Реферат: The Rise Of The Super Power Essay

it. Stalin was an opportunist and a skillful one. He demanded that Britain and America

recognize territory gained by the Soviet Union in pacts and treaties that it had signed with

Germany.

Stalin?s main plan seemed to be to conquer all the territory that his armies could

reach, and to create socialist states within it. From this it can be seen that one of the

primary reasons for the superpower rivalry was Roosevelt?s misunderstanding of the

Soviet system. Writer Elena Aga-Rossi states ?Roosevelt and his advisors thought that

giving the Soviet Union control of Central and Eastern Europe, would result in the

creation of states controlled somewhat similar to the way in which the United States

controlled Cuba after the Platt Amendment? (70). The State Department assumed that the

USSR would simply control the foreign policy of the satellite nations, leaving the

individual countries open to Western trade. This idea was alien to Soviet leaders, ?to be

controlled by the Soviet Union at all was to become a socialist state? (Ovyany 99). Stalin

assumed that his form of control over these states would mean the complete Sovietization

of their societies, whereas Roosevelt was blind to the internal logic of the Soviet system.

Roosevelt?s fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the Soviet state can be

forgiven. Once it has been realized that an apparently peaceful nature was apparent at the

time, and that it had existed for a relatively short time. The United States wanted to

?eschew isolationism, and set an example of international cooperation-operation in a

world ripe for United States leadership? (Morrison 78). Yet, another attempt from the

U.S. to spread its ideology to the rest of the world. The United States believed that the

world at large, especially the Third World, would be attracted to the political views of the

West. The main goal of the U.S. was to show that democracy and free trade provided

citizens of a nation with a higher standard of living. It has been seen that Roosevelt and

his administration thought that this appeal would extent itself into the Soviet sphere of

influence. Yet, the Soviet Union was organizing its ideals around the vision of a

continuing struggle between two fundamentally antagonistic ideologies (Morrison 79).

At the end of the war, the United States was in the singular position of having the

world?s largest and strongest economy. This allowed them to fill the power gap left in