Britain warned the United States that the Soviet Union would soon extend its control all the way across eastern Europe to the eastern Mediterranean. It called on President Harry Truman to provide strong American support to help Greece and Turkey resist the communist threat.
Britain, in effect, was asking the United States to take over leadership of the Western world. The United States was ready to accept this new responsibility.
For months, relations between the United States and the Soviet Union had been growing worse and worse.
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The two countries had fought together as allies in the Second World War. But Soviet actions after the war shocked the American people.
The Soviet Union wanted to block western political and economic influence in central and eastern Europe. It wanted to extend its own influence instead. So, after the war, it forced a number of countries to establish communist governments. The Soviets sent troops into Hungary, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia to make sure its political demands were met.
WINSTON CHURCHILL: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.”
Britain's prime minister, Winston Churchill, described the situation in a speech in March of nineteen forty-six at Westminster College in the American state of Missouri.
WINSTON CHURCHILL: “Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in some cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.”
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2013-11-25
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