Rise of Superpowers After WWII
Rise of Superpowers After WWIIIt 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 world�s 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.
Roosevelt�s 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 industry�s 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...
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