7.14: Post-War Diplomacy

7.14: Explain the consequences of U.S. involvement in World War II.

Welcome to the last set of notes for Unit 7! In the last set of notes, we talked about World War II and now, we’re going to talk about post-war diplomacy. So let’s get started!

The United States as a Superpower

In terms of the aftermath of the war, this war had some pretty massive consequences. Firstly, by the end of the war, the United States emerged as the most powerful nation in the world. Why? Well, there were several reasons

  • Almost the entirety of Europe and Asia had been destroyed as a result of the war

  • None of the fighting had actually occurred on U.S. soil (besides the bombing of Pearl Harbor), so all of the American infrastructure was still intact

  • The mobilization and rapid mass production that occurred during the war greatly boosted the American economy

  • The Americans had played a big role in winning the war

  • The Americans had created atomic bombs

After World War II ended, the United States wanted to use its new status as a superpower to stop the spread of communism. In February of 1945, months before the war ended, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met in the Yalta Conference as the leaders of the Untied States, Britain, and the Soviet Union respectively to discuss the future of Europe after the war. In this conference, they agreed to divide Germany into multiple territories and to allow for free elections in Eastern Europe. However, Stalin ended up setting up communist governments in Eastern Europe without free elections, claiming that they were necessary to stay between Russia and Germany to prevent another German invasion. This led to the concept of the iron curtain, the splitting of Europe into two halves: a democratic western side and a communist eastern side.

The Marshall Plan

In response to this spread of communism, the United States enacted the Marshall Plan which would lend twelve billion dollars to European nations to help them rebuild. The U.S. did this in order to help these nations recover economically and to get them to ally with the United States before they decided to try fixing their problems with communism. This worked and besides the eastern European countries, none of the other major nations of Europe turned to communism.

The United Nations

After the war, the League of Nations was replaced with the United Nations due to the League’s failure to stop World War II. Like the League, the United Nations was an international organization designed to prevent future wars and to encourage diplomacy. However, the United Nations would actually have the power to encourage peace by being provided with peacekeeping troops and resources from its member nations.

And with that, Unit 7 is over. In the next unit, we will be going more in-depth with communism, the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union (the Cold War), and the United Nations.