Rise of the Superpowers :: Superpowers International Affairs War Essays

Rise of the Superpowers 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 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