Rise of the Superpowers (USA & USSR) from events p Essays

Rise of the Superpowers (USA & USSR) from events p Essays Rise of the Superpowers (USA & USSR) from events prior to and during WWII World War II: the process of superpowerdom It is often wondered how the superpowers achieved their position of dominance. It seems that the maturing of the two superpowers, Russia and the United States, can be traced to World War II. To be a superpower, a nation needs to have a strong economy, an overpowering military, immense international political power and, related to this, a strong national ideology. It was this war, and its results, that caused each of these superpowers to experience such a preponderance of power. Before the war, both nations were fit to be described as great powers, but it would be erroneous to say that they were superpowers at that point. To understand how the second World War impacted these nations so greatly, we must examine the causes of the war. The United States gained its strength in world affairs from its status as an economic power. In the years before the war, America was the worlds largest producer. In the USSR at the same time, Stalin was implementing his five year plans to modernise the Soviet economy. From these situations, similar foreign policies resulted from widely divergent origins. Roosevelts isolationism emerged from the wide and prevalent domestic desire to remain neutral in any international conflicts. It commonly widely believed that Americans entered the first World War simply in order to save industrys capitalist investments in Europe. Whether this is the case or not, Roosevelt was forced to work with an inherently isolationist Congress, only expanding its horizons after the bombing of Pearl Harbour. He signed the Neutrality Act of 1935, making it illegal for the United States to ship arms to the belligerents of any conflict. The act also stated that belligerents could buy only non-armaments from the US, and even these were only to be bought with cash. In contrast, Stalin was by necessity interested in European affairs, but only to the point of concern to the USSR. Russian foreign policy was fundamentally Leninist in its concern to keep the USSR out of war. Stalin wanted to consolidate Communist power and modernise the country's industry. The Soviet Union was committed to collective action for peace, as long as that commitment did not mean that the Soviet Union would take a brunt of a Nazi attack as a result. Examples of this can be seen in the Soviet Unions attempts to achieve a mutual assistance treaty with Britain and France. These treaties, however, were designed more to create security for the West, as opposed to keeping all three signatories from harm. At the same time, Stalin was attempting to polarise both the Anglo-French, and the Axis powers against each other. The important result of this was the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact, which partitioned Poland, and allowed Hitler to start the war. Another side-effect of his policy of playing both sides was that it caused incredible distrust towards the Soviets from the Western powers after 1940. This was due in part to the fact that Stalin made several demands for both influence in the Dardanelles, and for Bulgaria to be recognised as a Soviet dependant. The seeds of superpowerdom lie here however, in the late thirties. R.J. Overy has written that stability in Europe might have been achieved through the existence of powers so strong that they could impose their will on the whole of the international system, as has been the case since 1945. At the time, there was no power in the world that could achieve such a feat. Britain and France were in imperial decline, and more concerned about colonial economics than the stability of Europe. Both imperial powers assumed that empire-building would necessarily be an inevitable feature of the world system. German aggression could have been stifled early had the imperial powers had acted in concert. The memories of World War One however, were too powerful, and the general public would not condone a military solution at that point. The aggression of Germany, and to a lesser extent that of Italy, can be explained by this decline of imperial power. They were simply attempting to fill the power vacuum in Europe that Britain and France unwittingly left. After the economic crisis of the 1930s, Britain and France lost much of their former international standingas the world markets plummeted; so did their relative power. The two nations were determined to maintain their status as great powers however, without relying on the US or the USSR for support of any kind.