaction to all this. Also in February, a rigged election put Communists in power in Poland – and another piece of Allied postwar planning, the Yalta agreement, was snuffed out by Soviet noncompliance. Almost at the same moment, in February 1947, the British government delivered to Washington a formal note saying that it could no longer afford to help either Greece or Turkey beyond the end of March. The climax came when the Greek government, controlling only a "shrunken area" around Athens, appealed for international help. Roosevelt’s "courtesy calls" in the Mediterranean, Stalin “stayed his hand” in Turkey – but tightened the screws on Greece. and British diplomacy backed by the aircraft carrier Franklin D. This time President Truman did consult his Cabinet officers and the Joint Chiefs of Staff and summed up their consensus with Trumanesque informality: “We might as well find out now, rather than five or ten years from now, whether the Russians are determined to take over the world.” Faced with resistance from Turkey and tough U.S. Twenty-five divisions of the Red Army were maneuvering near the Turkish border to show they meant it. The Soviets proposed to put an end to the international supervision of the Dardanelles and establish Soviet bases in Turkey. – started to consolidate the non-Soviet zones, thus ratifying the de facto division of Germany. The Western allies – Britain, France, and the U.S. Before the end of March Andrei Gromyko announced that Soviet troops would leave Iran, and before long they actually left.ĭuring that same spring, it became clear that the Soviets wouldn’t abide by the Potsdam agreement that Germany should be treated as an economic unit. naval and ground forces in the Persian Gulf if the Soviets didn’t pull the Red Army out of Iran. Byrnes) to send Stalin secretly what he describes in his memoirs as an “ultimatum.” He threatened to deploy U.S. So – it's still March 1946 - Harry Truman decided (after consulting only with his Secretary of State, James F. Since the Soviets had a veto there, that couldn’t work either. complained to Moscow when that didn’t work, the case was appealed to the UN Security Council. Indeed, in early March one Red Army column started south from Azerbaijan toward the Persian capital, Teheran, and another swung west toward Iraq and Turkey. The Western allies withdrew before that deadline, which was March 6, 1946. At their Teheran Conference in 1943 all the allies had agreed to clear out of Iran within six months of an armistice in Europe. The wartime allies had used Iran – with the Soviets occupying northern Iran and the British and American forces occupying the south – as a back-door Allied supply line to the Red Army. For it started when the President of the United States decided to protect Iran from our wartime ally, the Soviet Union. When did the Cold War start? The answer is classic irony in the somber shadow of today’s headlines. ![]() You will find in this text several unattributed quotes those are passages lifted directly from Tom Wilson’s writing. Especially for those parts of the story that I didn’t myself see unfolding, I have leaned heavily, with posthumous thanks, on his version of the whos and whats and whys. Cold War and Common Sense, he called it – and indeed his book is not only readable history but full of common sense, about matters which were most uncommon and often nonsensical. Shortly before we joined forces in the State Department’s Bureau of International Organization Affairs, Tom had almost finished a vignette of history, which was published in 1962. I was fortunate to work, during the 1960s, with a superlative writer named Thomas W. What I will try to do is something in between - an essay about this fascinating almost-half-century – not just what happened,īut why, and especially why it came out the way it did. ![]() I was of course an eyewitness to bits and pieces of the whole period we call the Cold War - but don't look for fragmentary anecdotes which would not do justice to the serious purpose of this symposium. NOTE: I am not a historian, so don't look for dispassionate recording of the Cold War in what follows. The National Archives and Record Administration
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