NATO's eastward expansion

Abstract

With World War II concluded and the United Nations charter recently signed, the US, and its allies looked on 1945 as the kick off to an era of peace. Their optimism was not to last. For one wartime ally, the Soviet Union - a new fight had just begun. Keeping its army and arms production at full capacity Moscow began to look afield. The USSR already occupied nearly 180,000 square miles of territory and using "fraternal communist parties in occupied countries, it moved to consolidate those gains. As British Prime Minister Winston Churchill told an audience in Fulton, Missouri in 1946, an "iron curtain" had begun to fall across Europe. Throughout Soviet occupied territory, opposition members were deposed, arrested or killed. By March 1948, Hungary Poland, Bulgaria, Romania and Czechoslovakia fallen to communist parties answerable to Moscow. Fearing that the Kremlin's attention would next fall on a weakened Western Europe, the Western Allies scrambled to build defences. In a speech known later as the "Truman Doctrine" the American President Harry Truman urged Congress " to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressure." Congress followed Truman's appeal by approving $400 million in aid for Greece and Turkey, both facing fierce Soviet pressure.