As we all know, the post-WWII years up until the late '80s were known as the Cold War, a period in which the world's two new superpowers, the United States and the USSR, had a rivalry that almost touched the brink of war several times. The United States absolutely hated communism, which was known as "the red scare," and even still today there is some bias in our country toward communists. Even before the war, countries like Britain, France, and the United States weren't exactly pro-communist, favoring democracy instead. Yet in the 1930s, the United States did several things in support of communist countries. For example, they came to the aid of communist China when Japan threatened to invade; China was also backed by the Soviet Union, which was obviously communist at this point. They'd even recognized the USSR diplomatically. I found this all to be odd; if the United States was undertaking a policy of isolationism at this time period, and they were anti-communist, why were they supporting these communist countries though it might mean making enemies of Japan and the communist hating fascists of Germany? And they didn't help China just a little bit - they provided military support, sent supplies to China, the whole nine yards. I got the impression that the textbook said that the United States' reason for helping out China against Japan was that it felt like Japan was overstepping its bounds in involving itself in another country's affairs, and that they were unprovoked, so they had no right to go after China. This then leads me to believe that the United States was using the excuse that they were aiding China because it was the right thing to do. But that still doesn't explain why they were in league with the USSR.
The US has been known to be hypocritical when it comes to communism - for example, how we'll trade with communist China, but we won't trade with Cuba because they're communist. Could it be that this hypocrisy goes all the way back to the 1930s? Did we maybe see potential in China as a trading partner, so that's why we helped them out? Did they just hate fascism so much maybe that they were willing to ally themselves with the USSR? I personally think it's very likely that there were underlying motives to the US support of communist countries in the '30s, especially taking into consideration the fact that the US was supposed to have adopted policies of isolationism. What are your thoughts on what those alterior motives might be? And what else do you think about this?
Another question....how did the rivalry between two former allies, the US and the USSR, develop into such a strong one? There's the splitting up of Germany to consider, how one wanted to use the fall of Germany to spread communism there and one was trying to prevent communism there, thus creating the split with the Berlin Wall. There was the preconcieved ill-will toward communism; there was the fact that both had emerged from WWII as a superpower, creating what would be a natural rivalry. There was also the fact that communism had already spread to China, the USSR, and even part of Germany by the end of the war, and threatened to emerge in other places, like Korea, Cuba, and third-world countries in Africa, so naturally the US would try to prevent this. Those are some ideas I had. But what is everyone else's thoughts on this?
