World War 1, Peace treaties and the League of Nations.
At the start of the war, President Wilson had declared the neutrality of the United States(elected on basis he would keep us out). Most Americans opposed US involvement in the European war. . On May 7, 1915, the British liner Lusitania was sunk at sea by a German U-boat. Among the more than 1100 dead were 128 Americans. In the United States there was an outburst of horror and condemnation of Germany. This and other German actions against civilians drew America sympathies to the Allies. German military leaders believed that they could still win the war by cutting off British supplies. They expected their U-boats to starve Britian into surrendering within a few months, longer before the US had fully prepared for war. Tension between the US and Germany increased after the British intercepted and decoded a message from Germany's foreign minister, Arthur Zimmermann, the German ambassador to Mexico. The message known as the "Zimmermann note", revealed a German plot to persuade Mexico to go to war against the United States. The British gave the message to Wilson, and it was published in the US early in March. Americans were further enraged after U-boats sank several US cargo ships.

The US entered the war unprepared for battle but became quickly.The US armed forces had almost 5 million men and women by the end of the war. American troops to support the tired Allied lines arrived in June 1917 and helped them withstand the last desperate German assaults. The new German chancellor, Prince Maximilian, on October 6, 1918, decided that Wilson's Fourteen Points gave his government a way to surrender without admitting defeat. Wilson was at the height of his career.

On November 11 an armistice was signed by Wilson and his discontented Allies, who would have preferred total military victory. Wilson sailed for Europe on December 4, a move that shocked many citizens. A president had never before left the United States during his term of office, and in doing so he removed himself from the rapid social and political change at home. In Europe he was given extraordinary receptions and spontaneous demonstrations reminiscent of his election campaign in 1912. The response persuaded him that popular opinion was overwhelmingly in his favour and would overcome any effort to halt the construction of a league of nations.

On January 18, 1919, Wilson addressed the opening session of the peace conference in Paris, urging it to create a permanent agency to ensure justice and peace. By February 14 he was able to define the organization and duties of a league of nations. Despite his triumphs, Wilson was disliked by European notables, many of whom saw him as arrogant and unrealistic. On the next day he set sail for the United States to sign important legislation, but when he returned to Paris he discovered that Allied diplomats had tried to bury the plans for the league. They advocated dividing the spoils of war and returning to prewar diplomacy. By sheer weight of his own prestige, Wilson, who was fighting sickness and exhaustion, turned the conference back to treaty and covenant negotiations.

The league of nations was writen into the Treaty of Versailles but was not sanctioned by the US congress. America was withdrawing from European Affairs.

The Twenties
Turn away from Europe..get mass emigration from Eur cut down eg Quota act 1921 . Yet 2 continents linked economically and culturally( influence of Jazz, movies felt in Europe). The Wall Street Crash of Oct 1929 led to a global recession and caused political problems in Europe( inc caused the colapse of the German national Bank......Gb devalued the pound). This recession aided in the rise of the nazis.

US involvement 1930's -1945 World war 2
Roosevelt was elected president in 1932 ...isolationism is the foreign policy of the time. Eg passing of Neutrality acts of 35, 36, 37 ...stopped USA even lending
weapons , money to outside countries.(AS happened in ww1)But Ros became wary of the Nazi menace.
In the year after the fall of France, the war moved toward a new stage-world war. This made Ros nervous.The U.S. abandoned strict neutrality in the European war and approached a confrontation with Japan in Asia and the Pacific Ocean. U.S. and British conferences, begun in January 1941, determined a basic strategy for the event of a U.S. entry into the war, namely, that both would center their effort on Germany, leaving Japan, if need be, to be dealt with later.

In March 1941 the U.S. Congress passed the Lend-Lease Act and appropriated an initial $7 billion to lend or lease weapons and other aid to any countries the president might designate. By this means the U.S. hoped to ensure victory over the Axis without involving its own troops. By late summer of 1941, however, the U.S. was in a state of undeclared war with Germany. In July, U.S. Marines were stationed in Iceland, which had been occupied by the British in May 1940, and thereafter the U.S. Navy took over the task of escorting convoys in the waters west of Iceland. In September President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized ships on convoy duty to attack Axis war vessels. The attack on Pearl Harbour in Dec 1941 formally brings the Us in to the war on the allies side.

Us provide huge amouuts of men and equipment and these were essential to the defeat of nazi germany...see this influence in North africa and in the D Day landings and in the development of the atomic bomb. However as the war nears its end relationships with the USSR go sour(some historians argue that the atomic bomb was used on Japan as a warning to the USSR)..leds the cold war. Ros died in office(4th term) in april 1945(same month as conference for the setting up of the United Nation..takes place in San Francisco)... and his vice president Truman takes over.

Cold War, Crisis in Europe 1945-1964, International Tension.
I INTRODUCTION
Cold War= tension between USA and USSR after 1945 until1 989. International politics shaped by the rivalry between these two powers and the political ideologies they represented: democracy and capitalism. USA backed by GB, FR, West Ger., Jap, Can. USSR by Eastern E.-inc. Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, East Ger, and Romania-and, during parts of the Cold War, Cuba and China. Countries that had no formal commitment to either bloc were known as neutrals or, within the Third World, as nonaligned nations.

American journalist Walter Lippmann came up with the term cold war (title of his 1947 book)in a 1947 book by that name. Lippmann meant ..relationship betweent USSR and its W.W.II allies had deteriorated to the point of war without the occurrence of actual warfare. This rivalry hardened into a permanent preoccupation, dominated the foreign policy agendas of both and led to the est. of two alliances: (NATO), created by the Western powers in 1949; and the Soviet-dominated Warsaw Pact(1955.) Although centered originally in Europe, the Cold War eventually drew the USA and the USSR into conflicts in almost every part of the globe.

Reasons why it happened ... 3 reasons
* Conflicting ideology
* Attitude to Eastern Europe
* Attitude to Germany
Conflicting Ideology
Hostility between USA and the USSR ...roots in the ending moments of W.W1. After Bolsheviks took over after Oct. 1917 revolution, Lenin resolved to withdraw Russia from the war. In 1918 the USA, GB, Fr, and Ja, intervened militarily in Russia to restore the collapsed Eastern Front in their war effort against Germany; However, to Lenin and his colleagues, this rep. an assault on Russia's new regime. Eur. powers and the USA did resent Russia's new leadership, with its appeals against capitalism. When In Dec 1922 the (USSR) was formed as a federal union of Russia and neighboring areas under Communist control. The US refused to recognize it until 1933. The deep ideological differences were (worsened) by the leadership of Stalin ruled from 1929 to 1953 . In Aug. 1939, Stalin signed a nonaggression pact with Hitler pledged not to attack one another and agreed to divide the territory that lay between them.However, June 1941 he USSR invaded. GB/USA rallied to USSR's defense, This Grand Alliance-was an uneasy affair, marked by mistrust and, on the Soviet side, view that USSR bore a heavier price than the other nations By 1944, with victory approaching, the conflicting visions within the alliance of a postwar world were becoming ever more obvious.

Attitude to eastern Europe
On March 5, 1946, in a speech in Fulton, Missouri, Churchill gave his famous warning: "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent." referring to the tightly controlled border in Eur. that separated Western democracies from the Eastern and Central states under the influence of(USSR).

Even before Nazis defeated May 1945, the US and the USSR divided over the political future of Poland. Stalin, liberated Pol. and established a pro-Communist provisional government there, believed Soviet control of Pol. was NB for USSR security.(buffer zone) Opposition from West, and quarrel later extended to the political future of other Eastern European nations. This constituted thefirst crucial phase of the Cold War.

Attitude to Germany Yet between 1944 to 1946, both sides clung to the hope that their differences could be overcome.. US accused USSR of seeking to expand Commu. in Eur. and Asia. USSR viewed itself as the leader of history's progressive forces and charged the US with attempting to stamp out revolutionary activity wherever it arose. In 1946 and 1947 the USSR helped bring Communist governments to power in Rom., Bulg., Hung, and Pol. (Communists had gained control of Albania and Yugoslavia in 1944 and 1945). Also communist uprisings in Iran , Greece and Turkey. Truman doctrine After In 1947 US president Harry S. Truman issued the Truman Doctrine, which authorized U.S. aid to anti-Communist forces in Greece and Turkey. Later, this policy was expanded to justify support for any nation that the U.S. government considered to be threatened by Soviet expansionism. Known as the containment doctrine, this policy, aimed at containing the spread of Communism around the world By 1948 neither side believed any longer in the possibility of preserving some level of partnership amidst the growing tension and competition. During this new and more intense phase of the Cold War, developments in and around postwar Germany emerged as the core of the conflict. Following its defeat in World War II, Germany had been divided into separate British, French, American, and Soviet occupation zones. The city of Berlin, located in the Soviet zone, was also divided into four administrative sectors. The occupying governments could not reach agreement on what the political and economic structure of postwar Germany should be, and in mid-1947 the United States and Britain decided to merge their separate administrative zones. The two Western governments worried that to keep Germany fragmented indefinitely, particularly when the Soviet and Western occupation regimes were growing so far apart ideologically, could have negative economic consequences for the Western sphere of responsibility. This concern echoed a larger fear that the economic problems of Western Europe-a result of the war's devastation-had left the region vulnerable to Soviet penetration through European Communist parties under Moscow's control. To head off this danger, in the summer of 1947 the United States committed itself to a massive economic aid program designed to rebuild Western European economies. The program was called the Marshall Plan, after U.S. secretary of state George C. Marshall (see European Recovery Program). The Truman Doctrine By proposing a program of $400 million in military and economic aid to back anti-Communist forces in Turkey and Greece, United States President Harry Truman created a prime model for Cold War containment of Communism. Truman's critics claimed that he was being unduly alarmist for suggesting that the effect of failure would be "far reaching to the West as well as to the East," and some also blamed his words for promoting anti-Communist hysteria in the United States. Most U.S. historians, however, view his response as an appropriate reaction to Soviet expansionism. Herbert S. Parmet In June 1948 France merged its administrative zone with the joint British-American zone, thus laying the foundation for a West German republic. Stalin and his lieutenants opposed the establishment of a West German state, fearing that it would be rearmed and welcomed into an American-led military alliance. In the summer of 1948 the Soviets responded to the Western governments' plans for West Germany by attempting to cut those governments off from their sectors in Berlin through a land blockade. In the first direct military confrontation between the USSR and the Western powers, the Western governments organized a massive airlift of supplies to West Berlin, circumventing the Soviet blockade. After 11 months and thousands of flights, the Western powers succeeded in breaking the blockade. Meanwhile, in February 1948 Soviet-backed Communists in Czechoslovakia provoked a crisis that led to the formation of a new, Communist-dominated government. With this, all the countries of Eastern Europe were under Communist control, and the creation of the Soviet bloc was complete. The events of 1948 contributed to a growing conviction among political leaders in both the United States and the USSR that the opposing power posed a broad and fundamental threat to their nation's interests. The Berlin blockade and the spread of Communism in Europe led to negotiations between Western Europe, Canada, and the United States that resulted in the North Atlantic Treaty, which was signed in April 1949, thereby establishing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The Berlin crisis also accelerated the emergence of a state of West Germany, which was formally established in May 1949. (The Communist republic of East Germany, comprising the remainder of German territory, was formally proclaimed in October of that year.) And finally, the Berlin confrontation prompted the Western powers to begin thinking seriously about rearming their half of Germany, despite the divisiveness of this issue among West Europeans. The Marshall Plan The plan outlined by United States Secretary of State George E. Marshall in this 1947 commencement address at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was aimed at containing the influence of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Europe's postwar economic recovery was, as Marshall outlined it, essential for the stability of the democratic West. Formally known as the European Recovery Program, but more commonly referred to as the Marshall Plan, this program provided for more than $13 billion in aid to European countries. Many historians regard the Marshall Plan as a masterstroke of U.S. resistance to Communist expansion. Herbert S. Parmet The death of Joseph Stalin in 1953 had a significant impact on the course of the Cold War. His successors, including Nikita Khrushchev, who ultimately replaced Stalin as Soviet leader, sought to ease some of the rigidities of Soviet policy toward the West, but without resolving the core issue: a divided Germany at the heart of a divided Europe. The Western powers responded cautiously but sympathetically to the softening of Soviet policy, and in the mid-1950s the USSR and the Western powers convened the first of several summit conferences in Geneva, Switzerland, to address the key issues of the Cold War. These issues now included not only the problem of German reunification, but also the danger of surprise nuclear attack and, in the background, the momentarily quieted but still unresolved conflicts in Korea and Indochina (for more information, see The Cold War Outside Europe below). The 1955 Geneva Conference achieved little progress on the central issues of Germany, Eastern Europe, and arms control. However, on the eve of the conference the two sides resolved the issue of Austria, which had been united with Germany during the war and divided into American, British, French, and Soviet occupation zones in its aftermath. The signing of the State Treaty between Austria and the Allies established Austria's neutrality, freed it of occupation forces, and reestablished the Austrian republic. This period also saw fundamental change in one critical realm: Both the United States and the USSR came to recognize that nuclear weapons had produced a revolution in military affairs-making war among the great powers, while still a possibility, no longer a sane policy recourse. East Germans Close Berlin Border After World War II, Germany was divided into two countries, the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). In addition the city of Berlin was split between East and West Germany. By the early 1960s, over one million people had fled from East Germany to West Germany via West Berlin. Apparently fearing further losses to its economy and workforce, the East German government closed the border to West Berlin and constructed the Berlin Wall, which became one of the most important symbols of the Cold War. Many of the terms used in this article do not reflect current usage. Meanwhile, the struggle over Europe continued. West Germany was recognized as an independent nation in 1955 and was allowed to rearm and join NATO. In response to this development, a group of Eastern European Communist nations led by the USSR formed the Warsaw Pact . In the late 1950s Khrushchev launched a new series of crises over Berlin, and in 1961 the Soviet government built the Berlin Wall to prevent East Germans from fleeing to West Germany. The Cold War Outside Europe Problems in Korea and Vietnam yet the most serious Cold War confrontation between the United States and the USSR that took place in the Third World-one that raised the specter of nuclear war-occurred in 1962. In the summer of that year, the U.S. government discovered that the Soviets were in the process of deploying nuclear missiles in Communist Cuba. In October the United States moved to block Soviet ships carrying missiles to Cuba. The resulting standoff, during which the world stood seemingly on the brink of ultimate disaster, ended with Khrushchev capitulating to the demands of U.S. president John F. Kennedy. From the Cuban missile crisis both sides learned that risking nuclear war in pursuit of political objectives was simply too dangerous. It was the last time during the Cold War that either side would take this risk. Age of Detente In the early 1970s the tenor of the Cold War changed. During the first administration of U.S. president Richard Nixon (1969-1973), the United States and the USSR sought to put their relationship on a different footing. While neither side abandoned its basic positions, the two superpowers tried to take the first steps toward controlling the costly nuclear arms race and finding areas for mutually advantageous economic and scientific collaboration. Détente, as this policy came to be called, collapsed in the second half of the 1970s, when the American-Soviet competition in the Third World intensified once again, this time during the civil war in Angola and the Somali-Ethiopian war over the Ogaden region. During this phase of the Cold War, Communist Cuba played a significant role alongside the USSR, while the Chinese, now deeply wary of the USSR, participated on the side of the United States. END OF THE COLD WAR The early 1980s witnessed a final period of friction between the US and USSR due toinvasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Reagan elected in1980 election saw the USSR as an "evil empire." and thus he set about to add greatly to American military capabilities. The Soviets initially viewed Reagan as an implacable foe, committed to subverting the Soviet system and possibly willing to risk nuclear war in the process. Mid-1980s Gorbachev came to power -determined to halt the decay of the Soviet system and to shed some of his country's foreign policy burdens. Between 1986 and 1989 he brought a revolution to Soviet foreign policy, abandoning long-held Soviet assumptions and seeking new and far-reaching agreements with the West. Get an endGorbachev's efforts fundamentally altered the dynamic of East-West relations. Gorbachev and Reagan held a series of summit talks beginning in 1985, and in 1987 the two leaders agreed to eliminate a whole class of their countries' nuclear missiles-those capable of striking Europe and Asia from the USSR and vice versa. The Soviet government began to reduce its forces in Eastern Europe, and in 1989 it pulled its troops out of Afghanistan. That year Communist regimes began to topple in the countries of Eastern Europe and the wall that had divided East and West Germany since 1961 was torn down. In 1990 Germany became once again a unified country. In 1991 the USSR dissolved, and Russia and the other Soviet republics emerged as independent states. Even before these dramatic final events, much of the ideological basis for the Cold War competition had disappeared. However, the collapse of Soviet power in Eastern Europe, and then of the USSR itself, lent a crushing finality to the end of the Cold War period.