A History of Orthodox, Islamic, and Western Christian Political Values by Dennis J. Dunn

Author:Dennis J. Dunn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

New Expansion Efforts: Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa

With World War II over, Stalin made a deliberate effort to spread Communism beyond the territories that he already controlled. In Europe, he went after two countries immediately—Greece and Turkey. He went after Greece with civil war and he went after Turkey by open threat of conquest, since in Turkey there was no element to cooperate within the population, the Turks being solidly anti-Russian as well as anti-Communist. Greece was rescued by American intervention that came in the form of the Truman Doctrine and at the behest of Great Britain. The civil war in Greece eventually petered out with the defeat of the Communists, though it was rather a severe affair. It was after the break between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union in 1948 that the avenues of Communist assistance to the Greek Left were blocked, ending the prospects of a victory there. As for Turkey, it was saved by making it known that it would fight the Soviets and that the USA under the Truman Doctrine would provide support. The Turkish-American position led Stalin to back off of his demand for a lodgment or several lodgments on the Straits and for the cession of territory in Asia Minor. 7 He was careful to avoid any war that would directly involve the Soviet Union against the USA.

Besides Greece and Turkey, Stalin also tried to take West Berlin and to prevent the Western-occupied zones of Germany from being consolidated in 1948–1949 into the Federal Republic of Germany (the FRG or West Germany), but here again the Western powers blocked him and circumvented his ground blockade of West Berlin with an airlift. Stalin also offered support to the Communist parties in Italy and France in the post-war period in the hope that they might win free elections, but both parties went down to defeat against the background of the USA promising economic assistance to rebuild war-torn economies and tightening Soviet control of the East European Communist Bloc.

By 1948–1949 Stalin’s attempts to push Communism in Europe led the USA to produce the Marshall Plan and the North American Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949. The Marshall Plan provided loans and economic assistance to countries to rebuild their economies and to make democracy and private property more attractive than Communism’s policies of authoritarianism and nationalization. NATO was a defensive military alliance, anchored on the military power of the USA, which offered Western Europe security and protection from the Soviet Union. It was a dramatic step that allowed the nations of Western Europe to rebuild their economic and political order behind an American shield without the draining expense of paying for a large military establishment in the face of the Soviet Union’s threats. The Americans put talent, treasure, and time into lifting the body and spirit of Europe and other parts of the world to resume the mission of building a global order based on Western values. The American effort was not selfless, but it was self-sacrificing and incredibly far-sighted.

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